Law and regulation

Wall Street banks, which already shut proprietary trading units that helped fuel record profits, are girding to learn next week how much revenue the Volcker rule may cut from the $44 billion they say comes from market-making.

Deborah Castellani, a principal and senior fiduciary specialist with Akros Fiduciary in Austin, Texas, responded on LinkedIn to a story about advisory firms sanctioned by the SEC over their compliance programs.

Ernst & Young agreed to pay investors $99 million to settle litigation over its auditing of the bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings, according to a filing in federal court in Manhattan.

The U.S. Treasury Department has signed intergovernmental agreements with the Cayman Islands and Costa Rica in an effort to combat offshore tax evasion as part of the implementation of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act.

JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs Group, the world’s biggest trading firms, had their revised capital plans for 2013 cleared by the Federal Reserve on Monday, a month before next year’s submissions are required.

The bank said the U.S. government’s move to add one of its executives as a defendant in a fraud lawsuit suggests retaliation after the bank said it was suspending settlement negotiations.

McGraw Hill Financial’s Standard & Poor’s unit said the U.S. government has broadened the securities covered in its fraud lawsuit against the ratings company so that the case would be unmanageable at trial.

The SEC asked Morgan Stanley about “multiple significant deficiencies” in its financial reporting after the firm corrected accounting errors involving loan cash flows, income taxes and derivatives contracts.

For most of the past year, the status of a uniform fiduciary standard for brokers and investment advisors might be summarized as, “Don’t hold your breath: the SEC has higher priorities.” But an important event last week may serve as an impetus to move this long-simmering issue forward.

Bank of America, the second- biggest U.S. lender, agreed to pay government-backed Freddie Mac $404 million to resolve mortgage-repurchase claims.

Can broker-dealers legally force reps to purchase E&O insurance?

Identifying problem transactions immediately can help keep you off the witness stand.

The regulator may make it harder for some brokers to clear their name.

JPMorgan Chase’s reported attempt to get the FDIC to pay part of its settlement with the government is yet another chapter in a long-running dispute over the 2008 resolution of Washington Mutual.

Challenges to social media protocols by employees fired for violating them are succeeding with increasing frequency.

The top U.S. derivatives regulator gave Wall Street two months to abide by a new policy imposing Dodd-Frank Act rules on banks when they arrange trades domestically and then book them overseas.

November's hot stories were a wide ranging lot. Check out this month’s big winners.

A former employee at an Ohio branch of U.S. Bancorp pleaded guilty Friday to charges that he accepted $24,000 in kickbacks from debt collectors in exchange for giving them business.

Retired Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, called Friday for both stringent standards and lenient enforcement around the law's much-watched Volcker rule.

MBIA agreed to insure a $1.16 billion pool of mortgages without its employees reading a report the bond insurer now claims was altered to hide flaws in the loans, JPMorgan Chase’s lawyers told a judge.