I quite liked Neil Irwin’s story today, in the aftermath of earnings season at the big banks, an an object lesson into how those firms still carry a multitude of legacy troubles from the crisis years: All of these banks are still grappling with the costs of the bad lending during the boom years before [...]

Before last night’s debate, Jeff Connaughton, former chief of staff to Senator Ted Kaufman and longtime aide to Joe Biden and President Clinton, offered some advice to Mitt Romney. He thought Romney should go after Barack Obama’s biggest weakness: the failure to prosecute Wall Street crimes. In actuality, Romney only submitted a glancing blow with [...]

The Daily ShowGet More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook The not-as-funny way to make the point Jon Stewart made about the Republican conception of the entitlement society and where it fails to intersect with reality comes from Simon Johnson. The true “moochers” in American life are, not surprisingly, [...]

Four years later, we have not seen a systematic dismantling of the conditions that created the crisis. We’ve seen trillions in emergency support thrown at the banks that survived the crash, all of whom have grown bigger and more indispensible, even more “Too Big to Fail” than before. We’ve seen cosmetic regulatory changes, many unrelated to the crash at all, which have not yet been tested and in many not yet implemented. And the core problems of a massive financial sector have not been resolved.

I’d be a bit surprised to see Neil Barofsky grace the airwaves of CNBC again. Clearly the empty suits over there don’t appreciate someone who doesn’t immediately defer to the Masters of the Universe. You simply cannot make the simple case that TARP had a specific goal to increase lending and help homeowners that went [...]

Sandy Weill, the former CEO of Citigroup, became the latest unorthodox figure to endorse the concept of breaking up the mega-banks. Weill joins former and current Federal Reserve regional bank Presidents like Richard Fisher and Thomas Hoenig, as well as several academic conservatives. What’s even more unusual about Weill joining this chorus is the central [...]

Let’s not let this little tidbit go unremembered today. Remember when Jamie Dimon came out and said that his firm’s little escapade in London cost them $2 billion? Multiply by four and a half: Losses on JPMorgan Chase’s bungled trade could total as much as $9 billion, far exceeding earlier public estimates, according to people [...]

I can get behind any piece of writing that includes the line “James Pethokoukis doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Nine times out of ten, that’s the case. This bill of particulars is accurate. But let’s call this that tenth time. Pethokoukis, a columnist for the American Enterprise Institute, writes in the pages of the [...]

Joe Nocera admitted yesterday, building on previous opinion and research, that Dodd-Frank, the financial reform law, was essentially too complex to work. The crucial difference between the Glass-Steagall Act, the landmark banking reform law that was passed during the Great Depression, and Dodd-Frank, is that the former had an appealing simplicity that Dodd-Frank lacks. Glass-Steagall [...]

More indications today that the Fail Whale trades were far more consequential for JPMorgan Chase than anyone is making it out to be. Reuters looks at the furious sell-offs JPMorgan Chase has engaged in over the last month: JPMorgan Chase & Co has sold an estimated $25 billion of profitable securities in an effort to [...]

There’s a credible school of thought that you can determine whether or not banking industry reforms like Dodd-Frank are working by whether or not industry profits have slowed. Well, the FDIC has your answer: Bank profits in the first quarter of 2012 reached their highest quarterly income levels in nearly five years, a federal banking [...]