It’s 4:18 a.m. and the strip mall is deserted. But tucked in back, next to a closed-down video store, an employment agency is already filling up. Rosa Ramirez walks in, as she has done nearly every morning for the past six months. She signs in and sits down in one of the 100 or so blue plastic chairs that fill the office. Over the next three hours, dispatchers will bark out the names of who will work today. Rosa waits, wondering if she will make her rent.

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.

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Joining Blankfein at the top of the list is John Stumpf of Wells Fargo, who took home $19.3 million. Overall, bank executive compensation increased 7.7 percent over the last year, according to Bloomberg.

When reached for comment, Goldman, naturally, suggested that it was very normal to award Blankfein a 73.7 percent compensation hike. “We strongly believe in linking executive pay to performance, and the variability of executive pay at the company over the past few years is a testament to that,” Goldman Sachs spokesman David Wells told Bloomberg in an e-mail. “We believe that our own framework for linking pay to performance provides a more reliable and thoughtful reflection of how best to compensate senior leaders than the methodology used for this exercise.”

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“Every single investment idea ... every desire to understand what is going to make this go up or go down is going to be overwhelmed by the most beautiful experience ... which a man will never share, about a mode of connection between that mother and that baby,” Jones told an audience at the University of Virginia, according to a video obtained by the Washington Post. “And I’ve just seen it happen over and over.”

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Really? That’s how you feel about it? Well, tell it to the U.S. Department of Justice, because that’s just what’s going down as a result of the LIBOR scandal.

To recap: Bank hustlers manipulated the world’s most important set of benchmark interest rates and thereby impacted the prices of upward of $500 trillion worth of financial instruments. The LIBOR scam devastated state and municipal budgets, squeezed pension yields and ripped off bank shareholders. In a case of jaw-dropping fraud, greedy traders rigged up the benchmark so that they could cash in on bets on derivatives, while banks submitted fake numbers to make themselves look financially healthier. One Barclays official was fond of fudging numbers in exchange for champagne. “Dude…I owe you big time!” gushed a trader in an email to Barclays’ Mr. Fix-It. “Come over one day after work and I'm opening a bottle of Bollinger."

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The organizing body pledges to run the maration next year. Here's the complete statement from Thomas Grilk, Executive Director of the Boston Athletic Association.

The Boston Athletic Association (B.A.A.) extends its deepest sympathies to all those who were affected by Monday's tragic events. Those who lost their lives and were injured are in our thoughts and prayers.

It is a sad day for the City of Boston, for the running community, and for all those who were here to enjoy the 117th running of the Boston Marathon. What was intended to be a day of joy and celebration quickly became a day in which running a marathon was of little importance.

We want to express our deepest gratitude to all of the B.A.A. medical personnel and volunteers and the City of Boston’s first responders who reacted so courageously to help save lives. Special thanks to the loyal Boston Marathon community – over 8500 volunteers, 1000 medical personnel, the organizing committee, and hundreds of thousands along the race route – who make the experience what it is for all our runners, who are hurting today.

We would like to thank the countless people from around the world who have reached out to support us over the last 24 hours.

We are cooperating with the City of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and all federal law enforcement officials in the investigation and the effort to bring those responsible for this tragedy to justice, so we are limited in what information we can provide.

Boston is strong. Boston is resilient. Boston is our home. And Boston has made us enormously proud in the past 24 hours. The Boston Marathon is a deeply held tradition – an integral part of the fabric and history of our community. We are committed to continuing that tradition with the running of the 118th Boston Marathon in 2014.

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So what are you to do if, say, you spent years working as a hedge fund attorney, and all your friends and colleagues are in the finance industry, but you really, really want to get elected to something in a liberal city as a Democrat? If you're Reshma Saujani, you just pretend you never had anything to do with Wall Street and hope no one digs too deep.

Saujani is running for New York City public advocate. New York's public advocate, one of only three city-wide elected offices, is sort of like the city's "ombudsman." The advocate's job is essentially to annoy the mayor as much as possible, and then run for that office. The advocate is expected, to put it broadly, to look out for "the little guy," against the city's bureaucracy and police department and so on. The job, thus far, has always gone to liberal, populist figures; Democrats have held the post since it was created in 1994, even as the city repeatedly elected Republican mayors.

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Via HuffPo:

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Former Wall Street V.P. and current Occupy Wall Street activist and member of Strike Debt Alexis Goldstein took it upon herself Tuesday to put the payouts in a little context. She created a site detailing "What You Can Buy for Having Your House Stolen," on which she lists a varied taxonomy of items the compensation can afford wrongfully foreclosed individuals -- all the items that are not your house back. Goldstein told Salon via email, "I'm hoping to (1) draw attention to the OCC, one of the lesser-known banking regulators who are completely captured by the banks. (2) point out how egregiously low these settlement numbers are."

