Banking, Finance & Services

The FBI has just released an ad featuring the fictional character Gordon Gekko from the "Wall Street" films to target insider trading. Increasingly, however, it seems that Scotland Yard needs a similar campaign for the City of London, which has become the center for the mantra "Greed is Good." Read More

U.S. investigators of bankrupt MF Global Holdings Ltd. have yet to determine after four months of probing whether enough evidence exists to pursue a criminal case. The company collapsed after a $6.3 billion bet on the bonds of some of Europe's most indebted nations went sour. When the Read More

The top 40 highest-earning hedge fund managers took home a combined $13.2 billion, according to a Forbes magazine survey. The top 10 hedge fund managers made more than $200 million each, while the lowest earning managers made $40 million each. Read More

Four years after the disintegration of the financial system, 24 million people jobless or underemployed. Yet claims of financial fraud against companies like Citigroup and Bank of America have been settled for pennies on the dollar, with no admission of wrongdoing. Executives who ran companies that made, packaged and sold trillions of dollars in toxic mortgages and mortgage-backed securities remain largely unscathed. Read More

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 encouraged the Securities and Exchange Commission to fine corporate executives if they certified financial results that turned out to be bogus. The record suggests a bark decidedly worse than its bite. The SEC has filed cases against 31 executives at only 20 companies so far and recovered a total of $12.2 million from nine former executives to date. Read More

In a settlement for bribery allegations related to the construction and expansion of its Bonny Island natural-gas liquefaction facility, Halliburton Co. agreed to pay $35 million to the Nigerian government. Read More

The midterm elections are days away, but the winners are virtually certain: the corporations and conservative operatives like Karl Rove who have taken advantage of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling to establish a well-heeled "shadow party" of networked trade associations and G.O.P. front groups. Read More

Prosecutors in Italy said Monday that former Parmalat Chief Executive Officer Calisto Tanzi was a flight risk and requested he be arrested. Tanzi has already been sentenced to a 10-year prison sentence on market-rigging charges and filing false reports with regulators in the wake of the collapse of Parmalat, the ANSA news agency reported Read More

The donation to the Proposition 23 campaign comes from a subsidiary of Kansas-based Koch Industries, which owns refineries and controls 4,000 miles of oil pipelines. Read More

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has warned Charles Schwab & Co. that his office plans to sue the firm for civil fraud over its marketing and sales of auction-rate securities to clients. Emails and testimony cited in the letter show Schwab's brokers had little idea of what they were selling and later failed to tell clients that the market was collapsing. Read More