Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s $550 million settlement with U.S. regulators yesterday will benefit the firm by ending three months of uncertainty at an affordable price. Now the rest of Wall Street begins calculating the cost. Investors welcomed the deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission, saying the company won key points: The cost was below [...]

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Wall Street’s biggest firms are considering the suitability of selling opaque financial products to governments, endowments and not-for-profit institutions after the contracts magnified credit-market losses that plunged the U.S. into a recession. “There is no distinction among very different groups of investors, and this is where things might change,” said Dino Kos, a managing director [...]

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“Questions have been raised that go to the heart of this institution’s most fundamental value: how we treat our clients.” — Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’s C.E.O., at the firm’s annual meeting in May As the housing crisis mounted in early 2007, Goldman Sachs was busy selling risky, mortgage-related securities issued by its longtime client, [...]

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Within days — perhaps even hours — of news that Goldman Sachs (GS.N) was facing fraud charges from U.S. regulators, rivals seized on a chance to elbow in front of Wall Street’s most profitable bank. DEALS Investment bankers have been lobbying executives at state-owned Agricultural Bank of China and pushing officials in Beijing to drop [...]

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Former Citigroup Inc. Chief Executive Officer Charles O. “Chuck” Prince said he wasn’t aware of the mortgage-related securities that caused the bank’s biggest losses until the financial crisis struck. Neither was Robert Rubin, the former U.S. Treasury secretary who headed the bank’s executive committee in the decade leading up to the crisis, he said at a hearing today [...]

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Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) — Since its inception, the derivatives market has echoed the fairground hawkers’ call to “scream if you want to go faster.” Among the new derivatives, collateralized-debt obligations (CDOs) were particularly hot. To make a CDO, bankers bundle together a package of other kinds of securities, such as corporate bonds, asset-backed securities (ABSs) [...]

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Layers of money managers that don’t bear the brunt of losses but walk away with big payouts when things go well have turned the US economy to a type of “ersatz capitalism,” Joseph Stiglitz, Columbia University professor and Nobel laureate, told CNBC Tuesday. “An awful lot of people are not managing their own money,” Stiglitz [...]

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In late October 2007, as the financial markets were starting to come unglued, a Goldman Sachs trader, Jonathan M. Egol, received very good news. At 37, he was named a managing director at the firm. Mr. Egol, a Princeton graduate, had risen to prominence inside the bank by creating mortgage-related securities, named Abacus, that were [...]

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LONDON, ENGLAND (AFP) – Britain’s financial watchdog said on Tuesday it had fined Japanese bank Nomura 1.75 million pounds ($4 million) for “widespread” failures of systems and controls used in the trading of “high-risk” products. Nomura avoided a bigger fine because it cooperated fully and swiftly with investigators regarding “mis-marking” at its London-based subsidiary Nomura International, [...]

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By GENEVIEVE CUA The failure of Lehman Brothers gave structured products a bad name but wealthy investors are warming to derivative-based solutions again. But events of the past year have left their mark on such products as structures are now simpler and tenors shorter. Barclays Capital’s head of investor solutions Philippe El-Asmar says issuance in [...]

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