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The Justice Department is investigating allegations that a mortgage subsidiary of Morgan Stanley foreclosed on almost two dozen military families from 2006 to 2008 in violation of a longstanding law aimed at preventing such action. A department spokeswoman confirmed on Friday that the Morgan Stanley unit, Saxon Mortgage Services, is one of several mortgage and lending companies being investigated by its civil rights division. The inquiry is focused on possible violations of a federal law that bars lenders from foreclosing on active-duty service members without a court hearing. Mark Lake, a Morgan Stanley spokesman, declined on Friday to comment on...

Two Banks Gain Access Within China By ALISON TUDOR And PETER STEIN HONG KONG—J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley have both won approval for securities joint ventures in mainland China, the first U.S. firms to gain such access in six years. The new ventures will allow the two Wall Street banks to underwrite stocks and bonds in mainland China. Like other international investment banks, both firms can already underwrite deals for Chinese companies in Hong Kong, New York and other markets. The approvals, announced by China's securities regulator, are the first for any U.S. banks in China since...

NEW YORK -- The Federal Reserve on Wednesday reluctantly opened the books on its monumental campaign to save the financial system in the midst of the recent crisis, revealing how it distributed some $3.3 trillion in relief. The data revealed that the Fed's aid was scattered much more widely than previously understood. Two European megabanks -- Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse -- were the largest beneficiaries of the Fed's purchase of mortgage-backed securities. The Fed's dollars also flowed to major American companies that are not financial players, including McDonald's and Harley-Davidson, through unsecured short-term loans. The measure, initiated in Jan....

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Let's go back, audio sound bite-wise, to me on my program, this program. This is March 12th of this year... RUSH ARCHIVE: The TARP money was not used for its original purpose. There's something else out there, Jordan, you need to know. The Federal Reserve, before the TARP bailout, made loans totaling $2 trillion and they will not tell us to whom. We don't know who got the money. Whether the Fed loans it or the government prints it, it's our money. So you can talk about the $700 billion TARP. You can talk about the $787...

"EAGLE, Colorado — A financial manager for wealthy clients will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because it could jeopardize his job, prosecutors said Thursday."

President Obama's nominee for deputy secretary of state has earned more than $8 million in salary and bonuses since January 2009 as an executive at a Wall Street bank that received a federal bailout. Thomas R. Nides, a six-figure fundraiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton during her 2008 presidential run, disclosed his compensation from Morgan Stanley in a recent filing with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. Mr. Nides, the company's chief operating officer, also said he remains eligible for additional bonus money at Morgan Stanley, which repaid its share of the federal bailout last year. As deputy secretary of state...

“I like to call it JIHAD with money because God has ordered us to fight our enemies with our lives and our money,” Sheik Yousuf al-Qaradawi is quoted as saying in the video produced by www.actforamerica.org Shocking evidence is surfacing which points to an ever deepening involvement of U.S. financial institutions in the Shariah Islamic Financial Initiative warns Shariah financial expert Joy Brighton in an important youtube.video every America should view. “Islam, as we know, is part of America” President Barack Obama told his approving audience at the recent White House Ramadan dinner. Brighton tells audiences, “We are selling our...

As I am traveling in Europe for a few more days, it seems appropriate to review the very fascinating work of Arnuad Mares of Morgan Stanley in London. He poses the very provocative question: "Ask Not Whether Governments Will Default, but How?" and comes up with some very interesting statistics. He suggests that simply looking at debt to GDP misses the point and offers four other ways we should also evaluate sovereign debt risk. This is a very worthy contribution to Outside the Box. The question I get over and over as I travel and present my thoughts is "When...

Regulators on Friday shut down a big community bank based in Chicago that has been known for its social activism but racked by financial troubles in recent months. It was the 114th U.S. bank to fail this year. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took over ShoreBank, with $2.16 billion in assets and $1.54 billion in deposits. Urban Partnership Bank, a new institution comprised of several big Wall Street banks and a private foundation, agreed to assume ShoreBank's deposits and nearly all its assets... In an unusual move, the FDIC allowed some of ShoreBank's executives to continue running the restructured bank......

A group of nuns from Ireland are suing Morgan Stanley, alleging improper actions by the investment bank that led them to lose at least 5 million euros ($6.4 million), about 80 percent of their total investment, a filing by Stuarts Law showed. The claim, titled "The Sisters of Jesus and Mary versus Morgan Stanley", is related to bond investments linked to Dresdner Bank debt. The filing claims Morgan Stanley’s [MS 25.90 -0.22 (-0.84%) ] Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) Saturn's Investment Europe "deliberately or carelessly failed to redeem the notes" following their downgrading in January 2009. According to the filing, The...

