Policy & Regulation

Virtually all discussions of banking crises these days assume that depositors should always be protected, often at taxpayer expense. Let's consider whether at least some depositors should be bailed in.

The House Financial Services Committee held its first full hearing of the year on Wednesday, with lawmakers divided on the future of the Federal Housing Administration.

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will rejoin the Council on Foreign relations later this month, the organization announced on Wednesday.

The EMV smartcard standard is so commonly combined with a PIN code that most consumers know it simply as "chip-and-PIN." But Visa and MasterCard don't agree on whether PIN use should be a priority when the U.S. adopts the EMV standard.

A crime ring based in New Jersey created thousands of fake identities to obtain 25,000 credit cards and steal more than $200 million in one of the largest scams of its type, the Justice Department said.

HSBC's reputation was "crushed" after it agreed to pay $1.92 billion to settle U.S. probes of money laundering in places such as Mexico, Chief Executive Officer Stuart Gulliver said.

A crime ring based in New Jersey created thousands of fake identities to obtain 25,000 credit cards and steal more than $200 million in one of the largest scams of its type, the Justice Department said.

Regulators seem obsessed with preventing false negatives: loans that pass underwriting and then default. They should consider the costs of false positives, i.e., restricting loans that probably would perform fine.

Royal Bank of Scotland will pay about $612 million in fines for manipulating interest rates, the second-largest penalty imposed in a global regulatory probe.

The Europay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV) and Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) standards don't appear to have a lot in common, but there is one alarming similarity — the tortoise-like pace of migration which threatens deadlines for both.