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Trading in the securities of Spanish lender Bankia has been suspended "due to circumstances that may affect the normal share trading," stock market regulator CNMV said on Friday. Bankia will ask the state for more than 15 billion euros ($19 billion) to bail it out when its new management team presents a restructuring plan on Friday, a financial sector source said late on Thursday.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The regulator overseeing the investigation of Jon Corzine's collapsed securities firm, MF Global, gave $10,000 to the New Jersey Democratic Party in 2005 as Corzine ran for governor of that state. Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and Corzine had worked together for 18 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and later collaborated to pass a law to combat corporate fraud. Election records show Gensler gave the money in August 2005. Corzine, a Democrat, was elected governor later that year. MF Global filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday. Gensler and other regulators are trying...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The lead regulator investigating the collapse of Jon Corzine's securities firm, MF Global, worked alongside him for 18 years at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The two later collaborated to pass a law intended to prevent accounting scandals. Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rose to become Goldman's co-head of finance before leaving in 1997. Corzine left Goldman in 1999, after serving as chairman and CEO. The two later collaborated when Corzine was a senator and Gensler worked on Capitol Hill. As a key staffer for Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., Gensler advised Sarbanes on the...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- MF Global, Jon Corzine's embattled securities firm, moved millions in missing client funds last week and tried to avoid detection, a regulator said Wednesday. MF apparently made "substantial transfers" of customer money after an on-site audit last week, said the regulator, CME Group Inc. CME is a private company that oversees firms such as MF Global on behalf of federal regulators. It also operates exchanges where MF Global traded investments. The money was moved in a way that "may have been designed to avoid detection," CME said in a statement. MF Global filed for bankruptcy protection Monday...

Though federal regulations require offshore drilling locations to be inspected by the Department of the Interior's Minerals Mining Service every 30 days, those inspections have repeatedly not happened since the Deepwater Horizon site was permitted by MMS in 2001 – including one out of every four months since President Obama's inauguration. ABC News has learned that in the 16 months from January 2009 through April 2010 MMS failed to inspect Deepwater Horizon four times – in May 2009, August 2009, December 2009, and January 2010. The reasons for the lack of inspections, sources said, were logistic.

<p>A top bank regulator has been placed on leave pending a Treasury Department investigation into regulators' approval of backdated cash infusions for troubled thrifts.</p> <p>The Office of Thrift Supervision said Thursday its acting director, Scott Polakoff, was placed on leave. He is being replaced by OTS Chief Counsel John Bowman.</p>

Tuesday, September 30, 2008 Bill Clinton Fibbing on Fannie ... Posted by: Matt Lewis at 8:56 AM Bill Clinton has been getting a lot of press lately for trashing his own party’s handling of the mortgage mess. Last Thursday, he told Good Morning America, “I think that the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by the Republicans in Congress, or by me when I was President, to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Unfortunately, he was fibbing. He actually set the “standards” that forced Fannie and...

A federal government water resources inspector went out to a Texas ranch to investigate water use at the large Texas property. The old rancher met him in the drive and told him that he appreciated and understood his job, but that there was one irrigated pasture that the government man simply would not be able to inspect or check out. The government man became a little irritated and said, "What do you mean I can't inspect or check it out?" The inspector then pulled out his official government ID and told the rancher, "You see this ID? It says here...

Downsizing Fan and Fred The Monitor's View If the government-sponsored mortgage giants known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac knew what was good for them, they'd accept proposals to create a more muscular regulator over them and reduce their supersized $1.5 trillion portfolios. Those proposals were laid out in a bill introduced on Tuesday by Rep. Richard Baker (R), chairman of the House financial services subcommittee on capital markets. His measure rightly reflects a growing, post-Enron alarm in Congress over the risks a potential collapse of these two beasts poses to the nation's economy. Yet officials at Freddie Mac have...