It has been nearly five years since the Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernard L. Madoff came to light, and litigation surrounding the case grinds on.

The trustee seeking to recover funds for defrauded investors, Irving H. Picard, asked the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court decision barring him from pursuing banks for their role in helping perpetuate the fraud.

Meanwhile, the prosecution of five former employees of Mr. Madoff’s firm began last week. The criminal trial is likely to expose more tidbits about the operation of the long-running fraud, including lurid details about sexual liaisons among staff members involving perhaps even Mr. Madoff himself. Yet, despite the titillating aspects of the case, it is really more of a footnote to his scheme.

The more important case concerns Mr. Picard’s efforts to recover funds from a number of banks, including JPMorgan Chase, UBS, HSBC and UniCredit. He accused them of aiding in the Madoff scheme by ignoring warning signs about the fraud that allowed it to grow. As time went on, the scheme cost investors about $17 billion, and wiped out billions more, as they were led to believe the money was safely in their accounts.

The trustee’s claim against JPMorgan alone seeks nearly $19 billion, so recovering even a portion of that amount could add significantly to the $9 billion Mr. Picard has already gathered to compensate investors.

As is frequently the case, the issue is not about the banks’ role in the fraud – at least not yet. Rather, it focuses on whether certain arcane legal doctrines will permit the lawsuits to move forward. The banks have been successful in obtaining dismissals of the complaints on the ground that Mr. Picard does not have the authority to pursue claims on behalf of the defrauded investors…..

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At a March 2012 meeting, a group of examiners at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York agreed that Goldman Sachs had inadequate procedures to guard against conflicts of interest — guidelines aimed at stopping firms from putting their pursuit of profit ahead of their clients’ best interests.

The examiners voted to downgrade a confidential rating assigned by the New York Fed that could have spurred costly enforcement actions and other regulatory penalties. It is not known whether the vote in fact led to a rating change. The former examiner who pushed for a downgrade, Carmen M. Segarra, now contends in a lawsuit filed on Thursday that just weeks after the vote, her superiors asked her to change her findings on Goldman and fired her after she refused.

The vote to downgrade, which has not been previously reported, could have been a big blow for Goldman.

“Goldman Sachs does not have a conflicts-of-interest policy, not firmwide, and not for any divisions,” Ms. Segarra wrote to Michael F. Silva, a senior executive at the New York Fed. “I would go so far as to say they have never had a policy on conflicts.”

The lawsuit, along with a review by The New York Times of confidential government documents and internal e-mails, raises questions about the success of Goldman’s efforts to police potential conflicts.

The bank has been buffeted by accusations that it has put its own interests ahead of its clients, a contention it denies. Goldman, for instance, faced accusations that in the run-up to the financial crisis that it sold billions of dollars in souring real estate assets to unsuspecting clients. Just weeks before the examiners’ vote last year, the bank was publicly excoriated by a federal judge who found that Goldman had conflicts in a huge energy deal.

The lawsuit also provides a look into the often-opaque relationship between federal regulators and Wall Street. After the financial crisis, banking regulators faced criticism that they were too cozy with the banks that they were overseeing — a familiarity that failed to thwart some of the risky behavior precipitating the housing crisis and ensuing recession…

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JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the lender that lost almost $2 billion during Chrysler Group LLC’s 2009 bankruptcy, is now its chief adviser as the automaker’s two owners haggle over its value.

JPMorgan will advise Chrysler in the event of its sale to majority shareholder, Fiat SpA, said people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The bank was also listed this week as the lead underwriter of an initial public offering of Chrysler shares owned by the company’s other shareholder, a United Auto Workers retiree trust.

The dual role highlights the complicated path Chrysler has been forced to take to resolve a dispute between its two backers. Sergio Marchionne, the chief executive officer of both Chrysler and Fiat who has spent four years seeking to merge the companies, is at loggerheads with the UAW’s trust over the value of its 41.5 percent stake in Chrysler. Letting public investors put a price on the stake, through the IPO process, is one way to resolve the matter…..

Read the rest of the article at Bloomberg.

For the first time since before the credit crisis, bond buyers are demonstrating more confidence in the U.S. banking system than in industrial companies as lenders fortify balance sheets while firms from Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) to Apple Inc. (AAPL) borrow record amounts.

Relative yields on bonds from Citigroup Inc. (BAC) to JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) were 3 basis points less than the average for industrial notes last week, the first time since September 2007 that investors didn’t require more from bank borrowers, Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data show. The relationship reversed after bank bond spreads surged to an unprecedented 365 basis points more than industrials amid the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Lenders sitting on a record $9.5 trillion of deposits are winning over the bond market after increasing a measure of their capital cushions by about 54 percent to meet regulations intended to prevent a repeat of the turmoil that followed the 2008 bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and contributed to more than $2 trillion of writedowns and losses at the world’s biggest financial institutions….

Read the rest of the article at Bloomberg.

