Spanish Sabotage Banks; SEC Hires Fox to Guard the Henhouse: Roundup

Patrick Clark — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 08:22:16 -0400

It gets worse in Spain. In the run-up to the current crisis, banks sold retail customers 22 billion euros of high-yielding preferred shares. Bank losses deepened, the securities plunged in value and the retail customers saw their savings diminished, and in some cases, locked in an illiquid product. Now, angry Spaniards are finding an outlet for their frustrations, according to The Wall Street Journal: threatening and slashing tires of bank employees, vandalizing branches, or stalling operations by slowing tellers with repeated requests to withdraw 50 cents at a time.

In Greece, meanwhile, 7,000 plainclothes police officers will be on duty when German Chancellor Angela Merkel visits Athens.

The Securities and Exchange Commission turned to a high-frequency trading firm to help build a system that will help the bank monitor high-frequency trading.

The market for municipal bonds is stuck in the dark ages, writes The Times' Gretchen Morgenstern.

Yoga-practicing, Bruce Springstein lover Barry Rosenstein, the founder of Jana Partners, is the activist investor you can bring home to mama in this profile.

Lehman Brothers' defunct brokerage is getting closer to paying creditors, four years after the firm went under.

Wall Street is anticipating lower corporate profits when companies begin reporting third quarter earnings, but that's not necessarily going to slow the stock market.

HSBC received a court order to bar Occupy protestors from entering its Hong Kong headquarters. The company evicted demonstrators in September after an 11-month occupation.

If only T. Boone Pickens had died ... Bloomberg Businessweek looks at Oklahoma State University's scheme to fund its athletic department by investing in life insurance policies on the program's boosters.

Would you work for Dominique Strauss-Kahn? Female executives are split on the question, according to Bloomberg.

A caddy at East Hamptons Golf Club, where memberships start at $400,000 and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is a member, has self-published a book about looping for the rich.

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Spanish Sabotage Banks; SEC Hires Fox to Guard the Henhouse: Roundup