Most Confused Blog Post of the Week Award

And it's only Wednesday, but it would be difficult to top this. Joe Weisenthal scratches his head and writes:

One thing we're not clear on: If this is how the conversion goes, and the bank does pay off the remaining $11 billion over the next year or so, are they considered to have repayed [sic] TARP? How does a bank that's taken the conversion ever actually repay the TARP?

Ah, Joe, once a conversion to common stock is made, it wipes out any liability and ends up as equity on a balance sheet, at that point it doesn't have to be repaid, just like any other purchase of common stock doesn't get repaid, since it is not a loan of any kind.

And the only other person that I can think of besides you that would even suggest that

...the spin machine has now turned the news completely backwards, and if you were tuning into CNBC or just looking at the market right now, you might conclude that it's all good news.

Why?

Well, see, The Treasury holds $45 billion in Bank of America preferred shares, so there's ostensibly no need for a private raise, when Tangible Common Equity is the metric that the Treasury cares about. Just convert $34 billion of it and voila: healthy bank.

,without pointing out the tremendous dilution this will cause for present shareholders and that the government will become the largest shareholder, thus politiczing decisons at the bank, is a dead fellow by the name of Karl Marx.