Wall Street

Matt Taibbi writes: The deal was announced quietly, just before the holidays, almost like the government was hoping people were too busy hanging stockings by the fireplace to notice. Flooring politicians, lawyers and investigators all over the world, the U.S. Justice Department granted a total walk to executives of the British-based bank HSBC for the [...]

Watch The Untouchables on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Matt Taibbi writes: It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think [...]

The Guardian reports: The chief executive of the US investment bank Morgan Stanley has said Wall Street pay is still “way too high” and remuneration and jobs will have to be sacrificed to boost shareholder returns. The comments by James Gorman, who took over the running of the bank in 2010, set him apart from [...]

McClatchy reports: Running for re-election, President Barack Obama frequently blames Wall Street and the deep financial crisis it caused for the underperforming economy. He doesn’t advertise that no major honcho of finance has been jailed under his watch for the mess, however. The lack of a high-profile arrest and trial is all the more surprising [...]

Simon Johnson writes: Two diametrically opposed views of Wall Street and the dangers posed by global megabanks came more clearly into focus last week. On the one hand, William B. Harrison, Jr. – former chairman of JP Morgan Chase – argued in the New York Times that today’s massive banks are an essential part of [...]

The Daily Beast reports: As the chairman of Barclays resigns in the wake of an interest-rate fixing scandal, the city of London is in crisis and Prime Minister David Cameron has announced an urgent Parliamentary inquiry. “It’s a turning point,” said Martin Vander Weyer, a former director of the investment arm of the British bank, [...]

Yves Smith writes: In case it isn’t yet apparent to you, the unfolding scandal over manipulation of Libor and its Euro counterpart Euribor is a huge deal. Even though at this point, only Barclays [the fourth largest bank in the world], the UK bank that was first to settle, is in the hot lights, at [...]

Even if the recession is over as far as Wall Street is concerned, it sounds like the 1% still feel deeply wounded by a nation that fails to recognize their true value. Nicholas Confessore describes the Obama campaign’s struggle to collect money from those who were once the president’s biggest financial backers. One day in [...]