Senior House Financial Services Committee member, Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) told a conference of bankers Wednesday morning that they needed to “find a way to neuter” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, according to Politico. Luetkemeyer was at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington when he made the remark, also calling Warren “the Darth Vader of the financial services world.”

According to Allied Progress, Luetkemeyer is an old friend to the banking and predatory lending industry, receiving more than $1 million in campaign donations from the industry.

He’s also scored more than $63,000 from predatory payday lenders which Senator Warren sought to put out of business with a bill she proposed in 2014 that would replace them with the United States Post Office. Nearly one in ten service members end up taking out loans from these sketchy lenders with high interest rates and end up crushed under the weight of…

Now that’s a start…

(Reuters) – Shareholders of J.P.Morgan Chase & Co (>> JPMorgan Chase & Co.) and Citigroup Inc (>> Citigroup Inc) will get to vote on whether the two banks should break up into smaller pieces, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The question will be included in their proxy filings, and voted on at a shareholder meeting later this year, the Journal reported.

The vote was requested by Bartlett Naylor, a shareholder in both Citigroup and J.P. Morgan, according to the Journal.

J.P.Morgan declined to comment, while Citi was not immediately available for comment.

The breakup of large banks into smaller ones has been an ongoing issue in the U.S. campaign trail.

Read on.

Jeoffrey Jenkins, a former employee of Wells Fargo Bank, and Vaughn Chambers, a former employee of SunTrust Bank, were sentenced for their roles in a two-year long tax refund fraud scheme that generated hundreds of false tax returns and sought more than $2.8 million in fraudulent tax refunds.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Jenkins and Chambers, both bank employees, stole personally identifying information from bank customers and used that information to open bank accounts to receive the fraudulent tax refunds.

Read on.

Eight years ago, the country was in financial free fall. Now, with the 2016 presidential election looming, America’s economic landscape is much different: unemployment is below five percent; job growth is rising; and corporate profits and housing prices are booming.

But not far below the surface is a much less glowing economic reality: an America where wages are stagnant, and more work is temporary and part-time. If you’ve been unemployed for a long time, you’re likely to stay that way — and the gap between the rich and everyone else is wider than ever.

We at FRONTLINE, APM’s Marketplace and PBS NewsHour are joining forces to investigate why.

In the run-up to the November elections and continuing through the presidential inauguration in January 2017, we’ll bring you “How the Deck Is Stacked” — a series of collaborative, multiplatform reports with Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal investigating this new American economy, the…

Wall Street prefers Kasich

In a result at odds with national polls, the latest CNBC Fed survey of economists, fund managers and analysts finds Ohio Gov. John Kasich is viewed as having the best policies for the economy and for Wall Street.

A 42 percent plurality says a Kasich presidency would be best for the U.S. economy, followed by 16 percent choosing Democrat Hillary Clinton and 13 percent picking real estate developer Donald Trump. Not a single respondent chose Clinton’s Democratic rival Bernie Sanders.

Read on.

The federal government has posted hundreds of pages of interviews and research from the government’s official effort to get to the bottom of the financial crisis.

The National Archives Friday made public research documents from the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), a governmental panel charged with finding who was to blame for the financial collapse of 2008 and 2009.

The newly released documents include a host of interview notes and transcripts with FCIC staff and major players in the world of finance. Among the transcripts released are former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein.

The documents are coming to light now because the country recently passed the five-year anniversary of the FCIC issuing its official report, which came out in January 2011. The Archives noted that Friday’s release was just a sample of the FCIC’s work, which eventually took…

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is partly to blame for market mistrust in Deutsche Bank AG because it spearheaded implementation of new liability rules for bondholders in a law passed last year, the lender’s Co-Chief Executive Officers John Cryan and Juergen Fitschen told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

While the government has solved the problem of liability capital, it created other problems that only exist in Germany and that “makes us a special case internationally,” Cryan told the newspaper. Fitschen said “national solo efforts” by the government that aren’t matched elsewhere don’t help.

Litigation issues are another reason why financial markets mistrust Deutsche Bank, with the greatest litigation risks stemming from the U.S., FAZ cited Cryan as saying. Deutsche Bank will also carefully examine its set-up in Russia after transactions with Russian shares raised questions as to how effective the lender’s “systems and controls” are, Cryan said.

Both CEOs see no need…

By Lynn Szymoniak• March 7, 2016

March 7, 2016

The plot thickens..