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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Charles Prince and Robert Rubin, who led Citigroup (Symbol : C Loading... ) in the run-up to the 2008 banking crisis, voiced regrets on Thursday but accepted no responsibility for mega-bank's massive losses. The two came under heavy fire before a congressional panel hearing for being blind to financial risks that Citi took on, which ultimately led to its near collapse, prevented only by a $45-billion taxpayer bailout. His hands visibly shaking as he answered questions, Rubin told congressional investigators he was not a decision-maker at the bank during the worst of its troubles. The former U.S....

Politics: Another bank failure is nothing new these days — except if the bank is run by the family of a U.S. Senate candidate who profited handsomely and lent millions to a convicted felon. But then, that's the Chicago way. 'I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall Street," President Obama said in a recent interview with "60 Minutes." Speaking to those bankers, he said: "You guys are drawing down 10, 20 million dollar bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that it's gone through in — in decades,...

MUMBAI — In New York and London, women remain scarce among top bankers despite decades of struggle to climb the corporate ladder. But in India’s relatively young financial industry, women not only are some of the top deal makers, they are often running the show. HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland, UBS and Fidelity International in India are run by women. So is the country’s second-biggest bank, Icici Bank, and its third-largest, Axis Bank. Women head investment banking operations at Kotak Mahindra and JPMorgan Chase and the equities division of Icici. Half of the deputy governors at the Reserve...

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said: "We face a deficit of trust -- deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years. To close that credibility gap, we have to take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue -- to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; to give the people the government they deserve." The day after the president uttered those words, a senior Democrat offered private policy briefings to lobbyists on the administration's plans. "In the upcoming elections, voters will face a choice between...

This number sounds suspiciously similar to the number used by the Inspector General over TARP about 10 months ago during congressional hearings.

By Patrick Jenkins in Davos and Tom Braithwaite in Washington Published: January 30 2010 00:02 | Last updated: January 30 2010 00:02 Some of the world’s most prominent bankers have come out in favour of a global bank wind-down fund, a concession from the industry after weeks of fighting proposals for new taxes in the US and Europe. Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, told the Financial Times on Friday : “To help solve the too-big-to-fail problem I’m advocating a European rescue and resolution fund for banks. Of course, the capital for this fund would have to come from...

Some of the world’s most prominent bankers have come out in favour of a global bank wind-down fund, a concession from the industry after weeks of fighting proposals for new taxes in the US and Europe. Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, told the Financial Times on Friday : “To help solve the too-big-to-fail problem I’m advocating a European rescue and resolution fund for banks. Of course, the capital for this fund would have to come from banks to a large degree.” Bob Diamond, president of Barclays , also supported the idea of a global levy, which could see...

Surprise! Banks with government guarantees take the biggest risks, make the most money, and pay the highest bonuses. President Obama said last month on "60 Minutes" that he "did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street." This assertion may mollify his constituents, but it is not consistent with his administration's own policies. We are on the cusp of what is going to be the most highly visible and contentious bank bonus season in history. Bonuses are predicted to run into the billions of dollars, and many of the banks that...

WASHINGTON – Challenged by a skeptical special commission, top Wall Street bankers apologized Wednesday for risky behavior that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But they still declared it seemed appropriate at the time. The bankers — whose companies collectively received more than $100 billion in taxpayer assistance to weather the crisis — offered no regrets for executive pay that is now likely to increase as a result of their survival. They did say they are correcting some compensation practices that could lead to excessive risk-taking. The tension at the first hearing of the Financial Crisis...

... [T]his is neither a housing crisis nor a Wall Street banking crisis. This is a monetary crisis, rooted in the lending of money created out of thin air. This is what leads to economic booms and busts. The current crisis goes back to the Asian Contagion of 1997 and the meltdown of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1998. In response to each of these situations, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates and rapidly expanded the money supply. This excess liquidity helped push stocks, especially tech issues, to unsustainably high levels. The excess money created by the...

