Bank channel

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.

Miami-based Ocean Bank faces a nearly $11 million fine to settle charges it turned a blind eye to drug traffickers allegedly using the bank to launder money.

James Kaplan's law firm was negotiating a handful of bank mergers when the stock market collapsed two weeks ago. All of them are bogged down in new squabbles over whether the seller can say "deal's off" if the buyer's shares tank.

Bank of America will lay off at least 3,500 employees in the next few months.

Credit card chargeoffs have been plunging since the middle of last year, moving against the tide of an anemic jobs environment but supported by slowing bankruptcies.

While lawmakers raising concerns about a potential merger is nothing new, Rep. Barney Frank added a unique twist to his letter asking the Federal Reserve Board to take more time to review the Capital One-ING Direct transaction: the potential for systemic risk.

Bankers are fond of the Small Business Lending Fund, but the SBLF is playing hard to get.

Credit card customers are the happiest they've been since the financial crisis, thanks in part to a government crackdown on the card industry.

The Conference of State Bank Supervisors this week said John Ryan will succeed Neil Milner as its new president and CEO, effective Jan. 1, 2012.

The list of objections to the risk retention proposal appears endless. While most of the attention so far has focused on an exemption to the plan for "qualified residential mortgages," bankers' fears about the proposal go far beyond that.

It sounds strange to say, but the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is solvent again. That the FDIC was technically in the red for seven quarters -- the result of heavy failures and very strict accounting --- was a lesser-known fact of the 2008 crisis, and so news last month that the Deposit Insurance Fund turned positive in the second quarter also drew scant attention.