That sense of victory barely lasted the morning. The same financial behemoths that had fought so ferociously to block Dodd-Frank were not going to let the mere fact of the bill’s passage ruin their plans. “Halftime,” shrugged Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, a lobbying group representing 100 of the country’s largest financial institutions.

— Gary Rivlin, “How Wall Street Defanged Dodd-Frank”, in the May 20, 2013 issue of The Nation. Rivlin will be on the show tomorrow talking about the article.

People come from Wall Street and go into government and then leave government and go back into Wall Street. When you have this kind of revolving door, it’s not just that their interests are not well-aligned with the public; it’s that their mindset is captured by the industry from which they come. They see their interest — the interest of Wall Street — as if it were in the public interest.

— Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz on lobbying. [full interview here]

‘Margin Call’: A Movie Occupied With Wall Street 

Today’s Show: Rating The Wall Street Ratings Agencies

When Standard & Poor’s recently lowered the U.S. government debt rating for the first time in history, it set off a firestorm of criticism, from the Obama administration to Wall Street. The downgrade raised questions about the influence of S&P and other agencies, which also faced blame in the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

(Source: http)

Tomorrow: how Wall Street ratings agencies acquired the influence they have in the economy, and how they exercise their power. The agencies misjudged the risk of mortgage-backed securities. Now S&P is under fire for downgrading US credit. We’ll talk with law professor Frank Partnoy, who used to work in derivatives on Wall Street, and now studies financial regulation. [picture from the brokers with hands on their faces tumblr] [some background from other Fresh Air financial-industry-related-pieces]

There really have been very few criminal prosecutions [of companies] and there has been no criminal prosecution of a senior executive from a major bank or financial company related to the financial crisis.

— Louise Story, from the New York Times, explains how guidelines issued by the Justice Department in 2008 have allowed prosecutors to take a softer approach to corporate crimes.

These penalties are ultimately paid for by Goldman’s shareholders — not by the executives or the salespeople or the traders that actually individually played a role in what happened. [The leaders of Goldman] are still there and they’re all still getting very large bonuses.

— New York Times business reporter Louise Story explains why so few people on Wall Street have faced criminal investigations since the financial meltdown in 2008.

Looking Backwards: On Fresh Air, one year ago today, Wall Street’s Quants.

Curious Photo (by George Eastman House)

Wall Street, Paul Strand, 1915. (via iconicphotos)

We don’t have a flight simulator for stock markets where we can run a whole bunch of possible scenarios and see how the stock markets might react. We really have no idea how these markets work or how these complex systems work or how they might just explode one day in a very unpredictable manner.

— Financial journalist Felix Salmon on the unpredictable nature of high-frequency computerized transactions on Wall Street.

New Jersey is the new heart of Wall Street.

— William O’Brien, 40, the chief executive of Direct Edge, one of the top four stock exchanges in the United States which operates out of several locations in North Jersey. Later this week, we’ll take a look at the high-frequency trading the New York Times wrote about on Saturday.

Investigative reporter Fred Schulte, on the criticism received by banks and hedge funds who are making millions of dollars off of tax liens: “These banks, when they were in trouble, the taxpayer bailed them out and now they’re running down to these distressed real estate markets and buying up liens on people who can’t pay their taxes.”

Bringing Gekko back now makes sense. After eight years in prison — which, by the way, far exceeds the terms served by his real-life models, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky — what will Gekko make of our new breed of predator, a XXXX who makes a killing off bad mortgages and puts the world economy in peril?

More important, has he changed?

— David Edelstein: Wall Street: A Bullish Market, A Bear of a Film (Photo: 20th Century Fox)