President Barack Obama will meet with chief executive officers and presidents from a dozen community banks today to discuss his proposals to boost small-business lending and his plans for regulatory overhaul.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Credit Suisse Group helped clients in Iran and elsewhere conduct financial transactions in secret, saying Wednesday the Swiss bank "established a business model to allow these rogue players access to U.S. dollars." Mr. Holder and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau detailed a decade-long effort by the bank to carry out transactions from Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba. The men announced a $536 million settlement by Credit Suisse, one of several banks accused in a long-running case that has netted roughly $1 billion in fines. The bank, which paid the biggest of the fines,...

In public, President Obama is on a tear against Wall Street. In private, not so much Over the weekend, Obama attacked fat-cat investment bankers, telling "60 Minutes" he didn't become president to aid and abet Wall Street -- which, only a year after the financial meltdown and taxpayer bailout, is now scheduled to hand out tens of billions of dollars in bonuses to its bankers and traders. But the president's meeting yesterday with the CEOs of the largest banks was nearly a lovefest, I'm told by attendees. Yes, White House spinmeisters advertised the gathering as a chance for Obama to...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- President Barack Obama on Monday pressed the chief executives of the nation's largest banks to lend more to small businesses, increase their assistance to troubled homeowners and end their opposition to bank regulatory reform legislation moving on Capitol Hill. "I urged these institutions here today to go back and take a third and fourth look about how they are operating when it comes to small business and medium-sized business lending," Obama said after meeting at the White House with the bankers. "Banks could be doing more to lend to small businesses." See full text of Obama's remarks....

President Obama is calling on the financial industry to help dig the economy out of the pit the White House says it helped create, as the president and bank executives headed into a potentially tense meeting Monday morning. President Obama is calling on the financial industry to help dig the economy out of the pit the White House says it helped create, as the president and bank executives headed into a potentially tense meeting Monday morning. The president set the tone for the meeting in an interview broadcast the night before in which he called Wall Street bankers "fat cats"...

In a London preview of Wall Street's bonus nightmare, more than 1,000 investment bankers have quit Royal Bank of Scotland to work at rivals due to curbs on their paychecks, according to people familiar with the situation. Wall Street banks fear top talent would flee en masse for greener pastures if Uncle Sam's pay czar, Ken Feinberg, and Congress try to put more ceilings on bonuses and pay at financial firms. In the UK, the rules are modeled after US actions to curb pay at firms bailed out by the government.RBS will soon be about 84-percent owned by the British...

If you haven't read Matt Taibbi's recent Rolling Stone piece on Goldman Sachs, make sure to get your hands on it ASAP. It's a must read on how Goldman Sachs and the U.S. government work hand in glove to produce giant investment bubbles... bubbles that allow Goldman to work over investors for hundreds of billions of dollars. We don't think you can lay all the blame for the housing bubble and the tech bubble at Goldman's feet... but we do find it suspicious that a ton of high level government posts are staffed by Goldman employees. It's close to a...

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again -~&~- The FIRST THING YOU NEED TO KNOW about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled-dry American empire, reads like a Who's...

(snip) I am concerned, however, that a number of the legislative proposals being circulated would significantly reduce the capacity of the Federal Reserve to perform its core functions. Notably, some leading proposals in the Senate would strip the Fed of all its bank regulatory powers. And a House committee recently voted to repeal a 1978 provision that was intended to protect monetary policy from short-term political influence. These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the...

National People's Action Network has put out an email reporting that 10,000 people have signed up to protest this weekend at the American Bankers Association conference in Chicago. This is really one mixed bag of protesters. NAPN, as I have previously reported (See here), is an ACORN want-to-be. I'm sure most of the anti-bank protesters don't have a clue about this. [snip] Bottom line the radical left is attempting to co-opt the anti-big banker movement and fold it into an anti-capitalist message.