The maple-veneer planks are still in place, and the sample-unit kitchen, and most of the bathroom, and the podium where the Trump Tower Philadelphia model used to be.

But the 57th floor of One Liberty Place is now vacant -- the Trump organization suspended its proposed Delaware River condo tower last fall -- and it's for rent, the highest 10,000-square-foot space now available in Philadelphia. So are the 18,000-square-foot 54th and the 24,000-square-foot 33rd floors. The rest of the building is leased, like most of Philadelphia's trophy office space, for now.

The view's spectacular -- you can see from the Atlantic City casinos to the hills below Reading on a clear day -- though not when it's foggy and you have clouds on three sides of you, as I remember from when this used to be Cigna Inc.'s corporate office, back when Cigna was still a financial conglomerate and Philadelphia's biggest company, not a healthcare insurer struggling to adopt to wherever President Obama is taking medical care payments.

Bill Hirschman, senior managing director at office broker Cushman & Wakefield, showed me around. We looked over the condo towers of Rittenhouse Square, South Broad and Market West, and dusted the rumors about which were mostly leased, which were mostly empty, and which were facing foreclosure.

Condos are boom and bust, rumor and claim; office rents are practically public, and the business, in Philadelphia, is so stable as to approach stagnation. One Liberty has been owned for the past decade by Metropolis Investment Holdings, the Chicago arm of Germany's Mann family, former furniture moguls who own some of the biggest U.S. buildings outside New York. They are long-term investors, which is probably a good thing: Philadelphia office rents haven't moved much in that decade.

In a speech at the University of Chicago (he's often away from his district), conservative Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia president Charles I. Plosser praised the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s method of stopping, seizing, selling, and exiting failed banks. And he implicitly criticized the way the Fed and the Bush and Obama administrations bailed out American International Group (and thus Goldman Sachs and other AIG creditors). Speech here. Excerpts:

President Obama is giving the permanent Washington business class fits by banning staffers from discussing stimulus projects with registered lobbyists. Read more in the PhillyDeals print column in last Sunday's Inquirer here. NEW: DC lobbyists and their friends at the ACLU tell Obama to cancel his anti-lobbyist policy here.

Meanwhile, Dennis Roddy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette writes that, despite federal probes, U.S. Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., remains one of the most ardent and unrepentant defenders of the DC lobby system. "If I'm corrupt it's because I take care of my district," based in the ex-steel center of Johnstown, Pa., Murtha told the Post-Gazette. And: "I have no idea why they're going after these lobbyists..." Story here. Excerpts:

"In a development called the John P. Murtha Technology Center, just a stone's throw from the John P. Murtha Airport, a group of locals set up Concurrent Technologies Corp., a nonprofit research and technology combine that found its footing with Murtha-directed earmarks…. A few miles (away) sits Kuchera Industries, another garage startup that… found itself flush with defense contracts under Mr. Murtha's tutelage. Multinational firms, from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to DRS Technologies and the Norwegian firm Kongsberg Gruppen, have set up outposts here, capturing defense contracts and partnering with local companies such as CTC and JWF."

Clouds approaching: “Federal agents have subpoenaed records from a CTC subsidiary. In January, they raided Kuchera and carted away boxes of records. In suburban Washington, agents swarmed the offices of PMA Group, an influential lobbying group founded by Paul Magliocchetti, a former Appropriations defense staff member. Mr. Magliocchetti's firm lobbied for a number of companies that benefited from Mr. Murtha's earmarks, including CTC…

If we've heard it once, we've heard it an awful lot from old John Bogle and other conservative Philadelphia investors: It's tough to time markets because you have to be right twice -- when you buy, and when you sell.

The Boston Globe's Michael Kranish writes that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the federal taxpayer-subsidized body that bails out broke pension funds, which will shortly be called on to rescue millions more pensioners' retirement payments, went and ignored that advice, dumping bonds and buying stocks and real estate last year just before the markets collapsed. Story here. Excerpt:

"Charles E.F. Millard, the former agency director who implemented the strategy until the Bush administration departed on Jan. 20 [and] a former managing director of Lehman Brothers, said flatly that 'the new investment policy is not riskier than the old one.'

