Right on time, The Wall Street Journal has an "analysis" that shows Libor doesn't actually reflect banks' borrowing costs.

Kareem Serageldin, the former head of Credit Suisse's CDO business arrested in London on Wednesday, said he will fight extradition to the U.S. When Mr. Serageldin was charges in February for running a scheme to falsify trading positions, he expressed surprise over the indictment, noting through lawyers that he was cooperating with attorneys. When he was nabbed outside the U.S. embassy in London this week, he said through a lawyer that he was working on a plea deal, and that his capture was the result of "miscommunication."Investors pulled capital from Spain for the 13th straight month.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is wading into the void left when the Securities and Exchange Commission decided not to propose new rules for money market funds.

The White House is circulating a draft executive order on cyber-security after a string of DDoS attacks on the consumer banking websites of Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and other financial firms.

Former Lehman Brothers CFO Erin Callan is flying her East Hampton coop.

A forgery suit against Allen & Co. CEO Herb Allen—who was being sued on claims that he had conspired to forge a dying cousin's will—has been dismissed.

True story? A British oil trader got blotto, bought $520 million in oil futures in the middle of the night, had no recollection of any of it. The Financial Services Authority suspended him for five years, commented dryly: “Mr Perkins poses an extreme risk to the market when drunk.”

Would you give money to a hedge fund called POOF? Would you be surprised to learn that said fund's manager just coughed up $6.8 million to settle cherry-picking charges—that he stuck clients with losing trades and moved profit-making trades to his wife's account?

“This is a great day for the art world and all those who seek order and justice in our society": Bond king Jeffrey Gundlach's Mondrian has been recovered.

Spain is moving towards accepting European bailouts, even as protests in Madrid turned violent and politicians in the Catalonia region called for secession.

“It’s just amazing how Libor fixing can make you that much money or lose if opposite.” So said Tan Chi Min, a former Royal Bank of Scotland trader in a conversation with traders at other banks, in an affidavit reviewed by Bloomberg. “It’s a cartel now in London.” Tan is suing RBS in Singapore for wrongful dismissal after being fired for attempting to manipulate Libor.

SAC Capital hedge fund manager Michael Steinberg is said to be an unindicted co-conspirator in the government's insider trading case against hedge fund managers Anthony Chiasson and Todd Newman and technology analyst Jon Horvath. A Sept. 6 filing, prosecutors added four unindicted co-conspirators to their case; the names were blacked out in the filing, but one of the four was "the portfolio manager to whom Jon Horvath reported at his hedge fund." That person was Mr. Steinberg, according to unnamed sources cited by Bloomberg.

Part two of Reuters massive, massively awesome profile of Peregrine Financial Group founder Russell Wasendorf Sr., who pleaded guilty to stealing millions from clients at his Iowa-based futures brokerage. Part one is here.

Former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov is suing the bank for $2.4 million in legal fees incurred while defending himself against charges that he stole code from the firm before leaving Goldman to join a high-frequency trading startup. Mr. Aleynikov was convicted by a federal jury in 2010, but won an appeal; he now faces charges in Manhattan.

Bureaucratic infighting has roiled government investigations into money-laundering charges at HSBC, according to Reuters.

Former UBS trader Kweku Adoboli told colleagues he was reporting fictitious trades, British prosecutors said. Mr. Adoboli is being tried on charges of fraud and false accounting over unauthorized trades on which UBS lost $2.3 billion.

Matt Levine on Securities and Exchange Commission charges against Hold Brothers On-Line Investment Services: "This is fundamental forces of some algorithms versus other algorithms, and each of those algorithms represents in some imperfect and abstracted way “supply and demand,” but not in a way a human could formulate in his mind or feel in his heart."

Germany is expected to enact legislation that would rein in high-frequency trading, according to The Times.

Have you heard the one about the British hedge fund manager (Crispin Odey) who's spending $210,000 on the stone to be used to construct a luxury chicken coop?

