Highlights include Citigroup Inc. (C), Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Bank of America Corp. (BAC), Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC).So far, most of the activity of the Obama Administration has been focused on cleaning up the existing mess. Today, it is turning its attention to preventing new, potentially world-threatening financial messes from occurring in the future. Please read Neena Mishra's blog for the details for regulatory overhaul proposed.One of the most important underlying factors in causing the current financial crisis -- and the resulting economic downturn -- was the gutting of the financial regulatory regime set up in the wake of the Great Depression, as well as the adamant refusal of the regulators to actually enforce the few regulations that remained.Lest someone think that I am being too partisan, I will ...

“The Big Takeover” by Matt Taibbi is probably the best article written to date explaining the financial crisis and how we got to where we are now. Taibbi’s necessarily lengthy article explains the problems, names the “poipetrators”, and exposes all of the conflicts of interest— absolutely a must read.

AIG, Goldman Sachs, and J. P. Morgan turn out to be the major players causing perhaps the greatest financial crisis in modern history— even if the pain is unlikely to get near Great Depression proportions, the dollar losses to individual investors have certainly gone as far.

JPM was the brewmeister of the CDO, a vat full of various kinds of income securities, determined to be less risky because the income on most would almost certainly keep flowing— kind of like the once popular junk bond fund that Wall Street insisted was not risky …

Time magazine has again demonstrated its irrelevance in the Internet age with a fatuous feature called “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis.”

The failure here is two-fold: One, the editors’ choices of who’s to blame, and two, the reader poll ranking those choices.

Let’s start with who’s on the little list — or more to the point, who’s not.  Time did an OK job of unearthing lesser-known names who definitely bear some culpability in the disaster — such as AIG’s Joe Cassano, who did much to unleash the nightmare of credit-default swaps.

But how can anyone take this list seriously when it doesn’t include Ben Bernanke?  Yes, Greenspan (who did make the list) laid the foundation, but Bernanke built on it with abandon.  Perhaps it’s because the intelligentsia regards him a genuine scholar on monetary matters — you know, historian of the Great Depression and all that.  A far more

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When US stocks dived following the passing of the bailout bill, President Bush sought to calm investors. He said it would "take a while" for the bill to take effect. Problem is George W doesn't have much of time.

In less than one month, Americans will vote into office either Barack Obama or John McCain. Each has very different ideas about how to tackle the financial crisis.

Martin Hutchinson says Obama is most likely to win on a populist anti-Wall Street platform. But if he follows up this rhetoric with more regulation and protectionism, this could hurt US investors even more in the long run.

The market’s verdict on the $700 billion bailout was pretty clear: Stock prices started dropping the moment the bill was passed on Friday afternoon and continued to do so Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing down 370 points for the day – after being down 800 points earlier that same day. The economic effect is also pretty clear: Given that the bailout plan is being launched at a point when money is already tight – and that it pours $700 billion of our money into the most useless, toxic waste left over from the housing bubble – you can be certain that it will end up starving more-worthwhile potential investments of badly needed capital. But the political impact is less clear, in both the short- and long-term periods. For a start, it’s not clear to the electorate who is to blame ...

It may seem odd but the quote of the day is from Robert DeNiro in the movie Casino. It follows with my long-term thinking regarding how Wall Street has been organized and operated since the 1990s: a casino architecture where it’s easy for investors to find their way in but impossible to find the exit while Da Boyz rip ‘em off. This being a political year there will be plenty of finger-pointing going on. But, this financial crisis has been the result of a great bipartisan effort. It began with the bipartisan destruction of the Glass-Steagall Act which was enacted after the Great Depression prohibiting cross ownership of banks and brokers. The leaders to drop the acts prohibition in the 1990s were Republican Phil Gramm and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Unlocking the previously closed ...