Investing

Famed financial titan Goldman Sachs, one of the few Wall Street players to come out of the financial crisis relatively well, may have realized, perhaps, that defending billions of dollars in bonuses, all while saying you’re doing God’s work, might not be the best way to endear one’s self to a public facing 10.4 percent unemployment and rising foreclosure rates.

The Republic of Iceland, one of, if not THE, hardest hit economies in the global financial meltdown, has suffered another indignity today.

Legislation regulating over-the-counter derivatives, the financial product largely seen as being at least partially responsible for sparking off the current financial crisis, passed the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday with a 43-27 vote that fell largely along partisan lines.

It’s coming.

We won’t know when. We won’t know where. We won’t know how.

All we know is that, one day, when we least expect it, it will arrive, dragging in its wake the tears and lamentations of its many victims. According to former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, it’s inevitable.

It’s said by some that the lottery (no, not that lottery) is a tax on people who never took statistics, as the odds of winning anything reasonably close to a jackpot are slim enough to be measured in picometers (seriously – see for yourself).

Now it's official: Bernie Madoff should be spending the rest of his life in jail.

He was sentenced to 150 years by federal judge Denny Chin for the $60 billion Ponzi scheme that wiped out the life savings of individuals, and destroyed businesses and a handful of charities.

American International Group was planning to sell its broker-dealer business, AIG Advisor Group, but some speed bumps threaten to derail the efforts.

The next "chapter" of Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo's pension fund probe is being written, and it's all about the investment companies.

Fairfield Greenwich Group has been charged by Massachussetts securities regulators for funneling money into Bernard Madoff's gigantic Ponzi scheme -- accused of lying to investors and not exercising enough diligence over investments that were worth billions of dollars.

The most damning accusations in the civil charges filed on Wednesday by Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin may be that Madoff prepared executives at Fairfield Greenwich in 2005 on how to answer federal securities regulators' questions about him after a whistle-blower reportedly told officials he suspected Madoff was running a fraud.

The two-part complaint said Fairfield Greenwich had not carefully evaluated Madoff's investment model, did not visit Madoff often and had not questioned how a one-man accounting firm, Friehling & Horowitz, could handle all of Madoff's assets.

Separately, US marshals in Florida reportedly seized two boats -- including a 55-foot yacht held in the name of Ruth Madoff -- and the Madoffs' Palm Beach estate. Madoff's victims are also reportedly trying to force the disgraced financier into personal bankruptcy so that all of his assets will be liquidated and Madoff family assets have been frozen.

If you think the savings you have secreted away in a certificate of deposit (CD) account is safe, think again. For the second time in just over a month, the Securities and Exchange Commission has allegedly identified a scheme involving the sale of ficticious high-yield CDs totaling $68 million.

The SEC alleges that a Caribbean-based Millennium Bank scheme targeted U.S. investors and misled them into believing they were putting their money in supposedly safe and secure CDs that purportedly offered returns that were up to 321 percent higher than legitimate bank-issued CDs.

Shouldn't that have raised red flags for the folks invested? Maybe. But CDs have long been known as a rock-solid investment. Typically, As long as you don’t invest more than the FDIC limits, you don’t need to worry about losing your money. If the bank that issues your CD fails, you're still protected, although the new bank could lower your rate of return.