Receiving Wide Coverage ...
Dorsey Heads to #Ferguson: Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey joined protestors in Ferguson, Mo., over the weekend as they demonstrated against the police shooting of unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown. Dorsey, a St. Louis native, documented the protests in tweets, retweets, photos and Vine videos on Saturday and Sunday. Although some of Dorsey's retweets reported fighting and tear gas in parts of Ferguson, his own posts captured peaceful marches, including a snapshot of protestors carrying roses in honor of Brown and of Dorsey's parents meeting St. Louis alderman Antonio French. Dorsey also praised Capt. Ronald Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol as an "amazing and disarming leader." Dorsey's page Tuesday morning remained dominated by Ferguson news, though his current whereabouts were unclear.
PwC Settlement Official: Pricewaterhouse Coopers struck an official agreement Monday to pay $25 million to settle charges that the company toned down its findings on a Japanese bank's compliance with U.S. sanctions. The New York Department of Financial Services "alleged that PwC, under pressure from the bank's executives, had watered down a 2008 report sent to regulators about wire transfers that Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi had performed on behalf of Iran and other countries subject to U.S. economic sanctions," according to the Wall Street Journal. PwC also faces a two-year ban on doing some kinds of consulting work with New York-regulated banks and agreed to take steps to address the conflict of interest inherent in reporting on banks that pay them. The New York Times first reported news of the settlement Sunday. Wall Street Journal, New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Americans may need some time to adjust to the arrival of chip-and-pin debit and credit cards, if an article in the Journal is any indication. One woman testing out a device equipped for EMV technology was nervous about leaving her card in the machine rather than swiping it, a concern echoed by some of the article's commenters. The article also suggests that credit card users may initially be taken aback by the newly added requirement of personal identification numbers.
The Federal Reserve may raise interest rates as early as the spring of 2015, but savings-account interest rates and 10-year bond yields won't receive much of a bump, according to the paper. "Blame it on the persistent sources of fragility in the global economy: banks that remain reluctant to lend to Main Street, a looming debt crisis in China and the alarming prospect that deflation will come to Europe's shores and return to Japan's."
Financial Times
Former Rabobank trader Paul Robson pleaded guilty to conspiring to rig benchmark interest rates Monday. Robson "is the second person to admit guilt in the probe that made an international splash in 2012 when criminal charges were announced against Barclays," the FT reports.
Standard Chartered may face a $300 million tab in its expected anti-money laundering settlement with the New York Department of Financial Services, according to anonymice.
Londoners should be worried about the possibility that American banks will move their European headquarters to Dublin if the United Kingdom parts ways with the European Union, according to FT banking editor Martin Arnold. "Given the importance of financial services to the U.K. economy, this is a race that the city of London can ill-afford to lose," he writes.
"Deutsche Bank has hired two technology executives as part of an effort to deal with more scrutiny from regulators, including over control failings identified by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York," the paper reports. The German bank brought on Richard Shannon, formerly of Goldman Sachs, as Americas chief technology officer and named Scott Marcar of Royal Bank of Scotland as head of information technology infrastructure.
New York Times
A profile of Manhattan federal prosecutor Preet Bharara highlights his conflict with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo over the governor's decision to shut down an anticorruption commission. "Bharara has taken the cases the commission was forced to abandon," the Times reports. The article also notes that Bharara, who was involved in the recent Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas settlements, maintains a generally high public profile. He even attended a Vanity Fair Oscar party in March.
Bitcoin's price has been dropping in recent weeks, but traders are taking it in stride. "This is just how Bitcoin trades, for better or worse," Barry Silbert, who oversees a Bitcoin investment fund, told the paper. "This is normal par for the course."
"Can we at least all agree that someone is getting away with something?" asks Teresa Tritch, referring to the fact that neither Lehman Brothers nor Lehman's auditor Ernst & Young are being held legally accountable for cooking the financial firm's books. "It's hard to escape the impression that liability and guilt for the financial crisis have gone undetected and unpunished," she writes.
Elsewhere ...
Slate: Postal banking was a success in the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century, law professor Mehrsa Baradaran writes in Slate, and its return would be a boon for low-income Americans.
