As a recent study indicates that college and universities are giving financial aid to rich students at the expense of poor ones Senator Elizabeth Warren is offering a bill to bring student debt relief. Warren says students should get the same rates as Wall Street. Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced her first standalone piece of legislation [...]

Believe it or not, there is a bill in Washington to break up the Too Big To Fail banks. Sponsored by Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Senator David Vitter (R-Louisiana)  the Brown-Vitter bill would break up the Megabanks by requiring higher capital reserves. Not surprisingly Wall Street is not pleased. Financial Services Forum CEO Rob [...]

Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew made a stunning and fantastic claim at his confirmation hearing, namely that the Too Big To Fail or systemic risk threat from the mega banks no longer existed. That the problem had been solved by the Dodd-Frank legislation. Seriously. You may not have heard this utterly amazing news. Neither has [...]

Treasury Secretary nominee Jack Lew went before the Senate Finance Committee today for his confirmation hearing. The hearing was mostly deferential with Lew finding considerable agreement with the Republicans on the committee, particularly on trade and corporate tax policy, but Lew did face questions over his bonuses at Citigroup and tax shelters in the Cayman [...]

After a global financial crisis, an epic price fixing scandal, and embarrassing criminal conduct British regulators are considering ending Too Big To Fail Banking. British Finance Minister George Osborne has proposed legislation that if banks do not shield their riskier investment activities from day to day banking they will face restructuring. Britain is shaking up [...]

Elizabeth Warren is not wasting any time trying to get answers from Wall Street’s regulators. Warren asked for documents relating to the recent mortgage settlement. U.S. lawmakers on Thursday asked bank regulators to turn over documents related to the $8.5 billion settlement that ended a government-mandated review of crisis-era foreclosures, saying transparency was needed to [...]

We now have bipartisan anger at the decision to hold HSBC and its executives harmlessfor years of money laundering and facilitating the culture of Mexican drug cartels. In fact, only the shareholders will pay, and not all that much, what amounts to five weeks’ worth of profits for the bank. The certainty of not being [...]

I do go on about the lack of regulation at the big banks. But I’ll have to grant the Federal Reserve a modicum of credit for this action: The Federal Reserve is pushing large U.S. banks to forget about all but the smallest acquisitions for a while amid a raging debate over the risk big [...]

Maybe I was too blasé about the federal government letting HSBC off the hook; certainly the story has effectively shown how Too Big to Fail continues to be the watchword of the financial regulatory community. My pet theory here is actually that, because practically every mega-bank engaged in this same type of money laundering for [...]

Yesterday was “bust British banks for money laundering” day in America, if you didn’t know.

Taibbi is pretty polite about it, but Obama’s defense involves a lot of misdirection. It assumes that Lehman Brothers, by virtue of having failed, was the only financial institution out there responsible for the collapse, rather than an example of industry-wide behavior.