The issues of housing policy and Wall Street criminality have not appeared at the top of the agenda in the Presidential campaign, certainly not among horse race journalists. But new polling shows that this is a major challenge for the President, who is viewed as having failed on housing and foreclosure policy, and as too [...]

In addition to asking Jeff Merkley about filibuster reform, I sought his reaction to the Fail Whale trades that have racked up massive losses at JPMorgan Chase. Merkley, along with Carl Levin, authored the Volcker rule, the ban on most types of proprietary trading, that made its way into the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. There [...]

The Justice Department and the FBI have now joined the fray in investigating JPMorgan Chase and its Fail Whale trade that has so far cost the firm $2 billion. The report added that “it isn’t clear what possible legal violation federal investigators may be focusing on,” and I can’t add any insight into that. The [...]

Ally Bank, formerly known as GMAC Mortgage, the nation’s fifth-largest mortgage servicer, put its mortgage subsidiary Residential Capital into bankruptcy. This is part of a continuing effort on the part of Ally, which is still majority-owned by the US government, to escape its mortgage liabilities. But what does it mean for the foreclosure fraud settlement, [...]

In the wake of JPMorgan Chase’s Fail Whale trade, proponents of stiffer regulation on Wall Street than what was ushered in with Dodd-Frank have offered a variety of solutions. In truth all of them could be beneficial in tandem to reduce risk and political influence from the financial system. For instance, Elizabeth Warren, who has [...]

Three JPMorgan Chase executives will take the fall for the “Fail Whale” trades that have so far cost the firm $2 billion. But Bruno Iskil, the actual London Whale, so far still has a job, for some reason, as does Jamie Dimon, the CEO who has been on an apology tour for his lack of [...]

In the wake of JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion Fail Whale trade and the ensuing federal investigation into violations of disclosure laws, US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren has called on JPM CEO Jamie Dimon to resign from his position on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The announcement brings to light the [...]

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy These quotes from Jamie Dimon’s upcoming appearance this weekend on Meet the Press are a bit out of character: David Gregory: Did the bank break any laws? Did it violate any accounting rules or SEC rules? Jamie Dimon: So we’ve had audit, legal, [...]

Politicians using Jamie Dimon’s Fail Whale trade as a pretext to call for tighter banking regulations are performing exactly the correct public service in their job description. They’re supposed to respond to events as they happen, and create appropriate safeguards to minimize the risk from those events. And Senators Levin and Merkley make the point [...]

The fallout from JPMorgan Chase’s “Fail Whale” trade (I’m trying to coin this phrase, so help me out, will you?) continues. But there’s been a thread in one section of the liberal blogosphere that has confounded me. For some reason, writers are trying to position this as a problem for Mitt Romney. Here’s a representative [...]

I spent most of yesterday afternoon laughing my ass off about Jamie Dimon’s London Whale loss, but it’s actually not all that funny. JPMorgan Chase revealed a $2 billion loss on a bad bet they made on a credit default swap index trade. They described it as an egregious, self-inflicted mistake. I think Felix Salmon [...]