Lester & Charlie lend their expertise to solving the financial crisis.

I was in my credit union to do some banking recently and I asked the guy helping me if he’d seen an uptick in new customers lately. “Definitely,” he said. “A lot of people are coming in from the big banks, because they said they read about doing it on the Web.” Two months ago [...]

How much do you pay at your bank for overdrafts, bounced checks, and stop-payment orders? From the Move Your Money project, this graph of average fees by size of financial institution. As you can see, banks classified as “giant” charge as much as 30% more than those deemed small for these services.

Since the country, in the form of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, is now officially delving into the causes of the financial collapse, it might be instructive to take a look back at who among the analysts and punditocracy thought the housing bubble — a precursor to the systemic implosion — wasn’t really a bubble [...]

Today marked the first meeting of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. The Christian Science Monitor reports: The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is a bipartisan 10-member committee that’s been handed the job of recording what went wrong prior to the near-collapse of the world financial systems in 2008. Congress has ordered the commission to work through [...]

From The Big Picture blog, a post called Banking Sector Remains (literally) unchanged: Ever wonder why the banking sector continues to operate as it always has? Here’s a possible answer: According to a report on Corporate Governance by Professor Emma Coleman Jordan of the Georgetown University Law Center…one simple issue might help to explain why [...]

It’s a different type of “bail-out.” The Huffington Post and friends are spearheading a nascent movement to move your money from the big financial giants to community banks. From a column by Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson: The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record [...]

That’s right. It’s Christmas Eve eve, er, eve. What a fine time to check out these parodies from the holiday songbook on Marcy Shaffer’s Versus web site. “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot More Riskless” Lyrics here “The Cinders of Ayn Rand” Lyrics here “Oh CRE” Lyrics here “Go Tell It In Accountin’” Lyrics here

Just how did mortgage-backed investments that were rated AAA by the ratings agencies Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch, wind up as “toxic assets” that precipitated a financial crisis that nearly brought down the world economic system last year and fed straight into this vicious recession? After all, investors depend on the agencies to assess [...]

Smigly is–unknowingly–having a bad day at the big bank. More Smigley below ↓ or here.