Derivatives

Most bankers are not the unethical and blindly greedy creatures that politicians and the media make them out to be; and there is no doubt that without the productive activities of the banking sector, no other industry in our nation would be able to survive or thrive. But that does not mean there isn't a ghost in the machine.

Jamie Dimon was hailed as the wizard of Wall Street. Until the revelation of JPMorgan Chase's disastrous derivatives bet, he was the man who supposedly could do no wrong. But, alas, even wizards are not all powerful, not in Oz and not when trading in financial derivatives.

According to the Office Of The Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) the value of the derivatives on the books at J.P Morgan is $70 trillion. That's nearly 5 times the size of our economy. That's more than the entire world economy. At one bank.

Greece is a convenient excuse. Let's correct our own weaknesses, starting from public indebtedness, rather than pointing the finger towards Europe.

We not only need to rein the banks in but we've got to delegate the responsibility for measuring household wealth -- and hopefully come up with ways to boost it -- to an agency that's more in touch with "the 99%."

At the annual JPMorgan Chase shareholders meeting on Tuesday morning in Tampa, Fla., CEO Jamie Dimon offered what amounted to a spirited defense of th...

U.S. banks might act worried about how JPMorgan Chase's trading pratfall will lead to tighter regulations on their own risky bets, but they've already...

While regulation comes with a significant price tag, those costs pale beside the losses that banks can incur when left to their own devices. Will regulators take the hint that the cost-benefit fight is one they can win?

To Brooksley Born, JPMorgan Chase's trading blowup looks a lot like the Long-Term Capital Management debacle of 14 years ago. It's "happening all o...

Not for the first time, Elizabeth Warren has spoken a simple truth, one that ought to be heeded: Jamie Dimon must surrender his seat on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The public opprobrium directed at Wall Street throughout 2008 and 2009 met with no satisfactory reformist result. That leaves us with Occupy Wall Street as the only viable option of steering the nation off the course of permanent high unemployment, low wages, and a shredded social safety net.

The United States is trying to pull out of the greatest financial tailspins in its history. Dice-rolling braggadacio by a key officer at one of the nation's largest banks is exactly the kind of thing Congress, taxpayers and voters should find scary.

Somebody throw some water on the irony meter because it's burning up: JPMorgan could have been spared the embarrassment and pain of its $2 billion tra...

Fun as it may be to beat up on the arrogant Jamie Dimon for the $2 billion-plus derivatives fiasco at JPMorgan Chase, this is like blaming the lion that ate the kid who got too close to its cage at the zoo, rather than going after the guy who allowed such an unsafe cage to be built.

What just happened at J.P. Morgan reveals how fragile and opaque the banking system continues to be, why Glass-Steagall must be resurrected, and why the Dallas Fed's recent recommendation that Wall Street's giant banks be broken up should be heeded.

The banking industry is getting personal in its tireless fight against regulation. Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase and the industry'...

Complicated credit derivatives turned the financial crisis into a catastrophe back in 2008. Now comes a study claiming evidence that these financial i...

Roughly a decade ago, billionaire Warren Buffett pronounced derivatives, or securities based on a contract between parties, "financial weapons of mass...

Richard Sandor is not a household name but he should be. He is quite frankly one of the most important people in finance today given his 40 years of innovation.

Corporate America, with help from the Obama administration, has struck yet another blow against the scary financial regulations it claims will hurt th...

On Monday, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued an order prohibiting the marketing of a new set of derivatives that would have enabled...