Financial Crisis | featured news

Goldman Sachs Group received a subpoena from New York prosecutors seeking information on the investment bank's role leading into the global financial crisis, a person familiar with the matter said.

Ratings firms won another victory against legal claims that they should be held responsible for billions of dollars in losses suffered by investors during the financial crisis. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that Moody's Corp., Standard & Poor's, and Fitch Ratings can't be held liable for their ratings of mortgage-backed securities.

Sheila Bair, one of the most visible regulators who navigated the recent financial crisis, will leave the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp on July 8, the agency announced on Monday.

Goldman Sachs’ first-quarter income fell 72 percent after the bank paid out $1.64 billion in dividends to redeem preferred shares it issued to billionaire investor Warren Buffett during the financial crisis.

Goldman Sachs designed, marketed and sold collateralized debt obligations that misled investors and created conflicts of interest as the company built short positions before the U.S. housing market collapsed, a Senate panel said in its report on the financial crisis.

The government panel, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blames: Banks that made reckless bets, credit rating agencies that endorse risky mortgage-backed securities and government regulators who overlooked warning signs until they threatened the global financial system.

A deeply divided U.S. investigative panel issued a scathing critique of the culture of deregulation championed by Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, saying the government had ample power to avert the financial crisis of 2007-2009 and chose not to use it.

The banking industry, racked by the financial crisis and facing slower revenue growth, is starting to cut costs—increasingly at the expense of jobs.

Top 10 stories of 2010: WikiLeaks, Afghanistan war, EU financial crisis, Haiti earthquake, World Cup, North Korea.

Banks are finally beginning to lend, the big ones that is. Commercial and industrial lending is up this quarter 0.2% from the third quarter, according to Moody's Analytics. That might not sound like much, but it's the first quarterly increase in two years. This is great, right? After all, if banks are lending more to businesses, they can expand and begin to hire. That's true, but this trend reveals something else: the financial crisis has created an environment where big banks are getting bigger, as the small ones struggle.