Quants’ Risk-Free Ideas Sink Market, Cause Ruin: Susan Antilla To become a potentially market- destroying “it” group on Wall Street, you need some arrogance, enough brains to justify making huge financial bets, utter cluelessness about lessons learned from finance’s booms and busts, and a sincere belief that your unique contributions to Wall Street will mean, ahem, that this time it really is different, so old truths can be ignored.

Protecting Consumers Will Undermine Capitalism: Susan Antilla Flouting the efforts of lobbyists to shut down his plan for a consumer protection agency, the newly combative President Barack Obama is digging in his heels. Spokesman Robert Gibbs said last week that it’s something Obama “is not willing to give up.”

Regulator’s Client Pitch Hit Little Guy in Head: Susan Antilla In an era when taxpayers are subsidizing Wall Street bonuses and a populist president is embracing financiers, I guess I won’t shock you with news that a top securities regulator tried to sell a service to help businesses keep employee and customer disputes out of court.

Hot Seat for SEC Chief Schapiro Won’t Cool Off: Susan Antilla The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission has a past that is fast coming back to haunt her.

Brokers’ Lawyer Says Finra Understated Merger Payment (Update1) A lawyer for securities firms suing the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said sealed documents show its executives understated how much they could pay brokers in the 2007 merger that created the oversight body.

Wall Street’s Closet Critics Blast Their Own: Susan Antilla Readers have had a lot to say about the goings-on of Wall Street over the past month.

Suckers of the Future Groomed With Stock Game: Susan Antilla Credit freezes, sleazy stockbrokers, and auction-rate securities gone bad have done wonders to drum up enthusiasm for financial literacy. So who could fault the Securities and Exchange Commission for recruiting Kathleen M. Floyd as its new deputy director of investor education last month?

Main Street Tells Wall Street, ‘Get a Real Job’: Susan Antilla Wall Street, meet Eric W. Haugaard, a civil engineer who designs water and sewer-line systems for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Haugaard says he had tears in his eyes as he watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, hopeful that politics would get more constructive and the economic crisis would get fixed.     Today, he is disgusted when he thinks about “what Wall Street has done to average, honest, tax-paying, no-loopholes citizens,” and says it makes him ill when h

Wall Street Cries ‘Feed Me’ or World Will End: Susan Antilla In the musical comedy “Little Shop of Horrors,” a dangerous and gluttonous plant dubbed “Audrey II” signals its insatiable appetite for human blood with a baritone demand, “feed me.”

You Cheat, I Cheat, as Wall Street Acts as Model: Susan Antilla Trickle down really does work. Consider these inspired words, from an online reader of USA Today, reacting last week to news that Americans were lying, cheating and law-breaking to get their hands on an $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers: