Essential Reading from Yesterday's FT

In case you missed it, due to Friday night carousing, or whatever…

–Whistleblower contacted US regulators (should they even be called this anymore?) on fraudster Sir Allen Stanford five years ago.

–Banking editor Peter Thal Larson writes that the UK plan for Royal Bank of Scotland amounts to nationalization in all but name, “maintaining the fiction that the ailing bank is anything other than fully state-owned.” This certainly has relevance in light of US policy with regard to Citi.

–The excellent Gillian Tett on how CDOs may be worth even less than the pitiful estimates bandied about these days. And, in a point too rarely rarely made in the financial press, “as the zeroes relating to writedowns multiply, a peculiar–and bitter– irony continues to hang over these numbers. Notwithstanding the fact that bankers used to promote CDOs as a tool to create more “complete” capital markets, very few of those instruments ever traded in a real market sense before the crisis–and fewer still have changed hands since then.”