Financial Crisis | featured news

UBS unveiled plans on Tuesday to wind down its fixed income business and fire 10,000 bankers, as it adapts to tougher capital rules that make it more difficult for investment banks to turn a profit since the financial crisis.

The 2008 financial crisis roiled the banking system and swamped the global economy, leaving millions of Americans jobless, underemployed or facing foreclosure. In its wake, Congress set out to overhaul how the government oversees Wall Street. The result was a sprawling law, the Dodd-Frank Act, which aims to prevent future crises by giving the government new tools and restricting banks' activities. The law may make future crises less likely, but it increases costs for companies, especially banks, and their customers.

Citigroup said on Wednesday that it had agreed to pay $590 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought by shareholders who contended that they had been misled about the bank’s exposure to subprime mortgage debt on the eve of the financial crisis.

In Vietnam’s major cities, a once-booming property market has come crashing down, adding to an economic slowdown that is being compared to the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Barclays alerted U.S. regulators as far back as 2007 to concerns that banks were rigging benchmark interest rates, according to documents released on Friday, but policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic did not appear to take decisive action, underscoring the chaos of the financial crisis.

How is your portfolio doing since the 2008 financial crisis? If you’re like most Americans, it’s probably healed some. After all, stocks are up about 13 percent since October 2008. Bonds are up about 30 percent. “Winnie-the-Pooh” is doing a bit better. A 1926 first-edition copy of the fabled children’s classic can fetch nearly four times what it did in 2008 — a return of almost 300 percent.

Unemployment in the 17-country euro currency bloc hit another record in May as the crippling financial crisis pushed the continent toward the brink of recession, official figures showed Monday.

More than at any time since the depths of the financial crisis, the world's leaders need to pull together today, end their squabbling and divisiveness, and come up with a concrete plan to get the fragile recovery back on track.

Rajat Gupta, a consummate business insider who once sat on the board of Goldman Sachs Group Inc, was convicted on Friday of leaking secrets about the investment bank at the height of the financial crisis, a major victory for prosecutors seeking to root out illicit trading on Wall Street.

Americans can expect to see tangible results this fall from the task force President Obama created to investigate the financial crisis, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman told TPM Thursday.