Credit Agricole's 2006 purchase of Emporiki Bank of Greece may cost the French lender another $779 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. Credit Agricole has already written off billions on Emporiki, which has been roiled by the Greek economic crisis; the French bank is in the process of selling Emporiki, for an expected price of 1 euro. Credit Suisse cut two investment banking jobs in Dubai and relocated others to Qatar, according to Bloomberg. Those moves come after Deutsche Bank and Nomura eliminated jobs in Dubai.

The American boss of former UBS rogue trader Kweku Adoboli testified on Friday, noting that the bank's London office had an aggressive attitude towards risk.

A panel of European lawmakers asked regulators from the U.S., Europe and Japan how and why Libor-rigging was allowed to go unchecked for so long.

'Free checking' is more expensive than ever, The Journal reports.

Fake gold panic hits the diamond district.

The son of a New York hedge fund manager—and great-grandson of the man who created Junior Mints—is set to be arraigned on charges of negligent vehicular homicide while under the influence of alcohol after he crashed an all-terrain vehicle, killing a passenger, at the Yellowstone Club in Bozeman, Mont.

Real estate banker Jeffrey Baker, a managing director at Savills, is marking artisanal whiskey in the Hudson River Valley.

Bank of America is accelerating cost-cutting plans, and may eliminate another 16,000 jobs by the end of the year, The Wall Street Journal reports. Most of the cuts will focus on the company's retail operations, as firm closes branches and shrinks its mortgage operation. Project New BAC, as the bank's restructuring efforts are called, is designed to save $8 billion annually by 2015.

Federal lawmakers are weighing means to prevent cities from using eminent domain to seize mortgages. A proposed law would prevent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from buying mortgages in localities that attempt to ease borrowers' woes by seizing mortgages, according to Bloomberg. Chicago and San Bernardino County have considered eminent domain as an approach to the foreclosure crisis.

The Department of Justice is asking for more time to complete its investigation of banks implicated in efforts to manipulate interbank-lending rates, according to The Journal. While the statute of limitations on the potential Libor-rigging violations is 5 years, banks generally prefer authorities not rush investigations. DoJ's move comes after the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission made similar requests this summer.

Libor is hardly the only financial benchmark vulnerable to manipulation, according to a paper from an international group of regulators.

The chances that Greece will leave the eurozone have increased now that the region is better prepared for a possible Grexit, Citigroup economists say, according to Business Insider.

Doubleline founder Jeffrey Gundlach was the victim of a $10 million robbery, Business Insider says, citing the Los Angeles Times.

The head of payment processing for Full Tilt Poker pleaded guilty and faces as much as 15 years in prison for misleading banks into accepting online gambling transactions.

At Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith got fooled by a fake Newsweek article in which Niall Ferguson was purported to wonder, "Was Mussolini Right?"

My name is Arch Crawford, and I'll be your financial astrologer.

One of the defendants, Peter Ghavami, a Belgian who had been head of an investment bank in Moscow, was arrested in December 2010 at Kennedy Airport. In the Libor case, a number of banks are outside the United States, so individuals who might be involved should be wary about traveling to this country because of the risk that they could be detained.

Two other points from Mr. Henning's take on the Deutsche case: Prosecutors can probably count on a 10-year statute of limitations in Libor cases, and if you even considered manipulating interbank lending rates while sitting near a computer, you probably committed wire fraud.

Mostly, though, consider a fake passport.

Last week, Citigroup chief executive officer went around telling everyone (read: The Financial Times and an audience in Singapore) that Citigroup didn't need to be broken up, as former Citi CEO Sandy Weill had argued last month. Mr. Pandit's media tour continued yesterday: Regulators telling banks which products they can sell undermines financial stability, somehow, he told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Occupy Central protesters in Hong Kong face a legal deadline to leave HSBC headquarters, where the group has been protesting for 10 months, according to Bloomberg.

London-based investment bankers would rather work in Singapore than London or New York, according to a survey conducted by recruitment firm Astbury Marsden; 60 percent of those surveyed expect the Asia-Pacific region to be the world's largest financial center in 10 years.

