“We believe that the credit rating agencies in exchange for fees departed from their objective neutral role as arbiters. At minimum they were aiding and abetting misconduct by issuers.”-- Richard Cordray Ohio attorney general on filing suit against Moody’s Standard & Poor’s and Fitch (MHP)“Trust dies but mistrust blossoms.”-- Sophocles***“F.H.A. financing was a lost language in San Francisco the real-estate equivalent of Aramaic. Once the limits were raised smart buyers started calling.”-- Michael Ackerman a Bay Area real-estate agent“Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day.”-- Samuel Goldwyn***“I love this show. This show has been my ...

More than most the PR department at Goldman Sachs (GS) must be looking forward to the weekend: It just spent the last few days getting pummeled like Apollo Creed. Today the hits kept right on coming. The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that shareholders in Goldman have asked the bank to slice the size of its bonus pool arguing that the firm should pass along more of its earnings to investors.“The investors hold tens of millions of shares in Goldman Sachs which is on track to make the biggest employee payout in the firm's 140-year history ” the ...

Should Goldman Sachs (GS) pay its vaunted legions of bankers and traders less money?According to the Wall Street Journal some of the dominant global investment bank's major shareholders are answering that question with a big fat “YES!”Wall Street pay is a hot issue on Main Street these days. With all that's happened over the past few years with the stock housing and job markets the consensus among regular Americans is that the economy just sucks and probably won't get any better.And who better to hate than an investment bank that pays its employees more than $700 000 a year ...

Shares of online broker E-Trade Financial Corp. rise more than 4% at the start of Friday’s session, amidst heavy talk of a possible takeover bid by TD Ameritrade Holdings Corp.

Peter Earlier this week on CNBC banking analyst Meredith Whitney said “I think that the call this year the trade this year has been short the regional banks and go long the capital markets banks.” Can you tell me what was behind that?-- Minyan John John As Whitney highlighted in her later comments her call was based on the enormous amount of liquidity from the Federal Reserve raising asset market prices. What she didn’t detail however was why this would help the capital market banks like Goldman Sachs (GS) Bank of America (BAC) and Citigroup (C) more than the ...

NOTE TO EDITORS: The Following Is an Investment Opinion Being Issued by Stock Market Alerts LLC.

$500 million Commitment to New Program

NOTE TO EDITORS: The Following Is an Investment Opinion Being Issued by WallStSense.com