When we were kids, the bedside poster beckoned with Browning: "
As the earnestness of hippies has morphed into the cynicism of hipsters, this encouragement to dare to dream, and more so, dare to try, could be read as just so much psychobabble.
I asked my boss once, an expert in white-collar crime (as a detached observer), why they — the bad guys — did it. His response was basically that we're all capable of doing the wrong thing, it's really more a matter of opportunity. Some take it, some don't. Either there's a lot more opportunity these days or a lot more bad guys. Or both.
Receiving Wide Coverage ...
The Dark Knights Rise: Libor hijinks — and the accelerating investigations into them — remain the main thread uniting the financial press. The Wall Street Journal tells us the latest domino to fall from London tipped in a southeasterly direction, with two German banks — bellwether Deutsche Bank and the late WestLB — fingered in the raft of global probes into rate manipulations. Anshu Jain, the new co-head of Deutsche Bank, happens to have been in charge of its London investment banking operations.
It Starts With Cutting Class: Attention is increasingly turning to student loans, and the Sword of Damocles it is becoming. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration wants Congress to make it easier for people to be able to walk away from some student debt by filing for bankruptcy protection. Note, the White House isn't talking about student loans financed by the federal government.
Wall Street Journal
Tough day in the trenches for Morgan Stanley. Not only did its stock price dive more than 5% on a terrible earnings report, but it appears it will now be
Financial Times
Morgan Stanley, by the way, is
Correction ...
The email version of Thursday's Scan bungled the full name of the FSOC (the "c" is for "council," not "commission") and misidentified the regulator's second annual report as its first one.