Zachary Goldfarb's Washington Post analysis of the SEC's troubles under chairman Mary Schapiro does a lot to explain what the agency has been unable to do.  It outlines the opposition from Wall Street interests to many of Schapiro's initiatives, from greater access to board seats for disparate groups of ...

Jenny Anderson and Zachery Kouwe of the New York Times deliver this important overview of the SEC's enforcement team -- the group that is responsible for policing Wall Street, hedge funds, credit-default swaps, and corrupt investment peddlers like "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" ...

The New York Times' Louise Story reports that just as the Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped its investigation of Bank of America, New York state attorney general Andrew Cuomo is suing the bank. The lawsuit stems from the well-established allegation that when Bank of America acquired Merrill ...

Despite outrage over Wall Street, the number of federal prosecutions of corporate and securities fraud declined from 2008 to last year. But: the Obama administration is belatedly taking action. The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports that the Justice ...

The New York Times' Mary Williams Walsh reports that the Federal Reserve of New York told AIG to withhold information in its regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Specifically, the New York Fed thought it wasn't such a hot idea for AIG to tell regulators it was ...

After a pleasant vacation, the Securities and Exchange Commission is back to investigating Wall Street. The Wall Street Journal's Jenny Strasburg and Kara Scannell report on a slew of mergers and acquisitions that the SEC is investigating for insider ...

By Norman Kelley A few weeks ago I posted an article regarding the need for a "bigger stick," that is, why the government should housed the myriad financial regulatory agencies under one roof in order to monitor the entire financial industry. Well, it seem that some in the financial industry are combining to make sure that the Obama administration's attempt to regulate the multi-trillion dollar industry is scaled back. Citing a letter sent to all members of the Senate by a newly formed financial industry trade group, Washington Post reporter Brady Dennis notes that The Coalition for Derivatives End-Users, organized by groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers, sent a letter to lawmakers last week saying that "some reform proposals would place an extraordinary burden on end-users of derivatives in every sector of the economy -- including manufacturers, energy companies, utilities, healthcare companies and commercial real estate owners and developers." The letter was signed by more than 170 companies and trade associations. The letter seems to represent a naked rationale for business to go on as usual, with no meaningful oversight of an instrument which led to last year's financial collapse.

There's helpful, big-picture info in Ryan Lizza's New Yorker profile on Larry Summers, the head of the White House National Economics Council (i.e. Lizza provides a narrative of how the Obama administration crafted both its stimulus and bank bailout policy). One somewhat tangential story that struck me ...

A big-time voice against the Federal Reserve getting even more power -- The Washington Post's Peter Whoriskey reports that World Bank President Robert Zoellick doesn't want the Fed to have increased powers to regulate the U.S. financial system. Zoellick worked for the Treasury Dept. under the Reagan administration and ...

James Surowiecki of the New Yorker has a really great column this week on credit rating agencies, the unsung villains of the financial cirsis (Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post also had a good piece on credit rating agencies last week). One point Surowiecki makes is that ...