Wall Street Cleverly Carves Up Bad Assets

Even Eric Holder is linked to elite financial world

(NEWSER) - With President Obama's campaign officially underway , two journalists examine why his promise to end "business as usual" on Wall Street has amounted to more, well, business as usual on Wall Street. "Casting Romney as a plutocrat will be easy enough," write Peter Boyer and Peter Schweizer at the Daily Beast . "But the president's claim as avenging populist may prove trickier, given his own deeply complicated, even conflicted, relationship with Big Finance." More»

Matt Taibbi on why the JOBS Act 'couldn't suck worse'

(NEWSER) - Did you enjoy the dot-com bubble? Well, expect a replay on an even bigger scale, because last week President Obama signed a bill that, according to Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone , "will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market." The JOBS Act is ostensibly designed to make it easier for startups, particularly tech companies, to raise money, but it's actually a "sweeping piece of deregulation" that "appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud." More»

(NEWSER) - Until the day Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, all three of the major credit-ratings agencies swore its debt was safe, rating it A or better. They rated AIG at AA. And they gave 75% of the $3.2 trillion of subprime mortgage securities iron-clad AAA ratings. Moody’s, S&P and Fitch were, in short, at the center of the credit crisis. Yet all are still profitable—and regulators aren’t touching them, Bloomberg reports. More»

Credit downgrades key catalyst in Wall Street titan's loss of value

(NEWSER) - After dodging many of the bullets that left its Wall Street peers wounded or dead, Goldman Sachs faces a net loss of up to $2 billion for the fourth quarter, the Wall Street Journal reports. The loss of $5 per share is five times worse than analysts feared as the firm deals with writedowns across its portfolio. Shares plunged $13.23, or 17%, yesterday. More»

One year in, credit crunch has upset all expectations about modern markets

(NEWSER) - Last summer, central banks injected hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial system, desperate to restore liquidity to battered markets. But by then the credit crunch was on—and after 12 months, it shows no signs of abating. The Financial Times looks at how risky US mortgages set off the worst economic crisis in 70 years. More»