A U.S. Senate committee will vote on three candidates for the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Tuesday, after the trio met little resistance from lawmakers in a confirmation hearing last month. President Barack Obama has nominated Timothy Massad, a senior Treasury Department official, to become the new chairman of the CFTC, which oversees futures and swaps markets. More on Reuters [...]

A New York state judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by an investor in a fund managed by Tremont Group Holdings, one of the largest feeders of funds into Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The 2009 lawsuit accused Tremont of investing $3.3 billion with Madoff for more than a decade without investigating “red flags” that Madoff never bought or sold securities. More on Reuters [...]

I was reading some articles I saved recently and come across a flurry of reports, talking about fines levied upon some of the biggest names in financial services. Various courts and industry regulators levied billions of dollars in fines on some of the biggest names in the business, mostly stemming from the market collapse in 2008 and subsequent Great Recession. The hits are still coming. Recently, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation started legal action against 16 of the world’s largest banks. They allegedly manipulated the LIBOR rate—just the latest action involving a scandal affecting some $300 billion in securities, according to Forbes. More on Forbes [...]

The Senate Agriculture Committee plans to meet as early as next week to vote on President Barack Obama’s three nominees to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, according to Senate aides. The panel is expected to meet as soon as Tuesday to sign off on the nomination of Timothy Massad, a senior Treasury Department official tapped to head the agency. It also would vote on the nominations of Sharon Bowen, a partner at law firm Latham & Watkins LLP, and brokerage executive J. Christopher Giancarlo. Mr. Massad was tapped in November to succeed Gary Gensler, who left the agency in early January. The exact timing of the meeting was still being worked out, one aide said. More in the Wall Street Journal [...]