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U.S. officials on bank "stress test" tightrope Thu Apr 23, 2009 6:01pm EDT By Mark Felsenthal and David Lawder - Analysis WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials testing the health of the nation's top banks must walk a tightrope when they disclose the exams' results: The scrutiny must be tough enough to be credible, but not so harsh as to rattle an already shaken system. "The challenging thing here is presumably they're going to be talking about some information that is not going to be at all flattering for some institutions," said Kevin Petrasic, a banking lawyer at Paul, Hastings, Janofsky...

Blog Post on Bank Stress Tests Adds to Worries Did a dire posting on an obscure blog about the Treasury’s bank stress tests contribute to Wall Street’s sell-off of financial stocks on Monday? Hal Turner, a blogger as well as a former controversial conservative radio host, wrote on his Turner Radio Network Blog on Sunday night that he had obtained the results of the stress tests, which are set to be announced in the coming weeks, and he asserted that the results were troubling. A Treasury Department spokesman, Andrew Williams, told CNBC on Monday that there was “no basis” for...

Trying to defuse the U.S. bank test bomb Wed Apr 15, 2009 6:40pm EDT By Karey Wutkowski - Analysis WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration faces one of its most sensitive financial decisions yet -- how to release the results of stress tests on the 19 largest U.S. banks without sending the weaker ones into a tailspin. Intense investor interest and a desire among stronger banks to leak their results to differentiate themselves from rivals has caused regulators to abandon any hope of keeping the results under wraps. The latest government plan is to release some form of the results...

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