Market Talk

- “I cannot figure out the thought process behind putting a consumer protection agency into the hands of the Fed,” FusionIQ CEO Barry Ritholtz notes. “This is the same regulatory body that gave a total pass to the non-bank lenders at the heart of the subprime, APR and exotic loan issues.”

- Big banks are bad for the economy just like they were 100 years ago when their powerful influence shaped the financial playing field in their favor, NYT’s Economix blog says. “Just as it did 100 years ago, the consensus on big banks has to change. In this instance, either we break them up, or they will soon break us all.”

- “The longer the economy expands without boosting payrolls, the less likely that expansion is to be sustained,” Economist’s Free Exchange blog says.

- Investors are brushing aside the market’s late January/early February declines and seem focused on brighter times ahead. At least that’s what the latest American Association of Individual Investors survey says, as bearish sentiment fell to 26.2%, the lowest reading since early January and third lowest mark since early 2009, Bespoke points out.

- When Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs announced lawsuit against HTC for patent infringement, he said in no uncertain terms that competitors should stop stealing their technology. “That’s not the language of a licensing dispute or the beginning of a polite negotiation. That’s the language of a man aggrieved,” Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber writes.

- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg remains in no rush to take his social networking behemoth public. Judging from the stock performance this year of the four big digital giants, Facebook’s not missing out on much upside, Kara Swisher says.

- Huffington Post had a staggering 40M unique visitors last month. “Eyeballs are eyeballs,” Peter Kafka writes. “Next up: Turning them into dollars.”

- Despite Google’s threats to pull out of China, China Unicom (CHU) says it still plans on selling handsets that run GOOG’s Android operating system.

- House approves $15 billion jobs plan.

- Sony’s looking to seriously get back in the game. It’s developing a new collection of portable gadgets that connect to its coming online media service and are designed to compete against Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

- S&P 500′s back in positive territory for 2010. “Small and midcap stocks have led the way up in recent days, which is a positive sign for bulls hoping that the market is about to make that next leg higher,” Bespoke says.

- Defining victim losses in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme as difference between cash paid into a Madoff account and amount withdrawn before fraud collapsed is the “difficult but correct call,” Barry Ritholtz writes.

- Forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisers updates its projection of this week’s jobs report, concluding “somewhere between 150,000 and 220,000 jobs were temporarily lost in February due to unseasonably bad weather.”

- Still, take any snow-related monthly employment projections with large grain of salt. “February’s will include weather related job losses, March will see a rebound and, assuming no freak spring snowstorms, April will show the underlying trend,” WSJ’s Real Time Economics says.

- Policymakers are congratulating themselves for avoiding total collapse, when they should be berating themselves for failing to engineer recovery,” Paul Krugman notes.

- Consumer-protection unit within the Fed a “dreadful idea,” Yves Smith writes. “Do we have a single shred of evidence to support the notion that the Fed has undergone a miraculous conversion experience as a result of the crisis and will now act as staunch defender of the little guy? I certainly haven’t seen it.”

- Believers of the recovery focus on consumer spending slowly returning to pre-recession levels, but how consumers will sustain such spending seems questionable given the plunge in income, credit and savings, Peter Schiff says.

- Time to stop fighting speculation, Reuters blogger James Saft argues. “Fighting reality by punishing people who point it out — and yes, may profit in the process — is a lot easier than addressing the fundamental underlying issues.”

- This week’s spat between Disney (DIS) and Cablevision (CVC) has a familiar feeling, MediaMemo blogger Peter Kafka says. “The characters change, but the script is always the same. A programmer wants more money from a cable provider, and threatens to pull its shows.”

- Google’s (GOOG) latest acquisition of online photo editing service Picnik, announced yesterday, represents another head-to-head battle of competing businesses with Adobe’s (ADBE) Photoshop and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhoto.

- “Twitter’s finally pushing ahead with a business plan that could begin to justify the venture capital investment it’s attracted,” John Paczkowski says.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that bankers are fighting Obama’s proposed consumer-protection agency.

Lawmakers are reviewing the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which is intended to protect consumers from the financial industry. But the American Bankers Association has already complained that the new agency would “stifle product innovation.”

Can’t blame lobbyists for lobbying, Andrew Jeffery writes at Minyanville, but it’s not likely complaints from Citi (C), Wells Fargo (WFC), Bank of America (BAC) and others will do much good.

“When an industry displays an abject inability to make good decisions to the extent that its blunders nearly bring down the entire world economy, it should take its regulatory medicine and move on,” Jeffery notes.

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