The trailer for Charles Ferguson's new documentary "Inside Job" has been making its way around the web. The film won the top award at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

Roger Ebert called the the film "devastating" and summed it up this way:

"From Roosevelt until Reagan, the American economy enjoyed 40 years of stability, prosperity and growth. Beginning with Reagan's moves against financial regulation, that sound base has been progressively eroded. The crucial federal error (in administrations of both parties) was to allow financial institutions to trade on their own behalf. Today many large trading banks are betting against their own customers."

"Inside Job" is due out in October. Check out the movie trailer.

A grim fact of the recession is that it pays to lay people off. The CEOs who laid off the most employees during the recession are also the CEOs who took home the biggest pay checks, according to a study released last week.

CEOs of the 50 U.S. firms that slashed the most jobs between November 2008 and April 2010 took in 42% more than the average CEO at an S&P 500 firm, according to the 17th annual Executive Excess study by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington think tank.

The study also found that 36 of the 50 layoff leaders "announced their mass layoffs at a time of positive earnings reports," suggesting a trend of "squeezing workers to boost profits and maintain high CEO pay."

The 10 "highest-paid CEO layoff leaders" ranked in the report include the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Mark Hurd, who earned $24.2 million in 2009 as the company laid off 6,400 workers and Walmart CEO Michael Duke, who earned $19.2 million as the company laid off 13,350 workers. No Wall Street banks were included in this list, but three banks -- Citigroup, Bank Of America and JP Morgan -- showed up on the study's list of the 50 firms that laid off the most employees.

Check out Institute for Policy Studies' ranking of layoff leaders among the highest-paid CEOS. in this photo slideshow.

Disclosure reports show that the banks that got the most government help in late 2008 and early 2009 also invested the most to influence members of Congress, the White House, the Federal Reserve, Treasury Department and a long list of federal agencies as new rules were enacted governing Wall Street and the nation's financial system.

"I'm not shocked that they spent that much money because I saw them every day," said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director at U.S. Public Interest Research Group, who said more than 2,000 lobbyists worked on the financial reform bill.

Read more in the Huffington Post.

Richard Fuld, the former chief executive of failed investment bank Lehman Brothers, said the bank might have survived if U.S. financial regulators had made different decisions, in prepared testimony for a hearing Wednesday.

Is this guy for real?

Read more in the Wall Street Journal.

I have written several blog articles about the failure of U.S. banks. My most recent article is U.S. Bank Failures In 2010 Surpass 100. Here is a followup to this article.

More than a 10th of U.S. banks remain at risk of failure. The FDIC said that 829 of the nation's roughly 7,800 banks were on its "problem list" at the end of June, up from 775 at the end of the first three months of the year. Already 118 banks have failed this year, well ahead of the pace set last year when 140 were seized by regulators.

Read more in the Wall Street Journal.

In a move that may reflect a growing unwillingness to tie their personal fortunes to those of their companies, Wall Street insiders this year have undertaken more than five times the number of stock sales of their corporate shares as they have purchases.

Officers and directors of Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo have sold about $100 million worth of stock so far this year, amid relatively small buying activity, according to public stock filings with the SEC that have been analyzed by the research firm InsiderScore.

Read more in the Huffington Post.

Currency trading volume around the world has hit $4 trillion a day, fueled by investors in the wealthiest nations looking to diversify beyond their home markets in a time of economic turmoil.

The $4 trillion mark represents a 20% gain from $3.3 trillion in 2007, the last time the global foreign-exchange markets were surveyed, according to the Bank for International Settlements. While the survey found continued growth in currency trading, it did reflect a slowdown in the market's growth from the prior survey, when trading volumes had soared 69% from $1.9 trillion in 2004.

Read more in the Wall Street Journal.

Sounds like some powerful strings are being pulled to prevent the truth from coming out .......

With less than four months left to complete its work, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) has been hampered by an exodus of senior employees and by internal disagreements that could hinder its ability to produce a report the entire commission could support.

The FCIC is expected to report to the nation by December 15th on the causes of the 2008 financial debacle. It is investigating 22 factors, including Asian savings, regulatory failings in the U.S., executive pay and credit ratings.

Modeled in part on the 9/11 Commission and in part on the Pecora hearings, which the Senate convened to investigate the sources of the Great Depression, the FCIC hopes to produce a detailed report that will influence future policy making. It has held 12 days of hearings, interviewed more than 500 witnesses and pored over hundreds of thousands of pages of documents.

