Bank channel

Wells Fargo & Co. has rarely felt the need to make major incursions into markets occupied by entrenched competitors. In fact, its bread-and-butter strategy dictated the opposite. But when a company makes a big purchase, like Wells' acquisition of Wachovia at the height of the financial crisis, it has to figure out what to do with businesses it might not have embraced otherwise.

Wells Fargo & Co. announced this week that another major step in its merger with Wachovia Corp. is now complete. The companies consolidated over the weekend to form one investment bank, Wells Fargo Securities, and one commercial bank, Wells Fargo Bank NA.

Hard as it is to defend the Byzantine nature of U.S. bank supervision, it's at least as hard to find a model guaranteed to provide a better defense against financial crises.

Wall Street is abuzz over whether the FDIC will encourage pension funds to invest in failed banks.

Despite advisors’ bullish prognostications, January's average production dropped by 11% to $14,930 from a month earlier.

Senior managers at Morgan Keegan & Co. argue that their restructuring moves last week are a break with the past — and a sign that the securities unit still has a future with its parent company, Regions Financial Corp.

Aon Consulting, the global benefits and human capital consulting business of Aon Corp., announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire J.P. Morgan Compensation and Benefit Strategies, a division of J.P. Morgan Retirement Plan Services LLC.

37 failures in 2010 more than doubles count at this point last year

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd's regulatory reform bill is generally winning praise for provisions giving the government more power to smoothly unwind a large, systemically important firm, but is also raising a host of practical concerns observers say could undermine its effectiveness.

New group brings together more than 300 of the firm's professionals who specialize in either corporate or public finance banking

Sen. Richard Shelby raised concerns with bankers on Thursday that "too big to fail" would survive if a proposed $50 billion fund to help unwind failing financial institutions remains in the Senate's latest regulatory reform bill.

A Dutch pension fund is the latest in a string of lawsuits against the banking company.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke offered a vigorous defense of his agency's oversight of holding companies and state banks, rejecting a Senate bill that would strip them of supervisory powers over all but the biggest institutions.

Preemption process would be complex, more burdensome

The latest regulatory reform proposal from Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd would have far-reaching implications for day-to-day operations at most banks and thrifts, changing which regulators oversee them and potentially broadening the number considered systemically important.

As the recession deepened, market watchers began obsessing about banks' capital ratios to figure out who might fail next. With a recovery on the horizon, they've latched on to another somewhat obscure financial metric: pretax, pre-provision earnings.

The Internal Revenue Service is collecting information on approximately 20 Swiss banks, according a letter from UBS, one of the main banks it has been investigating.

The government closed state-chartered banks in New York, Florida and Louisiana late Friday to bring the year's failure tally to 30.

This time, Bank of Florida Corp. is trying to raise enough capital just to stay alive.

Grubb said: "I'm moving on and they're moving on."