"He said the previous strategy of relying mostly on bonds would never garner enough money to eliminate the agency's deficit. 'The prior policy virtually guaranteed that some day a multibillion-dollar bailout would be required from Congress,' Millard said.

"He said he believed the new policy - which includes such potentially higher-growth investments as foreign stocks and private real estate - would lessen, but not eliminate, the possibility that a bailout is needed.

"Asked whether the strategy was a mistake, given the subsequent declines in stocks and real estate, Millard said, 'Ask me in 20 years. The question is whether policymakers will have the fortitude to stick with it.'" Judge me in 20 years! 

Maybe it's not as bad as all that. The Globe doesn't know exactly where the money is. But there's no reason for PBGC to be so secretive. It can collect performance data every day, every second. Why not post a current fund balance? Or at least a monthly peformance report, like New Jersey's retirement fund does?

Treasury Secretary Geithner's warning today that banks will need more money helped drive the KBW Bank Index down more than 10% in trading today. Another voice in the chorus:

"Loss will be significantly larger than what most are expecting" on bank loans to factories and stores this year, warns analyst James Abbott and colleagues at Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. Inc. in a report today. "We believe we are only in the very early stages of the business losses," and defaults in the next six months will be higher than in the S&L crisis of the early 1990s.

The analysts put PNC Financial Services Group, the nation's fifth-largest bank and the biggest based in Pennsylvania, is on a short list of lenders "at greatest risk for defaults" because they're in places "where the unemployment rate is rising quickly and/or housing prices are falling faster than average."  Other "greatest risk" lenders include Comerica, City National and SunTrust. No immediate comment from spokesmen at PNC.

Abbott and his colleagues say bad "commercial and industrial loans" (C&I) tend to rise with the unemployment rate, which they say will keep rising for many months. "Credit contraction and asset deflation will overwhelm this government intervention" and drive down both loan payment rates and share prices "as deterioration continues to mount."

Among the safest commercial lenders, says Friedman Billings & Ramsey: JPMorgan Chase & Co.; and, locally, Fulton Financial Corp., Lancaster. Ranked "medium risk": Bank of America Corp.; and Wilmington Trust, M&T Bank, Susquehanna Bancshares, Univest Corp., Harleysville National Corp., National Penn Bancshares.

Democrats in Congress want to speed up the Federal Reserve's pro-consumer credit card rules so they take effect this year instead of mid-2010. Those rules would slow interest-rate hikes by requiring 45-day warnings, limit card fees for subprime borrowers, and end "double-cycle" and other compound fees.

Don't rush, says U.S. Rep. Mike Castle, whose Delaware district includes Bank of America's and JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s credit card headquarters in Wilmington. "There's a lot of politics to this," Castle told reporters in a conference call. For banks, "the date is a major issue." He wants "a way the credit card industry can live with this." 

"If they have to put it in place too quickly, and they haven't worked out and tested all their models, and they're not confident in what they're doing, it could end up further constricting credit," warned Sandra Braunstein, director of the Federal Reserve's Consumer and Community Affairs division, who joined Castle for the call.

Haven't banks already cut back? We keep hearing from borrowers that card companies are jacking up rates and cutting credit limits. Is that because they're getting ready for the new rules -- or just because they can't sell ("securitize") old credit card loans, to finance new ones, in today's bond markets? 

"It is very difficult to say whether part of this is because of the (Fed) rules, versus economic conditions," Braunstein acknowledged? Different agencies still produce different kinds of data for different banks. "There's a lot of piecemeal information," said Castle. I told them it sounds awful tough to make policy from "piecemeal" information instead of hard central data. 

Castle's not sure less credit is a bad thing: "We've allowed credit to run away with itself," and some people may just have to get used to borrowing less.

Treasury Secretary Geithner last week hinted that President Obama might effectively reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act's ban oncommercial banks getting mixed up with investment banks. Economist (and ex-Deutsche Bank and Prudential Securities strategist) Ed Yardeni, in his newsletter today, quotes Goldman Sachs ceo Lloyd Blankfein's response - "It’s hard to turn back the clock” -- then ridicules it:

"Why is it hard to turn back the clock to November 1999, when the act was gutted by a cabal of Wall Street’s power brokers and their supporters in Congress?

"The Depression-era act prohibited brokerage firms from having investment banking divisions. Following the elimination of this prohibition and restrictions on their leverage ratios in 2004 (engineered by Goldman's CEO Hank Paulson at the time), Wall Street's banks ran amuck.

"In 1999, AIG purchased a thrift in Delaware. As a result, the entire operation of AIG was regulated by the woefully understaffed Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS).

"Under a law passed in 1999, certain kinds of holding companies could choose the OTS as their regulator, provided they owned one or more thrifts. Because the OTS was viewed as more compliant than the Fed or the SEC, companies rushed to reclassify themselves as thrifts. AIG blew up in mid-September 2008 after making a wholesale rush into risky derivatives without adequate collateral.

"Goldman Sachs, it turns out, was AIG’s biggest customer, with $20bn of exposure to CDS contracts written by AIG to insure Goldman’s mortgage derivatives. This explains why Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein was in the room with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson the weekend of September 13, when the federal government was scrambling to prop up AIG. The AIG bailout, in effect, was a bailout for Goldman.

"Could it be that all the commotion over $165 million in bonuses paid at AIG to retain key employees is just a diversion--just a game of trivial pursuit? After weeks of stonewalling, federal and company officials, who have jointly made the major decisions, recently disclosed that Goldman Sachs got $13 billion from AIG to settle trades and Merrill Lynch, now owned by Bank of America, got $12 billion. Among foreign firms, Deutsche Bank got $11.8 billion, Barclays $8.5 billion and Societe Generale $11.9 billion. The total is $57 billion!

"Apparently, none of AIG’s counterparties had to take haircuts. Why not? Why is Goldman's CEO giving us advice on how to fix the financial system?"

King of Prussia-based Mitchell L. Morgan Management Inc. has sued American International Group Inc., accusing the troubled, taxpayer-backed insurance and investment giant of delaying payments on a $120 million apartment-renovation financing venture, reports today's Wall Street Journal here.

AIG, in turn, blames the Federal Reserve, which took over AIG in the waning days of the Bush administration and now runs the company under considerable pressure from Congress and an outraged public, for holding up payments and demanding more documentation.

Morgan, whose namesake operator is a leading Pennsylvania Republican activist, bought the AIG-financed apartments, mostly in PA and NJ, 2007 from the Kushner family, developers (and Democratic donors) in New York and New Jersey, the Journal said. Charles Kushner went to jail in 2005 for illegally funding former NJ Gov. McGreevy's campaign.  Philly Deals reported on AIG's plan to cut back its real estate business, and its Morgan partnership, last fall, here.

In the suit, "Morgan contends that if its partnership with AIG can't pay contractors, it could file liens on the properties, which would trigger a default with the banks that provided the partners money to buy the apartments" for $2 billion two years ago, WSJ reports. Lenders include Wachovia Bank, now part of Wells Fargo & Co. 

Little kids in Harrisburg think the governor must be the richest guy in Pennsylvania, if he gets to live in that vast ornate domed stone Capitol building, in a town where there's not much other industry to speak of besides spending the peoples' money.

But in the real world, not counting perks like free health care and flunkies to carry your stuff, nearly 100 Pennsylvania state employees actually make more than Gov. Rendell's $174,000 yearly salary, another 550 earn pretty close to what he collects; and the highest-paid are state college administrators, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette here.

Excerpts: 
"John C. Cavanaugh, chancellor of the State System of Higher Education [the state colleges], tops the list with a $327,500 salary...

"With a salary of $320,000, James Preston, executive director of the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency [PHEAA, the student lender], isn't far behind Mr. Cavanaugh.

"Stephen M. Curtis, president of the Community College of Philadelphia, comes in third with compensation of $227,584, including a $37,500 housing and car allowance."

Missing from the list are the higher-paid people who oversee big free-spending colleges like Penn State, hospitals, health insurers, and other state-subsidized but privately-controlled institutions.