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Seven Irish banks are being investigated by the Central Bank of Ireland for selling consumers insurance policies that they did not need. Tens of thousands of Irish consumers could get as much as €3,000 ($3,900) each in refunds.

Spain will inject emergency capital into the country's biggest ailing bank, Bankia, as it puts into place reforms to allow loss-making banks to receive eurozone bailout money.

Kenichi Watanabe and Takumi Shibata, the CEO and chief operating officer of Nomura, have resigned over several recent insider trading scandals at the Japanese multinational conglomerate. The revelations are the latest in a series of events that have shone a welcome spotlight on seamier side of the financial industry.

HSBC, one of the world's largest banks, has been accused of laundering money for Mexican drug cartels. At a hearing conducted by the U.S. Senate earlier this week, David Bagley, HSBC's head of compliance, apologized and resigned.

BlackRock and Two Sigma Investments - both major hedge funds - have been conducting regular private surveys of brokers for wealthy clients. The practice has raised red flags because of Morgan Stanley's role in the Facebook stock market flotation, as well as insider trading scandals at Goldman Sachs.

A record $450 million fine for fixing rates at which banks lend to each other has been levied on Barclays bank in the UK, shining a light into how banks set - and manipulate - rates at which $360 trillion in international deposits are loaned out every day.

How Deutsche Bank made its U.S. arm vanish from the records maintained by the Federal Reserve and saved itself from locking up $20 billion in deposits. (Hint: Hire a lobbyist on Capitol Hill)

One rich bank (JP Morgan) lost money to a rich hedge fund (Saba). Surely that is a zero sum game: They swap mansions and yachts, their partners swap diamonds and butlers, and it makes no difference to the rest of us. Or are they robbing us?

Hedge funds were just handed an opportunity to make even more money under a new law signed by President Barack Obama last month. Consumer advocates say that unsophisticated investors may be at risk as a result.

Goldman Sachs will pay out $22 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges of insider trading. Company researchers were accused of holding weekly "huddles" with investment bankers and traders to provide them with stock tips for preferred clients.

Greg Smith, a Goldman Sachs employee in London, has quit the company with a fiercely critical op-ed in the New York Times in which he accuses the Wall Street investment bank of losing its moral compass.

During the final, desperate days before it entered bankruptcy proceedings, MF Global executives took money from segregated customer accounts - money that belonged not to MF Global but to the farmers and commodities traders that were its clients - and used it to prop up its rapidly collapsing business. Nor was this petty cash: of the $6.9 billion in customer assets that MF Global held, a stunning $1.6 billion is missing. There is virtually no chance that the full amount will ever be recovered.

Two Spanish lawyers have launched a campaign on social networking sites to prise out information about Euribor, the reference interest rate used for calculating mortgage payments in Spain, and to draw attention to the lack of transparency surrounding the way the rate is set.

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.

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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.

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."

During the heyday of the credit bubble, they were the financiers who earned huge bonuses for creating, trading and investing other people's money in those complex securities that resulted in trillions of dollars in losses and brought global financial markets to their knees. Now they're out there again hustling for investors and hoping to make another score buying and trading the same securities.

Nine of the financial firms that were recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008, according to a report released Thursday by the New York attorney general. The report is certain to intensify the growing debate over how, and how much, Wall Street bankers should be paid.

My perspective on the Games gradually shifted. I began to see that my sacrifices were going to be used by the Olympic Games and their sponsors for ends that conflicted with my fundamental values. My competitive performance would not just be a part of a world community gathering to compete in the spirit of fair play, good will and global unity, but rather it would be sold to the highest corporate bidder for their own commercial gain.