Banks, Financial Crisis | featured news

Investments that were vulnerable in the last financial crisis and believed to be gone for good have largely escaped new rules that were made to prevent another crisis.

Punishing the bankers who brought on the financial crisis has proved distressingly difficult. None have gone to jail. A few young traders, who hid their post-crash losses and thereby stole from the banks, are behind bars. The rest are untouched by the tragedy.

Next year, $1.5 trillion of bank deposits will lose an unlimited government guarantee granted during the financial crisis, and boutique firms are offering new shelters for the cash.

Since the financial crisis Citigroup has managed to firm up its balance sheet and fence off most of the toxic assets that brought the bank to its knees. Some shareholders want the firm to go further though, and the latest call for a breakup comes from an unlikely source.

...The boom in resource markets that started 10 years ago attracted many big banks to trade oil, metals and agriculture, but the 2008 financial crisis forced a painful retreat and tighter regulation now means some banks may throw in the towel.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Global regulators said that banks deemed too-big-to-fail would have to set aside an additional cushion of capital reserves in an effort to avoid a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.