Standard & Poors, one of the major credit rating agencies, has done an interesting pivot in defining itself amidst a Justice Department civil suit. Like all the major rating agencies S&P is paid by those whose securities it rates.  This, quite obviously, is a conflict of interest in how it rates securities because if it [...]

Greg Smith, an executive at Goldman Sachs, picked a heck of a way to spend his last day there. His resignation letter, published in the New York Times, reflects the wisdom of someone who has been with the firm for a while and seen it, and Wall Street, degenerate into a morass of greed, where [...]