We thought we'd pick out some of Goldstein's choice examples to drive the message home in the following slideshow. (All slideshow text from Goldstein's forhavingmyhousestolen.tumblr.com)

[slide_show id=13266186]

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We’ve all had the feeling:  You fall into conversation with some stranger on the subway or bus.  Or perhaps you are seated beside him at a concert or some other event.  Whatever the venue or circumstance, the conversation goes pleasantly for a while.  Your interlocutor makes various interesting observations about this subject or that.  He shows himself to experience the world much as do you and most others you’ve known.  He might even say something arrestingly perceptive or thoughtful at some juncture during your chat.  Then, without warning, it happens:  In the middle of a perfectly good sentence he throws in, as a sort of throwaway line or aside, some such observation as, ‘like that time the Venusians performed those experiments on me up on Telos Nine, before taking me back to the Bryant Park carousel and then flying home.  (They still call me, you know.)’

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Documents obtained by ICIJ show how two top Swiss banks, UBS and Clariden, worked with TrustNet to provide their customers with secrecy-shielded companies in the BVI and other offshore centers.

Clariden, owned by Credit Suisse, sought such high levels of confidentiality for some clients, the records show, that a TrustNet official described the bank’s request as “the Holy Grail” of offshore entities — a company so anonymous that police and regulators would be “met with a blank wall” if they tried to discover the owners’ identities.

Clariden declined to answer questions about its relationship with TrustNet.

“Because of Swiss banking secrecy laws, we are not allowed to provide any information about existing or supposed accountholders,” the bank said. “As a general rule, Credit Suisse and its related companies respect all the laws and regulations in the countries in which they are involved.”

A spokesperson for UBS said the bank applies “the highest international standards” to fight money laundering, and that TrustNet “is one of over 800 service providers globally which UBS clients choose to work with to provide for their wealth and succession planning needs. These service providers are also used by clients of other banks.”

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Today America’s powerful rentier interests, particularly those in the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector, are mobilizing campaign contributions and paid propaganda to promote what I called the Rentier Agenda: low taxes on those whose income is derived from capital gains; the privatization of public infrastructure and the deregulation of regulated private utilities, to generate windfall profits for investors in privatized or deregulated agencies; and a macroeconomic policy that serves the interests of creditors, at the expense of slow growth and mass unemployment, rather than productive businesses and workers. Similar observations have been made by many on the left and some mavericks on the right.

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"Of course, it willn't," says Stewart. "Democrats and Republicans would have to be incredible incompetent not to be able to avoid this "self-designed and imposed mutual ball punch."

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So what gives?

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It's so artfully done, and so diabolical, that one can picture secret seminars in subterranean Wall Street meeting rooms, guiding young business recruits in the proven process of taking an extra share of wealth from the middle class. Their presentation might unfold as follows:

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On "dark pools," large block trades between institutions that are conducted outside the market and thus invisible to the public until they are completed:

While I have always been an advocate of electronic trading due to the efficiency the lower costs they bring o the markets, I am nit (sic) a fan of the lack of transparency the DARK POOLS create.

It is important to examine why there has been this growing interest in the use of dark pools. Markets have always focused on the speed with which information becomes available. Of course this information can be composed of various types.

It could be corporate developments like earnings or mergers or it can be information regarding the placements of buy and sell orders and who is placing these orders. It is the latter information that has created the interest in the dark pools.

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The buyer, IntercontinentalExchange, a 12-year-old exchange that deals in investing contracts known as futures, said Thursday that little would change for the trading floor in Manhattan's financial district.

The NYSE dates to 1792, when 24 brokers and merchants traded stocks under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street. But its importance today is mostly symbolic. Most trading is done on computers that match thousands of orders a second.

"The cash equities business in America has effectively been obliterated," said Thomas Caldwell, chairman of Caldwell Securities in Toronto and a shareholder in the New York exchange's parent company, NYSE Euronext.

He said that the jewel of the deal is not the New York exchange but Liffe, a futures exchange founded in London.

"The original New York Stock Exchange, it's got a brand name, it's got recognition, but as a business it's a very small part of this thing," Caldwell said.

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The Treasury department said it would be selling off its remaining 500.1 million shares of General Motors stock within the next 12-15 months, according to a press release.

GM is expected to buy 200 million shares of Treasury's stake for $27.50 each with the $5.5 billion deal expected to close by the end of this year. The department will sell its remaining 300.1 million shares through other channels subject to market conditions.

“The auto industry rescue helped save more than a million jobs during a severe economic crisis, but TARP was always meant to be a temporary, emergency program. The government should not be in the business of owning stakes in private companies for an indefinite period of time,” assistant secretary for financial stability Timothy G. Massad said in the release.

The department sold off the last of its stake in insurance giant AIG earlier this month. It says that it has "recovered more than 90 percent ($381 billion) of the $418 billion in funds disbursed for TARP."

Including the 200 million share sale to GM, Treasury it will have recovered $28.7 billion of the $49.5 billion that it invested in the company. The department cites independent estimates to say that its rescue of the U.S. auto industry saved 1 million jobs and has created 250,000 new jobs since June 2009.

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