The Fed may have already begun its role as Wall Street ’supercop.’

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Fed has sent agents into major Wall Street investment banks to makes sure of the banks’ financial wellbeing.

“We want to be sure that any lending we do to the investment banks will be done on an appropriately sound basis,” said Fed chief Ben Bernanke.

The Fed has is lending money to investment banks, even though it currently has no statutory regulatory power over them.

Airbus Lands in Hot Water; Ford Fishtails in March; Microsoft Won’t Raise Yahoo Bid; SCA Sues Merrill Lynch; Big Oil Brought Before Congress; $10.9 Billion Blackstone Real Estate Fund; Gold Prices Sink; Indonesia’s Inflation Soars

With US stocks futures pointing higher and a rally around banks in London trading at the beginning of the new quarter, The Wall Street Journal sees light at the end of the credit-crisis tunnel.

“Stock futures rose as investors opened the books on a new quarter by betting that the latest write-downs from UBS and Deutsche Bank have put most of the worst damage to banks and brokers from the credit crisis out in the open,” says the WSJ.

– UBS gets thumped

Swiss bank UBS makes front-page news on The Wall Street Journal for its thumping quarterly loss of more than $12 billion on write-downs of $19 billion. The losses have claimed chairman Marc Ospel.

– USA 2008: The Great Depression

Brit newspaper The Independent leads with “dismal projections” that in the fiscal year starting in October, 28 million people in the US will rely on government food stamps to survive, the highest level since the food assistance programme was introduced in the 1960s.

– Paulson plan will be DOA

Paulson plan will be “dead on arrival”, according to The New York Times, as “lawmakers and lobbyists from an array of industries” oppose to the plan to create a new financial regulatory system…