WHEN the Securities and Exchange Commission tried last year to safeguard investors in money market mutual funds, Mary L. Schapiro, its chairwoman at the time, ran into a buzz saw of opposition from industry ... Read more
One recent Thursday, G. Steven Farris, the chairman and C.E.O. of the poorly performing oil-and-gas company Apache, stood before a few hundred shareholders who were about to vote on his salary. Farris, who was ... Read more
As chairman of the Federal Reserve, Paul A. Volcker tamed inflation. More recently, he took on the country’s biggest banks in an effort to force them to give up lucrative but risky Wall Street-style ... Read more
WASHINGTON — Wall Street bankers and some of the world’s top finance ministers are waging a bitter international campaign to block Washington financial regulators from extending their policing ... Read more
THERE’S a lot to like, if you’re a taxpayer, in the new bipartisan bill from two concerned senators hoping to end the peril of big bank bailouts. But if you’re a large and powerful financial ... Read more
The alchemists of Wall Street are at it again. The banks that created risky amalgams of mortgages and loans during the boom — the kind that went so wrong during the bust — are busily ... Read more
Like many advocates of financial reform, I was a bit disappointed in the bill that finally emerged. Dodd-Frank gave regulators the power to rein in many financial excesses; but it was and is less clear that ... Read more
The private mortgage-backed securities market grew to be a virtually inscrutable giant. Each securitization contained thousands of mortgages and as many as dozens of different securities, some of which could ... Read more
IT is a prevailing myth in Washington: big bailouts are over for good. Never again, the line goes, could giant financial institutions imperil the nation’s economy. This is nonsense, of ... Read more