Thanksgiving this year fell on the 49th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. I was just 20, married only 9 months, and my husband and I spent the weekend glued to the TV in our tiny apartment, weeping. That and the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center are my only two “never forget where I was when I heard” moments.

Continuing on the theme of prosecutions for fraud during the housing collapse, though in this case civil rather than criminal ones, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman just announced a new lawsuit against Credit Suisse for defrauding investors in its mortgage backed securities business. The case mirrors the previous suit filed by Schneiderman against JPMorgan Chase over Bear Stearns’ MBS business. Curiously, both of these banks engaged in settlements just this past weekwith the SEC over precisely the same conduct, settlements where they didn’t have to admit wrongdoing.

In another in a long line of weak settlements where the perpetrators of fraud don’t have to technically say whether or not they’ve committed it, the Securities and Exchange Commission reached agreement with JPMorgan Chase and Credit Suisse on a collection of violations related to the handling of mortgage backed securities.

Jeff Connaughton has authored a powerful, and chilling insider’s perspective on the financial crisis and the pathetic governmental response to it. The second part of his title sums up the result and the first half explains why Wall Street always wins. Many, perhaps most Americans are likely to agree with both parts of Connaughton’s title so this book will not transform the public’s view of the issues. The public largely has this set of issues correct. Connaughton gives the readers unique access to the facts because he had a front row seat to many of the key discussions and he has the analytical abilities and expertise to explain the significance of those facts.

One of the areas that Sen. Ted Kaufman and his chief of staff Jeff Connaughton tried to focus on during his accidental two-year term in the Senate was high-frequency trading. The 2010 “flash crash” showed the potential dangers of this fast-growing industry. Consider that our financial system places a large emphasis on where super-computers are sited relative to the trading machines.

As Felix Salmon points out, one of the consequences of the melting polar ice sheet is not just that companies want to drill for oil in the Arctic. They want to lay cable through the shorter Arctic route, to increase the speed of information between the US and Asia by a matter of 20-60 milliseconds. And that infinitesimal shaving off the time of a trade matters. It’s the difference between placing a trade too early and placing it too late. It means billions upon billions of dollars. And that’s a huge problem.

the lawsuit against Bear Stearns on securitization fraud put together by Eric Schneiderman’s office is that it’s rooted in reality. My issues are primarily with timing and scope. There’s no reason this case couldn’t have been filed in 2011. There’s literally nothing in the case that advances what we knew from these other cases in any meaningful way. If the New York AG’s office wanted to pursue a parallel proceeding, they had every ability to do it in 2011, before the foreclosure fraud settlement. Now they’ve given up claims they could have pursued.

Yesterday, Bank of America fired off one of their biggest settlements yet, spending $2.4 billion to quiet claims with investors over their purchase of Merrill Lynch.

This was outright securities fraud, and I’m more than surprised that the investors plaintiffs, led by public pension funds in Ohio and Texas, accepted this.

MoveOn.org has sent a finding of fact to the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department, asking that they initiate an investigation into whether Mitt Romney lied on a federal financial disclosure form.

This is an issue that arose back in July, during the debate over precisely when Romney left his job at Bain Capital.

Jed Rakoff is the federal judge who has engaged in a lonely crusade against the SEC’s practice of slap-on-the-wrist settlements against the nation’s largest financial firms. The SEC and Citigroup took Rakoff to court, essentially, to get their settlement on some mortgage-backed securities deals approved. Rakoff has a lawyer now, and he argued before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals that he required more information to properly conduct oversight.

The prosecutors, the rich, the politicians: all buddies in the rarefied atmosphere of wealth and power. How could one of them possibly be a cheat? And if there is a slip-up, they cover up.