Time magazine describes the SEC fraud case against Goldman Sachs this way: On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed civil securities-fraud charges against Goldman Sachs, alleging the investment bank and its partners created mortgage bonds that were set up to go bust. Goldman then sold these bonds, which are called collateralized debt obligations [...]

Simon Johnson is a professor of entrepeneurship at MIT. Below he speaks about The Doom Cycle , described by the web site New Deal 2.0 as “the current boom-bust-bailout structure of the financial sector that leads to economic crises.”

One of the sticking points in enacting the financial reform bill stuck in the Senate is the creation of a new consumer financial protection agency, which Republicans have ardently opposed.

This post from the financial sector policy blog Finance: Facts and Follies summarizes the dismantling of consumer protections in the mortgage and credit card industries in the 2000s.

Many of the steps violating unsophisticated consumers’ protections against predatory lending came from a cascade of federal, not state, regulatory actions and legislation.

We first found this on The Awl. It’s a photo of what’s described on the blog I ought to be working as a pile of manure left in the entrance of a Chase Manhattan bank ATM at 10th street and 2nd Avenue in Manhattan, with this explanation: This happened across the street from my apartment. [...]

I was in my credit union to do some banking recently and I asked the guy helping me if he’d seen an uptick in new customers lately. “Definitely,” he said. “A lot of people are coming in from the big banks, because they said they read about doing it on the Web.” Two months ago [...]

How much do you pay at your bank for overdrafts, bounced checks, and stop-payment orders? From the Move Your Money project, this graph of average fees by size of financial institution. As you can see, banks classified as “giant” charge as much as 30% more than those deemed small for these services.

From The Big Picture blog, a post called Banking Sector Remains (literally) unchanged: Ever wonder why the banking sector continues to operate as it always has? Here’s a possible answer: According to a report on Corporate Governance by Professor Emma Coleman Jordan of the Georgetown University Law Center…one simple issue might help to explain why [...]

It’s a different type of “bail-out.” The Huffington Post and friends are spearheading a nascent movement to move your money from the big financial giants to community banks. From a column by Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson: The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record [...]

Smigly is–unknowingly–having a bad day at the big bank. More Smigley below ↓ or here.

…the worst dramatization of a governmental agency function goes to the FDIC Channel’s “Introduction to FDIC Deposit Insurance,” starring “Ashley” and “Grandpa.” And here to present the award are Big D of the Freedom For You and Me channel, Pennsylvania congressional candidate and tea-party participant Jake Towne, the Fat Libertarian, and this guy “proclaiming the [...]