Some European bankers are being asked to watch what they say at the bar.

Spain is expected to tap about $75 billion in rescue funding, about 60 percent of the facility approved by European finance ministers last month, The New York Times reports.

Blackstone adds another name to its succession plan; CEO Steve Schwarzman still expected to "die at his desk."

The Times takes a closer look at Luis A. Aguilar, the SEC commission who scuttled the agency's attempts to impose new rules on money market funds.

Nomura is getting ready to slash jobs in equities and investment banking, according to Reuters.

Deutsche Bank introduced rules that allow it to claw back shares bestowed on employees in return for unvested stock awarded by their previous employer, the Financial Times reports. Other banks may follow suit.

A producer for The Wolf of Wall Street, which stars Leonard DiCaprio as a crooked stockbroker, is suing the film's production company for reducing her role behind the scenes, The New York Post reports.

Chinese investors are buying up Bordeaux vineyards.

Standard Chartered’s lawyers believe there's a case to sue DFS over reputational damage, reports The Financial Times.

Add Bank of England governor Mervyn King to the list of Brits tweaked by DFS chief Ben Lawsky's decision to file an order against Standard Chartered without coordinating with other U.S. authorities. King asked regulators to "refrain from making too many public statements until the investigation is completed," at his quarterly news conference.

Knight Capital says malfunctioning trading software cost the firm $270 million after taxes, compared with Knight's previously reported pretax loss of $440.

Knight might have accepted a $500 bailout from Citadel if not for mistrust between the two market-making wholesalers and their respective CEOs.

U.S. prosecutors agreed to a leniency deal for junior UBS employees said to be involved in the Swiss bank's efforts to manipulate interbank lending rates, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Morgan Stanley is seeking to replace some highly-paid bond traders with computers and technicians, The Journal reports.

Goldman Sachs cut its exposure to Italian sovereign debt by 92 percent in the second quarter, according to Bloomberg.

Shockingly, Mariano Rajoy’s efforts to implement austerity measures in Spain have not done wonders for the prime minister's popularity.

In 2008, Goldman Sachs employees contributed $6.1 million to political campaigns, 75 percent of which went to Democrats. This year, Goldman employees have donated $4.9 million, 70 percent of which found its way to Republican coffers.

Banks are taking advantage of low interest rates to stretch profit margins on mortgages, says The New York Times.

The initial public offering for British soccer club Manchester United is oversubscribed, sources tell Reuters. One investor asks: why is the club going public in the U.S., where investors don't know anything about the soccer business?

Buyout specialist Al Tapper spent $200,000 to produce a musical about baseball for which he wrote music and lyrics. The Washington Post called the show "syrupy"; Mr. Tapper said that the show has since undergone extensive rewrites.

More problems: Barclays underlying profit before tax, which strips away the firm's $451 million settlement with U.S. and U.K. regulators, increased 13 percent in the first half of the year. The bank revealed that it is under investigation by British regulators over disclosures it made during a 2008 capital raise.

Tax haven? When Eddie Lambert said he was moving $10.5 billion hedge fund ESL Investments to Florida from Connecticut last month, he really meant that he was moving. Mr. Lambert's staff stayed behind in Connecticut, The New York Post reports, where they now work for a company run by ESL's former chief financial officer—and continue to provide research to ESL. Mr. Lambert, meanwhile, is avoiding partnership and other taxes.

Whither Europe: Caixabank, Spain's third-largest lender, and two smaller banks reported lower earnings today as more real-estate loans went bad.

Faceplant: Facebook shares dropped more than 10 percent in trading after the close of markets after the company released quarterly results for the first time since its May IPO. The stock fell even thought the company hit analyst estimates for revenue and earnings-per-share; daily and mobile use of the social networking site continued their downward trends.

Who needs profit? Amazon reported profit fell 96 percent in the second-quarter, and investors didn't seem to mind.

Mirror, mirror: Goldman's vaunted new P.R. strategy continues to pay off with stories about Goldman's vaunted new P.R. strategy.

Dealbreaker...has an app for bank employees whose firm's have blocked access to the site.

