In a 2011 speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, civil rights hero and Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) eloquently described attacks across the country on Americans' access to the ballot box: "Voting rights are under attack in America.
Regulators in the United Kingdom are looking into allegations that traders from some of the world's largest banks have been manipulating benchmark foreign-exchange rates to make profits on the backs of clients.
Bloomberg News broke the story earlier this week, citing interviews with several anonymous traders who claim the practice has been occurring for at least 10 years. [...]
We have learned, painfully, of the damage derivatives can do to an economy in a financial crisis. But derivatives are hurting the economy even on its best days, according to a new study.
In the wake of the National Security Agency scandal, the mainstream media is obsessing over Edward Snowden’s security clearance. It is asking, along with Senators from the Intelligence Committee, why a systems administrator at Booz Allen Hamilton had access to troves of top-secret documents and whether or not the vetting process for the other 1.4 million people with top-secret clearances is rigorous enough. The fear, the mainstream seems to be pushing on Americans, is that other leaks are in store.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo spent his career cultivating the image of a man who gets what he wants. In 2011, he rammed same-sex marriage legislation through the legislature, even with a Republican-controlled Senate. In 2012, when he wanted New York to be the first state to pass gun-control laws after the Newtown shooting, he was similarly productive. This year, Cuomo has said he wants to make state elections fairer, by lowering contribution limits and supplementing small donations with public dollars to give them more weight.
One by one, the House Financial Services Committee has rubber-stamped industry approved bills that would weaken elements of Dodd-Frank designed to hem in risky derivatives trading.
For lawmakers in Washington, the daily chase for money can begin with a breakfast fundraiser in the side room of a Washington restaurant.
At noon, there might be a $500-per-plate lunch with lobbyists in a Capitol Hill town house. The day might wrap up in an arena sky box in downtown Washington, watching a basketball game with donors.
Imagine that you're trying to make an extremely complicated decision. You want to understand the facts and do the right thing. At one ear, you have someone -- perhaps a former colleague -- who whispers you highly detailed advice six times a day, cajoling and pleading. At the other ear, is someone who whispers you advice only once or twice a week.
Housing prices are coming back and consumers—feeling flush now that their home equity is rebounding—are more confident than they've been in four years. The American middle class is finally getting back on its feet after a half decade of trauma, right?
Progressive organizations in New York City and Washington, D.C. rail a good amount against big banks. But not enough of those organizations have cut themselves off from those "too-big-to-fail" institutions to join, say, the Amalgamated Bank (AB), a bank which does not have a history of scandals and scams that banks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase do.
As the capital is engulfed in scandals, advocates of campaign finance reform are intensifying their pressure on Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, urging him to persuade the Legislature to rewrite state elections law in the hope that change in New York could have an influence nationally.
New rules to regulate derivatives, adopted last week by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, are a victory for Wall Street and a setback for financial reform. They may also signal worse things to come.
This week has delivered two economic surprises that illustrate the right way and the wrong way to respond to the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression.
First, the euro zone economy shrank more than expected in the past three months, moving France back into a recession. That's what happens when you implement an austerity policy that serves to undermine economic demand.
With Jamie Dimon under growing fire from shareholders of JP Morgan Chase, one possibility is that he may relinquish his role as chairman of the board but remain as CEO. That raises an interesting question: Why does Dimon hold both jobs to begin with?
The IRS is under siege for investigating conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status. But the real problem wasn’t that the IRS was too aggressive.
The banks have systematically figured out how to rip off the government,” Lerner says.
Part of that ripoff was the LIBOR scandal, which had a “massive consequence on everything,” according to Wallace Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs employee and current senior fellow at nonpartisan think tank Demos.
Murphy suggested two ways out of this trap. One is crowd-sourced fundraising, which is already occurring over the Internet. Murphy stated that his Senate campaign raised $4 million of its $10 million total from donors giving online. That meant he did not have to call wealthy donors to raise 40 percent of his campaign haul.