My daughter and I joined an estimated 50,000 demonstrators in Washington D.C. marching against the XL Pipeline that would connect the Canadian Tar Sands to American refineries. After a half century on this planet, I took to the streets. Here's why.

The "business as usual" arguments in favor of building...

After apologizing at Davos -- but only to his shareholders -- according to William Cohan on the Bloomberg View, JPMorgan Chairman and CEO hastened to add about 2012, "We did have record profits. Life goes on."

It is true; JPMorgan reported a strong financial performance in 2012, "London...

I eat dinner with my mom in nearby Newtown frequently. One reality in these tragedies is that distance matters -- the closer to home, the more poignant. 9-11 taught me that.

If 9-11 revealed that we live at a scary time in this world, with forces at work I was...

The futile debate between market fundamentalists and those who claim you can't stop "progress" on the one hand, and proponents of tighter government regulation and oversight on the other, continues on with no resolution in sight. From too-big-to-fail banks, a second front is now opening -- this one focused on...

The ramifications of the Libor scandal -- what Warren Buffett glibly called a can of worms that affects the whole world -- grow by the day. Criminal indictments of individuals, even if firms are too big to indict, appear to be in the making as the tsunami's shock...

Like Lloyd Blankfein with the Abacus fiasco, and Jamie Dimon with "the whale trade," Barclays CEO Bob Diamond has an unparalleled opportunity to surprise us this week during his appearance before Parliament to explain the most recent financial scandal involving the systematic manipulation of LIBOR, the benchmark interbank...

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon will today, once again, stand before the authors of Dodd-Frank and attempt to make the case for why a $2 billion trading loss was a stupid mistake, not a willful breach of at least the intent of the law. Our representatives who wrote the law should...

Reactions to departing Goldman derivatives salesman Greg Smith's "Why I am Leaving Goldman Sachs," which appeared as an op-ed in the New York Times last week, have ranged from the hyperbolic -- Robert Reich's "If you took the greed out of Wall Street, all you'd have...

Generation Investment Management's recently released white paper "Sustainable Capitalism" (PDF) calls for a "paradigm shift to Sustainable Capitalism." It is an admirable and important contribution to the discussion about how to make individual firms more sustainable. Beyond this effort, we need the sustainable business community to join the...

In his Feb. 10 essay, New York Times columnist Joe Nocera asked a simple question: "Can a person support the Keystone XL oil pipeline and still believe that global warming poses a serious threat?"

Joe answers "yes," with the logic that this one pipeline alone will not bring...

All eyes are trained on Europe these days. While I look on, I can't help but yearn for the day when financial markets and financial institutions are a little less interconnected, and a lot more resilient. Whether such a system lies in the future, or only in the past, is...

The Dark Age of Banking reaches its twelfth anniversary today, November 4. It would be simplistic and unfair to blame the near collapse of the global financial system on the Financial Modernization Act, signed into law on November 4, 1999, repealing Glass-Steagall. But history will no doubt judge it as...

I'm a former banker, a one percenter, and I'm mad as hell too.

Let's be clear. The Occupy movement is not a product of frustration, as President Obama, Treasury Secretary Geithner, and now Eric Cantor have suggested. Frustration is passive; anger is active. Martin Luther King was not frustrated....

Banking used to be a profession, not just a business. That profession is vital to the real economy, and essential at a time of profound economic system transition. It's about time we rebuild the banking profession, using public-private hybrid models when necessary, to promote banking's critical public purpose such as...

Jobs. Depending on how you count, the challenge is to create 7 to 10 million net new jobs in the United States over the next 5 years while keeping the 130 million people currently employed in their jobs -- a 5 to 7 percent increase in employment, the sooner the...

Forty-eight years ago this Sunday, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his famous "I have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by proclaiming it, "the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation." And it was.

While the struggle for freedom has...

Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the situation is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. -- John Maynard Keynes, Speculator and Economist

You know you've hit a hot button when publicly traded stock exchanges, futures brokers, and...

I recall when JPMorgan lost its AAA rating. Those of us who had worked there a long time felt the gloom of losing our specialness. Though the rating agencies were right, the truth hurt. Egos were stung. But, the rating agencies were late, as they almost always are.

The downgrade of...