While the financial reform law that was signed by President Obama yesterday signaled a renewed interest in Washington to regulate go-go bankers, it may have an even greater impact on "fringe banking" -- the high-cost, dead-end alternative banking industry that includes payday lenders and check cashers. Regulators across the country...

As the lessons of the mortgage crisis are studied by historians in the coming years, a significant and widely overlooked consequence that will no doubt emerge is how it's set back the economic mobility of minorities in this country by at least 20 years.

The statistics...

For all the failures of bankers and policymakers to tame the unbridled innovations of capitalism in recent years, many of us have also lost our own way financially--and it's costing us hugely. American consumers are losing hundreds of billions of dollars in unnecessary banking and checking fees, inflated interest rates,...