Judging from some of the news coming out of Washington, civil discourse seems to be in extremely short supply. Perhaps Americans would be more civil if they used an ancient Japanese poetry form to discuss the major issues of the day.

As…

John Reed, one of Vikram Pandit’s predecessors as chief executive of Citigroup, has been saying recently that Congress made a mistake in repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated the banking and investment industries. Pandit, however, doesn’t think reinstating the Depression-era law…

As the previous post mentions, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit was in town yesterday to speak at Washington University. He also visited with employees of the CitiMortgage division in O’Fallon, Mo., and announced some updated results for the company’s foreclosure prevention efforts. In the…

Citigroup Chief Executive Vikram Pandit spent an hour today with students at Washington University’s Olin School of Business, fielding questions on everything from bankers’ pay to the MBA job market.

Regarding the recent actions of federal pay czar Kenneth Feinberg, who…

Fed officials such as James Bullard, Thomas Hoenig and Gary Stern have spoken eloquently about the need to address banking’s too-big-to-fail problem, but in the real world, bank regulators haven’t done much about it. In fact, the Washington Post reported last week,…

Whenever something goes wrong, it’s human instinct to find a scapegoat. Since things have gone terribly wrong with the economy, Time magazine is asking readers to assign blame to a lineup of 25 politicians, bankers, Wall Street moguls and others.…

James Hamilton at Econbrowser has an excellent post on why we should be concerned about excesses in executive pay. Rather than discussing inequality or morality, he worries about getting the incentives right. After mentioning the vast sums earned by CEOs who proved…

My column on Citigroup and Bank of America drew an insightful voice mail from Charles “Chip” Roame, managing principal of Tiburon Strategic Advisors in Tiburon, Calif. The financial-services consultant’s comments came too late to get into the column, but they’re too…

Citigroup is outraged that Wells Fargo would come in and break up its bargain-basement, government-financed deal to buy Wachovia Bank. But let’s hope the regulators find a way to make the Wells Fargo deal happen: It won’t cost taxpayers anything, and it may…