Adam Davidson on NPR’s “Morning Edition” reports on the software programs that banks use to sift through massive amounts of transactions.

Davidson talks with a manager at Actimize, a company that designs this kind of banking software:

DAVIDSON: The computer scores risk based on who is making the transaction. Where does he come from, who is he associated with, what else is he up to? Every bank customer has somewhere in some computer database a risk assessment score.

Ido Ophir (Actimize): Immediately upon opening an account, the bank will look at all your characteristics, starting from your credit score to where you live to how much money you make.

DAVIDSON: The bank uses all this data to create your personal risk profile. It also checks a bunch of lists: are you on a terror watch list, a list of criminals?

Did Spitzer become a target because of the nature of his transactions, as the NYT’s account suggests or was it because he was a “PEP”? He’s what you could consider the financial industry’s ultimate PEP, so we’ll keep an eye out for more reporting here.

Watchdogs well-watched

Credit The Wall Street Journal’s Elizabeth Williamson for her story on industries that are pushing for friendly regulations in the corporation-friendly (to be euphemistic) Bush administration’s final year to blunt the calls for radical change that will surely come from the new government in January:

These so-called midnight regulations often characterize an administration’s final year. Industry lobbyists feel greater urgency this time because they are worried about what Democrats would do in power and because they also are uncertain about the presumptive Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Power companies, public health groups, ranchers, environmental groups, small business consortiums, cable companies, and others want to grab all they can while the gettin’s good. May never see another Bush in the oval office! One example: the EPA wants to let livestock farmers promise they won’t discharge feces into rivers and the like—no monitoring necessary.

Keep a close watch on this developing story over the next nine months.

Noticing a vacancy

A Credit as well to Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins whose piece
on Saturday admirably demonstrated how checked-out President Bush is on the economy:

We’re really past expecting anything much, but in times of crisis you would like to at least believe your leader has the capacity to pretend he’s in control. Suddenly, I recalled a day long ago when my husband worked for a struggling paper full of worried employees and the publisher walked into the newsroom wearing a gorilla suit… Our credit markets are foundering, and all we’ve got is a guy who looks like he’s ready to kick back and start the weekend.

And:

O.K., so he’s not good at first-day response. Or second. Third can be a problem, too. But this economic crisis has been going on for months, and all the president could come up with sounded as if it had been composed for a Rotary Club and then delivered by a guy who had never read it before. “One thing is certain that Congress will do is waste some of your money,” he said. “So I’ve challenged members of Congress to cut the number of cost of earmarks in half.”

Besides being incoherent, this is a perfect sign of an utterly phony speech. Earmarks are one of those easy-to-attack Congressional weaknesses, and in a perfect world, they would not exist. But they cost approximately two cents in the grand budgetary scheme of things. Saying you’re going to fix the economy or balance the budget by cutting out earmarks is like saying you’re going to end global warming by banning bathroom nightlights.

It’s tempting to skip this topic altogether because the president, by his inaction, seems irrelevant to the financial and economic crisis. Collins’s column reminds us how low our standards have dropped.

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