Soft tactics: The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England talked about reforming the process by which Libor and other interbank lending rates are set, but play their hands timidly in recommending action. Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic are asking why.

Does anyone want this job? It's a lot easier to say who won't replace Bob Diamond as Barclays CEO than to guess who will. Deputy chairman Michael Rake and the firm's investment banking head Rich Ricci each ruled himself out over the weekend.

If at first you don't succeed...apologize again: Nasdaq announced a new plan to compensate customers for losses suffered due to technical glitches during Facebook's May initial public offering. Among the changes: Nasdaq upped the amount it would refund from $40 to $62 million, agreed to pay refunds in cash, as opposed to with credits on future trades and expanded eligibility for the funds. The expanded plan is unlikely to satisfy all investors. Knight Capital has said lost as much as $35 million on the botched IPO, while reports surfaced last month that UBS might float a much higher number.

Whither Europe: The Spanish government is paying more in borrowing costs than it has at any time since the inception of the euro, and finance minister Luis de Guindos is heading to Berlin tomorrow to talk about it.

Jumping in: Marc Lasry, Avenue Capital hedge fund manager and Democratic Party booster, has finished raising a $3 billion fund to invest in European debt. He joins alternate investment firms such as Blackstone, KKR and Apollo Global Management to seek profit in volatile European markets.

Black list: Zero Hedge reads Italian, spots this list of 10 cities that may default.

Chinese GDP...The new Libor? Investors double-check the math.

Future of futures: The National Futures Association is looking to tighten up its ship after Peregrine Financial Group founder Russell R. Wasendorf misappropriated more than $200 million on the NFA's watch.

Smaller entities slide through loopholes: The largest U.S. lenders have created more than 10,000 subsidiaries in the last two decades in an effort to reduce tax and regulatory exposure.

Ackman acolyte out: Scott Ferguson is leaving Pershing Square to start an activist hedge fund of his own, according to letter obtained by Bloomberg. Mr. Ferguson was the first analyst Mr. Ackman hired at Pershing Square.

Think of the fees! Somewhere a lawyer is drooling over the possibility that Wall Street firms that don't participate in setting Libor will start suing the firms that do. Asked about such a legal stance during Goldman Sachs' second-quarter earnings call, Chief Financial Office David Viniar demurred. The more banks enter settlements like Barclays $451 million pact with regulators, the higher the likelihood of interbank lawsuits, Bloomberg reports.

Soon to be Libor-ated? Bloomberg has the names of three traders—Michael Zrihen at Credit Agricole, Didier Sander at HSBC and Christian Bittar at Deutsche Bank—said to be under investigation for manipulating interbank lending rates.

So you'll have to share..."I have to apologize that there are so many people in the audience I don't have enough subpoenas for all of you," U.S. attorney Preet Bharara told a room full of investors yesterday at the Delivering Alpha conference. Also: “If you have open and aggressive and fair and proper and proven cases that you bring, and you show that in the kinds of cases that I’ve brought, that’s the kind of thing that over time gives people more confidence in the market.”

Rebound: How Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts attorney general who lost a 2010 Senate seat to Scott Brown, declared war on Wall Street's role in the collapse of the housing market.

Not so golden: The foreclosure rate among Americans over 50 is rising faster than in previous years, according to the AARP.

Whither Europe: Spain is paying more to borrow on 5-year bonds than it has at any point since 1996.

CFPB strikes: Capital One will pay $210 million to settle charges that call-center contractors pressured customers into buying products such as identity-theft monitoring. The settlement included a $25 million fine paid to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in what has been touted as the year-old agency's first major enforcement action.

Will travel: Lloyd Blankfein would not waive his magic wand over Dodd-Frank and make it disappear, he said at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. He also joked that he'd like to be courted for a political appointment when his career at Goldman ends. “By any president," he said. "I didn’t mean to limit it to the United States.”

Missed: Morgan Stanley reported second-quarter earnings of 16 cents per share, well short of Wall Street's expectations for 29 cents.