Buried financial news is unsettling

Fed waives banking rules to allow CitiBank, BofA to loan more money through brokerage

Dislaimer:  I am not, nor have I ever been, an economist.  Nevertheless, this looks Bad to me, with a capital Bad.  This may be in part connected to BofA's recent $2 billion preferred-stock investment in Countrywide Financial, one of the biggest subprime lenders in the business (if not the biggest), which itself required a waiver from the Fed.  This new rules waiver allows BofA and Citibank to bypass the limit of 10% funding exposure, allowing them to loan up to $25 billion through brokerage — in Citibank's case, representing 30% of its total regulatory capital.

So, how serious is this rule-bending?  Very.  One of the central tenets of banking regulation is that banks with federally insured deposits should never be over-exposed to brokerage subsidiaries; indeed, for decades financial institutions were legally required to keep the two units completely separate.  This move by the Fed eats away at the principle.

(article pointed out by danjite)

CD label/cover tools?

Do you frequently burn your own CDs?  Personal mixes, etc?

If so, do you go to the trouble of making CD case bootkelts and CD labels?

If so ... what do you use?

I ask because Nero's label/booklet designer seems to have scores of templates for commercial adhesive CD labels, but doesn't appear to have one single template for printing the front and back of a CD booklet next to each other so that the resulting booklet can just be folded over and slopped in.  I found one CD label-printing tool with a 14-day free trial, that did allow printing a foldable booklet, but, Cthulhu in a merrywidow, teh STUPID, it BURNS.  It's such a wretched, broken-by-design piece of crippleware I can't imagine anyone actually spending money on it.  It can't render transparency in imported images, it can't import track lists from ANYTHING,¹ ... I've rarely seen a more pathetic piece of junk masquerading as commercial software.

[1]  Well, OK, not quite "anything".  It can do a cddb lookup.  That must be really useful for retrieving a track list for your own personal CDs, huh?  What were they THINKING?  Oh, wait:  They weren't, of course.  Silly me.