But as the FCIC prepares for its final round of public hearings on Capitol Hill this week — including appearances by Richard S. Fuld Jr., the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, and Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve — it faces substantial obstacles.

In May, the commission’s executive director was moved aside and succeeded by an economist from the Fed, a decision that drew criticism since the central bank is an object of the investigation because of its leading role in handling the crisis. In addition, five of the commission’s 14 senior staff members have resigned, including Matt Cooper, a journalist who was drafting the report.

Moreover, the commission’s chairman, Phil Angelides, and vice chairman, Bill Thomas, are finding it challenging to maintain support from all eight other commissioners. While squabbling within the panel has not broken into open dissent, several commissioners are divided over how much to blame specific individuals and banks, how and when to release the documents it has gathered and whether to make available testimony of government officials and bank executives it has interviewed privately.

Read more in the New York Times.

Raymond J. Learsy writes this sobering article in the Huffington Post.

Wall Street will not let up. In spite of the financial regulation bill passed last month, the Wall Street casino continues at full tilt. Just last week the New York Times reported ("Despite Reform, Banks Have Room for Risky Deals" 08.25.10) that the likes of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are continuing to squander hundreds of millions on bets, purportedly on transactions handled for their customers, (they are now passing themselves off as "croupier" at the roulette wheel) bets that seem to serve little or no economic value other than to further pressure an economy already in distress, pushing a deeply burdened American middle class further into third world status, and taking the entire nation along for the ride. It is a phenomenon all too real and has been authoritatively set forth Arianna Huffington's recent book, Third World America.

Among the most malicious effects of Wall Street's workings on our economy has been its ruthless focus on the bottom line and its grim focus on its self enrichment, irrespective of the societal cost visited on workers, communities, the nations economic sinews and the nation's entrepreneurial vision. Millions of workers have lost high value and productive jobs in manufacturing, trade and the professions. Jobs having been sent overseas and many destroyed through the brutal and self-serving leveraging of debt by the financial engineers, pledging the assets of the companies of which they have taken control before flipping them or dressing them up for an IPO. Many were enterprises with years of tradition created by the hard work of entire communities that have now been closed down entirely or moved offshore after having dismissed its workers en masse. All to the rapacious benefit of the Wall Street Mergers and Acquisition teams and their banking enablers, and the hedge fund honchos.

But our friends on Wall Street need not despair. They have their admirers, or better said "emulators" in, of all places, Beijing. Heartlessness in the name of Capitalist efficiencies makes strange bedfellows. And China, as in so many endeavors, will not be left behind.

Just yesterday the New York Times' lead article blared "China Fortifies State Businesses to Fuel Growth". The article informs us that China, which calls itself socialist, is often perceived as brutally capitalist. Once eager to learn from the United States, "China's leaders during the financial crisis, have reaffirmed their faith in their own more statist approach to economic management." And yet some of the lessons learned under Wall Street tutelage continue to linger on, all to our shame.

Some weeks ago an illuminating article, again in the Times ("Workers let Go by China's Banks Are Putting Up a Fight" 08.15.10) reports on the single largest public offering ever, a $22 billion IPO of the Agricultural Bank of China, resulting in windfalls for the well placed in China and overseas. But wait, having learned a thing or two from Wall Street the bank "slashed payrolls and restructured to raise profitability and make themselves more attractive to outside investors." And where have we heard that before?

And of course in China nothing is small. Some 70,000 people among the laid off by the bank are seeking to regain their old jobs or receive fair monetary compensation. There are differences of course. Here we do not, as yet, place recalcitrant laid off workers into labor camps or have them do jail time without having been prosecuted.

But then again, here as in China, the financial upheavals of these last years are tearing at the very fabric of our society. In China, dozens of former bank staffers -- unsuccessful at finding new jobs- have committed suicide. Where it will all end for China and for us, as the excess of the few trumps the welfare of the many, is yet to be told.

France is calling for a tightening of the oversight on commodity derivatives markets in the EU in order to help reduce the volatility of commodity prices.

Three French ministers have sent a letter to EU commissioner for internal markets and services Michel Barnier urging him to increase supervision on a European scale on commodity derivatives markets. They stress that the existing regulatory framework for financial derivatives markets fails to capture the specific risks posed by commodities markets.

Please read more in the Wall Street Journal.