For Randy Neugebauer, the Texas Republican who chairs the investigations subcommittee, the top sources of funding for his 2012 reelection campaign are from the insurance, banking, finance, securities and real estate industries.
In the struggle against sexual discrimination on Wall Street, Pamela K. Martens is a latter-day Rosa Parks - a woman who, metaphorically speaking, refused to sit in the back of the bus.
MF Global used to be known as Man Financial, and it had a reasonably good reputation. It did a humdrum business placing commodities trades for fund managers as well as farmers, grain dealers and others whose livelihoods depend on the vagaries of commodity prices.
If you think Wall Street has a short memory, you're dead wrong. No, the folks who work on Wall Street, regulate Wall Street - and, above all, invest in its wares, notably its hedge funds - don't have a bad memory. They don't have any memory at all.
Despite all the drawbacks, the Internet provides a wide array of information - and some of it is being watched pretty carefully by the pros.
Oil futures were originally created to give heating oil dealers, gas retailers, aviation companies and other businesses a method of hedging against adverse price changes. Instead, they've become just another Wall Street plaything.
No other facet of American business is more corrupt, more intoxicated with illegality, more weakly regulated, and has a greater impact on poor and working people than debt collectors; not credit card companies or subprime mortgages, not even payday lenders.
People are told their rights when they're arrested. Consumers getting collection letters are entitled to the same courtesy.
Debt collectors should be required to disclose the applicable statute of limitations in the body of their collection letters, in bold type. While it's not illegal to dun a consumer for an old debt, it is illegal to sue for one.
Newt Gingrich is a boastful kind of guy. But when it comes to Wall Street, the former House speaker is surprisingly modest.
I'm not an ultra-libertarian who thinks there shouldn't be insider-trading laws at all.
The heart of the 2008 financial crisis was a coterie of reckless financial executives, working for too-big-to-fail financial companies, who were handsomely compensated for taking risks that almost ruined the economy when they failed.
The problem with the focus on speculators, as was demonstrated during the financial crisis, is that it tends to divert attention from the real villains. During the financial crisis, the villains were the actions of the banks, not the speculators betting on bank share prices.
One problem with the focus on speculation is that it tends to promote the growth of the great intellectual cancer of our times: conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories feed on opacity, and that's a longtime problem with short selling. Large long positions must be reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission in public filings, but not large short positions.
Short-sellers perform a useful function in the market as conduits of negative information, and shorts often complain that they are discriminated against by regulators.
I'm rooting for Saudi Arabia getting a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Mutual funds dare to be average. In fact, they dare to be lousy. They have long since ceased striving for anything resembling perfection when it comes to managing your money.
In the U.S., diversity is a politically correct slogan. In India, it is a historical fact. Much as we in the West may resent it, India has a lot to teach us when it comes to religious tolerance.
India may be the only country in the world that has been free of anti-Semitic prejudice throughout its history.