Ruth Porat didn’t see it coming.

The Morgan Stanley (MS) banker who thought she understood the risks to the financial system in September 2008 was advising the U.S. Treasury Department on its rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when she got a message: Would she come back to Washington to deal with the collapse of American International Group Inc. (AIG)?

“The call I got was ‘We worked on the wrong thing,’” Porat, 55, said in an interview last month at the New York headquarters of the bank where she’s now chief financial officer. That AIG “could vanish that quickly and the impact that could have throughout the country, and that nobody could see it coming, was just staggering.”

Porat’s own bank almost vanished when hedge funds, spooked by difficulties getting money out of bankrupt Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., pulled more than $128 billion in two weeks from Morgan Stanley. To stay afloat it sold a 20 percent stake, became a bank holding company and borrowed $107.3 billion from the Federal Reserve on a single day.

Five years after Lehman Brothers sank on Sept. 15, 2008, triggering the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Morgan Stanley is safe enough to survive a shock that devastating, Porat said. She and Chief Executive Officer James Gorman, with prodding from regulators, led a drive to cut risk and boost capital to soften the next blow….

Read the rest of the article at Bloomberg.

Let’s play a game. It is called “What if … .”

As we observe the five-year anniversary of the financial crisis — Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy five years ago this coming weekend — the most intriguing hypothetical question about those fateful days is what would have happened had the government bailed out Lehman.

It would have changed the course of history, certainly, but maybe not for the better.

The collapse of Lehman has long been considered the domino that led to the tumbling of so many others: Merrill Lynch’s hasty sale to Bank of America; the bailout of the American International Group; the breaking of the buck in the money market; the near collapse of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley that led them to become banking holding companies; and the decision by the government to pursue the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program to bail out the entire banking industry.

The decision not to rescue Lehman has been called a mistake and worse. Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister at the time, called it “horrendous.”

No one suggested Lehman deserved to be saved. But the argument has been made that the crisis might have been less severe if it had been saved, because Lehman’s failure created remarkable uncertainty in the market as investors became confused about the role of the government and whether it was picking winners and losers. The government had bailed out Bear Stearns and then nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but left Lehman for dead only to turn around and save A.I.G….

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The bond market is helping to make Sprint Corp. (S)’s promises to its bank lenders irrelevant.

The third-largest U.S. wireless carrier, backed by new majority owner Softbank Corp. (9984), said in a regulatory filing yesterday its $6.5 billion bond sale on Sept. 4 was enough to violate the terms of its loans “by a significant level” at the end of the month. While Sprint is in talks with lenders to amend the leverage covenant, the company also said it has the money to pay off its loans and cancel $4.5 billion of credit facilities if it fails to reach an agreement.

Sprint’s willingness to sacrifice its borrowing capacity including a $3 billion unsecured revolving credit line arranged by Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. underscores the security provided by Softbank, a company with a $78 billion market value, three times the size of the U.S. unit. That enabled Sprint to complete the biggest junk-bond offering since 2008 at lower relative yields than it paid a year ago and also increases the chance it will get the covenant amendment, according to KDP Investment Advisors Inc….

Read the rest of the article at Bloomberg.

Vikram S. Pandit has been on the sidelines of the banking industry since resigning as chief executive of Citigroup last October. But with a new investment, Mr. Pandit is betting an upstart lender will be able to compete with the giants of Wall Street.

Mr. Pandit is among the investors in a round of financing raised by CommonBond, a Brooklyn-based start-up that lends to M.B.A. students and refinances existing debt. The financing, including equity and debt, totals more than $100 million, the company said.

Though Mr. Pandit has kept a low profile since his sudden departure from the helm of one of the nation’s biggest banks, the CommonBond deal is his second publicly disclosed investment this year. In May, Mr. Pandit and a business partner bought a 3 percent stake in the Indian financial services firm JM Financial.

The two investments fit under a broader thesis that the business of providing credit is changing, as traditional banks pull back. Mr. Pandit plans to make more investments along these lines, according to a person familiar with his thinking who spoke on condition of anonymity…

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The regulators, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, plan to announce the actions as soon as next month, according to people briefed on the matter. Under the terms of the civil orders, the bank will have to acknowledge internal flaws and dole out at least $80 million in fines, said the people, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

The most costly cases for JPMorgan center on concerns that the bank duped its credit card customers into buying products pitched as a way to shield them from identity theft. In separate actions reflecting their varied jurisdictions, the consumer bureau will levy a roughly $20 million fine, while the comptroller’s office is expected to extract about $60 million.

In another set of actions, the regulators are aiming at the bank for the way it collected overdue bills from consumers, the people said. It is unclear whether those cases will yield any fines.

Even if some fines are assessed, those penalties will barely nick the bottom line of the bank, which earned record profits in recent quarters. Yet the actions represent one element of a broader federal crackdown on JPMorgan…..

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