* A handful of what appeared to be Secret Service agents lined the room for Treasury Secretary John Snow's lunch-time speech.
* "Accounting is the cocaine of cfos."--Trevor Harris, managing director at Morgan Stanley, on how various accounting methods have enabled companies to underfund their pension liabilities.
* Lunch started off with what the menu provided by the Waldorf-Astoria termed an Asian salad--perhaps it was an acknowledgement of Asian investors' increasing heft in the bond market?
* "I spend a lot of my life in planes, and with the first two panelists I feel we're on the runway, but now I feel like we're at 30,000 feet." -- Sheryl Kennedy, deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, referring to how other panelists had warmed up a conversation on foreign demand for U.S. securities and she would take it from there.
* "If you do not have model humility, you will die." Scott Simon, managing director at Pacific Investment Management Co., discussing how investors need to be aware that widely used option-adjusted spread models are not perfect.
