Financial Watch

President Obama’s speech on Wall Street last week signals that a year after one of the worst financial panics in U.S. history, financial reform is on its way. Though reform will not prevent all future crises, it will make them less frequent and less likely to pose the same lethal threat to the economy.

That reform is necessary almost goes without saying. The financial system issued trillions of dollars in bad loans over the last decade – loans unlikely to be repaid under even the best of circumstances – creating the fodder for the subsequent financial panic and Great Recession. Its legal merits aside, the recent Securities and Exchange Commission suit against Goldman Sachs Group Inc. brings into sharp relief all that we feared about the financial system: that it has become opaque, conflicted, and dysfunctional.

Some of the largest U.S. banks were ranked very low for retail customer satisfaction, a marketing research company said on Thursday.

The study implies that as some of the biggest banks get bigger, customers may not be happy.

Smaller banks and even large regional banks fared better than their colossal counterparts, according to the survey from J.D. Power and Associates.

The three biggest U.S. retail banks — JPMorgan Chase & Co’s Chase, Citigroup’s Citibank, and Bank of America Corp’s Bank of America — consistently rank at or near the bottom for customer service in the regions they serve, the survey said.

As President Obama heads to New York City on Thursday to press for a major overhaul of financial rules, he faces stiff opposition by Wall Street to the toughest proposed regulatory crackdown since the Great Depression.

A Senate committee on Wednesday approved the final piece of the legislation: strict new oversight of the murky and unregulated market for complex financial derivatives. It is one of three significant provisions that rile Wall Street the most.

World stock markets fell Thursday as mounting concerns about Greece’s debt crisis eroded investor confidence following a bright finish on Wall Street the day before.

In Europe, the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares was down 43.95 points, or 0.8 percent, at 5,679.48 while Germany’s DAX fell 53.15 points, or 0.9 percent, to 6,177.23. The CAC-40 in France fell 40.82 points, or 1 percent, to 3,936.85.

Wall Street was poised to open lower too — Dow futures fell 30 points, or 0.3 percent, to 11,029 while the broader Standard & Poor’s 500 futures fell 4.4 points, or 0.4 percent, to 1,196.

President Barack Obama’s plan to tax financial institutions to recoup funds spent during the government’s bailout of financial firms received tepid enthusiasm from the top tax writer in the U.S. Senate.

Senator Max Baucus, the conservative-leaning Democrat who heads the Senate Finance Committee said on Tuesday he will hold a series of hearings to examine the plan.

But he also said good news on the government’s recouping of its bailout investments may cast doubt on the need for the funds Obama wants to raise.

“We need to learn whether banks will pass it on to consumers, and how it might affect lending to small businesses,” Baucus said.

President Barack Obama will push for his plan to tighten Wall Street regulations in New York on Thursday, the White House said on Monday, as he attempts to overcome solid Republican opposition.

The battle over a financial regulatory overhaul represented a new election-year fault line in Washington after the bruising healthcare debate, and poses a new challenge for Obama as he seeks to gain passage of one of his key domestic priorities.

Democrats have seized on a fraud suit against Goldman Sachs as an example of why Wall Street needs to be cleaned up after a financial crisis that triggered the worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression.