"Not as negative" is the headline comment from clsa bank analyst Mike Mayo following his meeting with Citigroup executives on Friday. Two years in the making, the meeting has sparked headlines and seems to have pushed the stock back over $4 per share. In his note published for clients today: "Citigroup-paradise list; will it be found?"... Mike is still wary as he continues to rate the shares "underperform" but, has raised the target price to $4 from $3.50.

Following are responses Mike Mayo sent in reply to questions submitted by our reporter, Mary Thompson.

So we shipped Carney off to D.C. for the SEFCON I derivatives conference hosted by the Wholesale Markets Broker's Association to get the skinny on just what those guys are up to, but we want to shake things up a bit and give our readers the chance to get in on the action as well.

Check out the conference schedule and see if there is anything/ anyone who interests you, then just shoot us an e-mail or post a comment below and Carney will do his best to get an answer to your questions/requests.

Now Carney isn't one to sit on the sidelines, so don't hold back.

What do you want to know? Anyone you want us to pull aside? Who do you want Carney to spill coffee on?

• SEFCON I First Annual Execution Facility Conference Schedule

Email us at NetNet@cnbc.com

The $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program expired on Sunday, two years to the day it became law. Like a creature from a zombie movie, however, it lives on, with roughly $225 billion still owed back to the taxpayers.

By any measure, the TARP is wildly unpopular. Much of the public believes the TARP was never necessary and many believe it failed.

As debate continues to rage over its performance, we asked Alan "Ace" Greenberg about TARP, the midterm elections and the direction of the economy.

Last week Alan Blinder pointed out that despite all the hoopla about higher capital requirements coming out of the Basel negotiations, when the final requirements kick in in 2018, banks will only be required to have a Tier 1 leverage ratio of 33:1.

“Isn't that about what Lehman Brothers had?” Blinder asked.

That’s the kind of question that’s likely to make ordinary people scratch their heads. Certainly, in the run up to the financial crisis, these kind of eye-popping leverage ratios made lots of ordinary people—and some extra-ordinary people—do something more than scratch their heads—it convinced them to sell their shares of financial companies.

During the financial crisis, analysts such as Meredith Whitney were able to cause lots of trouble for financial firms by pointing out that regardless of whether this or that company was meeting regulatory capital requirements, many of them simply lacked sufficient capital to survive a crunch.

Conundrum: (New York Times) Interest rates low, big business borrows, but economy stagnates as companies hoard cash rather than hire.

Capital Requirements Hike? G-20 may agree to exceed Basel III capital requirement, by CNBC’s Steve Liesman (CNBC)

In my recent pieces on whether and ETF can collapse, if there is one thing I heard from the ETF industry and anybody but everybody who disagreed with me it was this \(and I’m paraphrasing because this is a g-rated website, John Carney notwithstanding\): “Greenberg, you’re wrong: ETFs are not derivatives.”

Do do that voodoo that you do so well – "You do Something to Me," by Cole Porter

Brace yourself: The good folks over at the Bureau of Labor Statistics are about to do that voodoo that they do so well.

Next Friday’s monthly jobless report will include preliminary revision estimates for the benchmark it uses to calculate the unemployment rate. If indications hold up, the revisions will show that the economy actually lost 902,000 more jobs in 2009 than actually had been reported, according to calculations from Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research. Ouch.

So how does this all work?

The BS that the BLS uses to calculate unemployment can give even the nerdiest pencil-pushing pocket-protector-wearing economist a migraine.

Benchmarks provide the bureau a basis point from which to make all the estimates and calculations that go into figuring out the unemployment rate.

Today’s joint Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission report discussed the causes of the May 6 Flash Crash in detail.

The most surprising revelation in the report is that a single trade, against a backdrop of high volatility and downward price pressure, seems to have been responsible for the crash.

A firm identified by officials as Waddell & Reed Financial of Kansas attempted to execute an algorithmic sale of 75,000 S&P 500 futures contracts, referred to as E-minis, valued at $4.5 billion, in order to hedge an existing equity position.

The algorithm was programmed to sell the E-minis so that the sell volume was to equal 9 percent of the total volume, calculated over the previous minute; however, the algorithm did not specify the sell price or the time frame of the trade.