[veyron]

There are worse banks. For example, Regions Financial quietly slid into positive tangible common equity with the $900M offering last week (for the past few years it was actually negative ...)

Bloomberg had a reasonably coherent discussion: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-15/stress-tests-pass-f...

FTA:

    The footnotes to the company’s latest financial statements tell the story. 
    There, the Birmingham, Alabama-based lender disclosed that the loans on its books 
    were worth $8.1 billion less than what its balance sheet said, as of Dec. 31. By 
    comparison, the company’s tangible common equity, a bare-bones measure of net worth,
    was $7.6 billion.

    So if it weren’t for the inflated loan values, Regions’ tangible common equity would 
    have been less than zero, with liabilities exceeding hard assets.

EDIT: fixed formatting -- I wish that there were a way to indicate that a quoted block should be wrapped

[Drbble]

> I wish that there was a way to indicate that a quoted block should be wrapped

Just use the conventional caret instead of the monospace blockquote