Clarification Appended: June 30, 2011 Here's some good news for consumers who feel themselves trampled by soulless banking and credit giants: on July 21, a new consumer-protection agency will open its doors in Washington, with the mission of making everything from mortgage documents to credit statements fairer and easier to understand and generally giving the little guy more power against the financial corporate juggernauts. Here's the bad news: it's not clear that President Obama will be able to appoint ...

"You will be visiting Berlin at a time of ferment," Secretary of State George Shultz wrote to his boss, Ronald Reagan, on May 11, 1987. The confidential memo was included in the briefing materials given to Reagan before a trip to Europe, which would include a speech in West Berlin. "Your address ... offers the chance to call for the lowering of East-West barriers and an improved situation in Berlin," a city that had been divided for ...

One of the more depressing and outrageous revelations of the massive Wall Street scandal was the news that the previously Olympian ratings agencies, Moody's and Standard & Poor's, were incompetent at best; at worst, they were in bed with the investment banks whose bonds they were supposed to be evaluating. Both agencies, for example, bestowed AAA ratings — the highest possible — on laughably flimsy mortgage-backed bond contraptions, whose demise almost sank the global economy. In an actual market, no one would trust these ...

Is there anybody out there investors can trust? Wall Street was pondering that today as markets were hammered following last night's announcement that WorldCom had inflated profits by a staggering $3.8 billion over the past five quarters. The Dow skidded towards the 9,000 level, while the news pushed the NASDAQ to near post-Sept. 11th levels. The accounting slight-of-hand was accomplished by calling some ongoing costs, like network maintenance, capital expenditures — a move that let the company spread costs over several years, thus ...

For the past couple of years, Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has been shaking the trees on Wall Street. Since October 2009, Bharara has charged 46 people in his investigation of insider trading tied to "expert networks." The biggest case is against hedge-fund giant Raj Rajaratnam, who ran Galleon Group and is now on trial in lower Manhattan. Expert networks are firms that broker information by connecting corporate insiders with hedge funds and ...

A week after Nintendo's Wii debuted in November, the Wall Street Journal reported that the gaming console was leaving some users as sore as the gym often does. Unlike traditional hand-held video games, where users sit on the couch exercising little more than their thumbs, the Wii features digital sensors that let users virtually play the game. In Wii Sports, a game that comes with the console, users mimic the ...

The fall of the Berlin wall caught the world by surprise. For months, East Germany's beleaguered communist rulers had tried in vain to silence a growing opposition movement and stem the tide of people pouring out of the country. On the night of Nov. 9, 1989, an East German official held a press conference to announce new government travel policies but inadvertently announced that crossings to the West would be opened "without delay." Within hours, thousands of East Berliners ...

Are you furious? If not, you should be. The giant financial institutions that make up Wall Street have been bailed out, thanks to trillions of dollars of our money, and are on track to hand out record-breaking multibillion-dollar bonuses while millions of regular folks are hurting. Even outside the gilded halls of Wall Street, there's no shortage of good cheer: many economists say the Great Recession has ended, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keeps seeing "green shoots" in ...

President Barack Obama's Nobel peace surprise was given "primarily for his work on and commitment to nuclear disarmament," according to Agot Valle, a Norwegian politician who served on the award committee. Valle told the Wall Street Journal that the stewards of the prize wanted to "support" Obama's goal, as expressed recently at the United Nations, "of a world without nuclear weapons." It's tough to think of a goal more widely espoused than the dream of an H-bomb-free planet. Ronald ...

Two journalists working for Associated Press were wounded when they were struck by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, the news agency reported Wednesday. If you're in need of some quick cash, here are six stories of people who found a fortune when -- and where -- they least expected it. 1. Lose a hammer, find a horde In November 1992, a farmer living near the village of Hoxne in Suffolk, England, lost a hammer in one of his fields, ...