A group of Irish investors, including hundreds of nuns, filed a class-action suit with the U.K.'s High Court on Tuesday alleging U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley failed to satisfy its contractual obligations related to about €6 million ($7.9 million) of bonds they purchased, resulting in the near total wipeout of their investment. In the claim titled "The Sisters of Jesus and Mary v. Morgan Stanley," 88 investors including the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary, the Holy Faith Sisters and the Irish Veterinary Benevolent Fund allege the improper actions of Morgan Stanley led them to lose at least €5...

Morgan Stanley shares dropped in premarket trading Wednesday following a report that the investment bank is facing an investigation into mortgage derivative deals. Federal prosecutors are investigating whether Morgan Stanley misled investors about its role in a pair of $200 million derivatives whose performance was tied to mortgage-backed securities, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper said Morgan Stanley sometimes bet against the success of the derivatives, which were underwritten and marketed to investors by Citigroup Inc. and UBS AG. Shares of Morgan Stanley fell $1.29, or 4.5 percent, to $27.09 in pre-opening trading. A spokesman...

TOKYO (Reuters) - Morgan Stanley Chief Executive James Gorman said he had no knowledge of any U.S. federal investigation into the Wall Street firm as was reported by media. "We have not been contacted by the Justice Department," he said at a joint news conference with Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group in Tokyo. "We have no knowledge whatsoever about the Justice Department investigation," Gorman said. The Wall Street Journal reported U.S. federal investigators are probing whether Morgan Stanley misled investors about mortgage derivative products it helped create and sometimes bet against.

China's giant sovereign wealth fund revealed it has accumulated stakes totalling $US9.6 billion ($A11.1 billion) in major US companies including Coca-Cola, Apple and Goodyear following a buying spree last year. Most of the stakes are small, reflecting China Investment Corp's strategy of avoiding politically sensitive acquisitions. But they highlight its growing presence in global markets as it invests a portion of Beijing's $US2.4 trillion ($A2.78 trillion) in foreign reserves. The holdings were disclosed Friday in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that listed shares traded in the United States. CIC, one of the world's biggest investment funds,...

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Some big Wall Street banks are girding against the swine flu, but a flap over how the firms got the vaccine will make them miserable. The public is outraged about reports that Citi , Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley along with other big New York employers, received hundreds, even thousands, of H1N1 vaccine doses before hospitals and other healthcare providers, many of which have run out of the precious drug

Citi sues Morgan Stanley over CDS, claims $245 mln Sat Sep 26, 2009 3:35am BST NEW YORK, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Citigroup Inc (C.N: Quote, Profile, Research) sued Morgan Stanley (MS.N: Quote, Profile, Research) on Friday for breach of contract, saying the Wall Street firm owed it $245.4 million for protection it bought on a loan. Citibank bought a credit default swap (CDS) from Morgan Stanley & Co International in 2006 on a $366 million revolving credit facility it provided to an issuer of collateralized debt obligations (CDO), according to the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The...

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What are you getting? You’re getting the same thing you got when he sold out Honduras to Chavez over that non-coup “coup” they staged: The warm fuzzy glow of knowing that George Bush would heartily disapprove. But some members of Obama’s own party, however, had a simple question for the administration: if this was a return to realism, and a concession to Russia’s long and vocal opposition to the missile program, what, exactly, was the U.S. getting in return for fundamentally changing it? And almost certainly, the answer leads back to Iran… But Russia has given no ground on those...

Markets were up about one percent yesterday. This movement appears to have come as a result of the better than expected weekly jobs report. That showed that new jobs claims dropped to 550,000, the lowest in about two months. There's some breaking economic data. This time it is import prices for the month of August. They rose by about 2%. So far, the market has shrugged off the news and markets are relatively unchanged. The University of Michigan consumer confidence index will come in about an hour and a half. I have no data on what the consensus for that...

Wow. Morgan Stanley revealed today that it had set aside 72 percent of its second-quarter revenue for compensation and benefits. This might just be a new record. The average compensation for Wall Street firms hovered around 48 percent his decade, according to Bloomberg. Many thought that compensation on Wall Street might actually diminish thanks to government bailouts. But instead firms have been increasing the share of revenues that they pay themselves. So what's behind it. Bloomberg quotes Morgan Stanley's chief financial officer pointing to "the war for talent." The only problem is that the casualties in this war seem to...