Wall Street analysts make bad calls all the time, but among the worst made at least in recent history has to be Meredith Whitney's prediction back in 2010 that the municipal-bond market was set for an epic implosion.

What makes Whitney's call so bad isn't necessarily that in the nearly...

During this brief lull in the drama surrounding the nutritional company Herbalife, it's time to reflect on the drama within the drama: the battle between Bill Ackman and Carl Icahn, who have staked out opposing positions in the stock.

And upon reflection, here's hoping that they both lose. Yes, these...

There's a great scene in The Godfather II when Michael Corleone is weighing the odds of killing his archrival Hyman Roth. The assessment from his caporegimes, Rocco Lampone, was pretty simple: "Difficult, not impossible."

That's about the same assessment most of the elite on Wall Street have regarding the possibility...

People who know John Thain tell me he's a changed man.

The same doofy Wall Street fat cat who during the financial crisis infamously spent $1.22 million to redecorate his office using shareholder money for such necessary items as a $35,000 "commode on legs" and a $1,400...

Sandy Weill's signature accomplishment during his long career on Wall Street, Citigroup, engaged in fraud on a massive scale, unfettered risk taking and then needed a massive taxpayer bailout during the 2008 financial crisis because it was so big it couldn't be managed.

Yet only now does Weill say it...

Some not-so-big news: the Justice Department is now investigating the JP Morgan trading loss fiasco.

Of course, all those Eliot Ness types who came up with a 100
reasons why no one should be charged criminally for misleading
investors about the 2008 financial collapse...

Wall Street bankers said Mark Zuckerberg wasn't going to show up in New York on Monday, the first leg of the "road show," or publicity campaign to make sure the company he founded in his dorm room, Facebook, is worth close to the estimated $100 billion he and his bankers...

Co-written with Sital Patel

The latest urban legend to spread on trading desks and through the executive suites on Wall Street goes something like this: coming this fall, as President Obama makes his final push for a second term, his Justice Department will finally give the public...

Just a few months ago Jon Corzine was on the short list to be President Obama's Treasury Secretary, but now he's ignoring a request to testify before a House subcommittee investigating the demise MF Global and setting up a showdown that could have major political implications for the president as...

Mayor Bloomberg has finally disbanded the Occupy Wall Street Movement from its headquarters in lower Manhattan, calling the 3-month-old protest a "health and fire safety hazard."

The bigger story: What took him so long?

Bloomberg's bizarre dance with the Occupy Wall Street protesters over the past months will certainly rank...

Under normal circumstance the travails of a mid-sized brokerage firm like MF Global shouldn't be receiving this much attention, particularly when reporters have so many drugged-up hippie Wall Street protesters to interview down at Zuccotti Park.

But MF Global -- which is unlikely to survive through the weekend, at least...

I'm not saying this only as a supporter -- quite the opposite in fact. I'm probably one of the few reporters who is repulsed not just by the filth and the litter that now encompasses the protest movement's headquarters, Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, but also how Marxist elements have...

The Wall Street protesters and their barely discernible message that seems to want to hold bankers accountable for the 2008 financial collapse is attracting lots of press attention, but inside the big firms, senior executives have barely noticed.

The reason: They have a lot bigger problems to worry about.

Executives...

The left wing media loves a good scandal, particularly one that somehow points out how allegedly greedy capitalists rip off taxpayers. If these capitalists are in any way connected to the Republican Party, like defense contractor Halliburton, it's feeding-frenzy time.

But if the scandal involves one of the liberal media's...

On the three-year anniversary of the financial crisis, Wall Street is in the dumps. Not the same dumps as the big banks and Wall Street firms found themselves in back in 2008, but the mood on Wall Street is pretty dark.

It's not easy to refrain from vomiting when millionaires...

If the saga of Bank of America, the country's largest and most troubled bank, were to be made into a movie, its title would have to be "The Dumbest Men in the Room," with a starring cast that features its half-witted chief executive officer Brian Moynihan and his equally half-witted...

One of the great mysteries coming out of the 2008 financial collapse centered on how the rating agencies, for all their culpability in aiding and abetting the mindless risk-taking on the part of the big banks, escaped legal responsibility.

After all, these were the companies that slapped all those faulty...

Meredith Whitney says she "can't believe I'm the only person talking about" the big budget problems facing states and cities these days and that investors in municipal bonds should be cautious. The reality, of course, is that she isn't and hasn't been ever since the financial crisis, the...

What passes for top-notch financial journalism these days is an in depth report in the New York Times about why Goldman Sachs, the most successful of all Wall Street firms, is so modest. Amid billions of dollars in profits, a rising share price, the big Wall Street firm...

Duncan Niederauer, the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, doesn't like the people at the Nasdaq and Intercontinental Exchange much these days. He calls them "interlopers," who are trying to mess up a good thing for NYSE shareholders and its employees with a rival bid designed to...