If you're going to have a raucous, costumed march in New York City, Midtown makes for a great setting. Nurses and HIV activists in Robin Hood hats took the streets yesterday, blocking traffic as they called for a financial transaction tax to fully fund healthcare and other public services. Chants of

Five years after the fall of Lehman Brothers and the worst financial crisis since 1929, one thing seems certain: another meltdown of the financial system will eventually happen. Why? Because we still haven't fixed many of the problems that led to the last crisis.

Blythe Masters is the most recognizable woman on Wall Street—and arguably its most resilient. At 44, she heads the largest commodities trading operation at the largest bank in the U.S., JPMorgan Chase ( JPM). In the mid-1990s she developed and marketed credit derivatives, which rapidly became a new

The standard rap against regulation is that government uses a meat cleaver to clean up problems in the private sector that are better tackled with more nuance. Yet regulation—or the threat of it—often serves to spur smart self-regulation that wouldn't otherwise occur. You want to see a scalpel at

After a marathon hearing that wrapped up in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the City Council of Richmond, Calif., voted to allow the use of eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages, becoming the first city in the nation to take such a concrete step toward the novel and risky strategy for

President Obama met with the nation’s top financial regulators last week, to urge for rulings associated with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform law passed more than three years ago. It was the first time the president convened a sit down with each regulator since 2011. According to a White House

On Friday, Paul Krugman dealt with financial market price bubbles, focusing specifically on emerging markets. He takes on the issue of bubble creation as a result of aggressive Fed loose money policy of the recent past. He correctly points out that the emerging markets situation is really one of a

The post-recession party line at the American Bankers Association (ABA) is something like, “Hey Jane/Joe Briefcase. We're just as mad at gosh darn Wall Street as anyone. But only some bankers are evil. A lot of us are honest and work hard, just like you.” Maybe. But this isn’t a reason to lose track

The huge trading losses suffered by JP Morgan last year—and the cover-up of those losses—stand as just one example of that giant bank's long record of excess, criminality, and deception. And when you think of who should be held accountable for the London Whale fiasco, one name comes to mind. It's a

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) has, ironically, found that exploiting children turns a profit. It has been doing so since its creation in 1984 under Ronald Reagan, who created the quasi-governmental agency. It enjoys liberal funding from the Department of Justice and