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Via Felix Salmon, I see that Tim Geithner has unveiled his plan — or, more accurately, his guiding principles — for regulating leverage more effectively in the financial industry.  And it’s not bad.  Basically it requires (a) stronger capital requirements across the board; (b) higher capital requirements for bigger firms, which would make larger firms somewhat less profitable; (c) an emphasis on real capital, not shell games; (d) higher capital requirements in good times and lower requirements in bad times; (e) a simple leverage constraint as sort of a backup to the more complex main capital rules; (f) stronger regulation of off-balance-sheet vehicles; (g) some kind of minimum liquidity requirement so that banks can’t be wiped out in just a matter of days by a bank run; and (h) extension of all these rules to big non-banking entities (the “shadow banking” system).

All of these are described in general terms, and I note that (h) is described in especially dodgy terms.  So we won’t know how serious Geithner is about this stuff until he rolls out the details.  But at least he seems to singing the right songs.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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