You can’t bark out of both sides of your mouth, yet that’s essentially what President Obama did today.

In a meeting today with the CEOs of the 12 largest banks, Obama told them they their companies should make more loans. This as his regulators are preventing the banks from doing exactly that.

But in the same speech he said:

I wonder exactly how that works. Or, put another way, I wonder whether a bank CFO can tell her bank regulator that, “well, my coverage ratio is out of whack because President Obama told me to make more loans”? I doubt that would fly.

If you want banks to lend prudently and abide by their coverage ratios, then you can’t criticism them for underwriting to what the banks consider to be prudent guidelines. Unfortunately, I see these as cheap political points. The president said today:

Therein resides the great disconnect. What exactly does it mean to “have a greater obligation to the goal of a wider recovery, a more stable system, and more broadly shared prosperity”? Perhaps that means lending less, rather than more? The message is so muddled and unsavory, and it speaks to politics rather than prudence. You’d think prudence would override all as we come out of the Great Recession.