Bank channel

Prediction: the Federal Reserve Board will let Capital One Financial Corp. buy ING Direct USA. Why? Because blocking it would doom every financial firm larger than Capital One to a stagnant future and send a chilling message to any foreign firm with a presence here.

Morgan Stanley has announced that John J. Mack will step down as chairman of the firm and leave the board of directors at the end of this year, and James Gorman will take over that position.

UBS said it estimated it had lost $2 billion from unauthorized trading, by one trader. In connection with the case, London Police arrested a 31-year-old man, in the middle of the night.

Bank of America Corp. chief executive Brian Moynihan's heavily anticipated speech Monday fell short of the hype, but it was enough to ease tensions.

Bank of America Corp.'s executive shuffle this week supports what the beleaguered conglomerate has been telling investors for weeks: it will keep selling unwanted bits of the company and hold on to major business units.

Bank of America executives are mulling a restructuring plan that would lop off as many as 40,000 jobs in its first phase, according to a Wall Street Journal report citing sources familiar with the discussions.

While financial services issues are no longer on the front burner on Capitol Hill, several high profile topics this fall are likely to impact banks, especially any efforts to revitalize the housing market.

Many of the country's largest banks received $6 billion in kickbacks from mortgage insurers over the course of a decade, according to a previously undisclosed investigation by the Inspector General of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Of the hundreds of thousands of words in the Dodd-Frank Act, none has caused as much consternation as the seven-letter one tucked into Title 10: abusive.

First PacTrust Bancorp's cash-and-stock deal for Beach Business Bank is designed to ensure neither party gets clocked if the buyer's share price drastically changes.

When it comes to compliance, no one should be hired until they spend a minimum of one year as an advisor. This way they will truly learn how hard it is when dealing with various personalities and all the unique client situations.

The Bank of New York Mellon Corp., the country's sixth-largest bank with more than $1.3 trillion in assets under management, said late Wednesday that Robert Kelly has stepped down as chairman and chief executive officer due to differences with the bank’s directors regarding his management approach.

A lot of the banks actively unloading problem loans share a telling characteristic — ownership by big private equity groups or hedge funds.

In 2008, Barack Obama was the toast of Wall Street. The nation's biggest banks were among the most lavish contributors to the Democratic upstart's presidential campaign. But so far in the 2012 race, the six largest U.S. banks have switched sides in a dramatic way, and are giving far more money to GOP hopeful Mitt Romney than they are to the sitting president, according to the most recent campaign-finance reports.

A rare public rebuke of a rogue attorney general by his colleagues has highlighted the dysfunction among the state AGs and raised doubts about their ability to strike a settlement deal with the largest mortgage servicers.

Warren Buffett's $5 billion public vote of confidence in Bank of America, happily for him, does not require actual confidence. The terms of the legendary investor's deal, which grants Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. $5 billion in perpetual preferred stock and warrants to buy B of A stock at just over $7 a share, include no lockup period.

Bank of America Corp. has received a vote of confidence from legendary investor Warren Buffett and sealed an agreement for his company, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., to inject $5 billion into the bank in a private offering.

Over the next 25 years, the U.S. economy will reinvent itself by returning to its agricultural roots. The big banks will stagnate in size. Banking as a whole will contract. Superregionals are coming back.

The banking industry earned $28.8 billion in the second quarter thanks once again to lower provisions for loan losses, and a regulatory watch list of troubled banks shrank for the first time in nearly five years.

On the surface, the industry turned a corner last quarter. Loans actually grew, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. returned to black and the official watch list for failure-prone banks shrank for the first time in five years. But a closer look at the FDIC's Quarterly Banking Profile reveals a familiar theme: banks are still tiptoeing to recovery.