More than a year after the cataclysmic collapse of Lehman Brothers just about everyone on Main and Wall Streets agrees that the Market Crisis of 2008 was the economic equivalent of 9/11. Like that tragic event, it galvanized legislators, commentators, and presidential candidates to promise a top-to-bottom overhaul of the financial services industry and its regulators. And it brought to mind the words of FDR: “We [have] to struggle with the old enemies of peace – business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” Democrats and Republicans blamed the government’s inability to oversee and curb Wall Street’s greed but aside from spending hundreds of billions of dollars to prop up banks deemed “too big to fail,” exactly what has Congress done to protect the American economy from its baser instincts in the future?

Wesley Snipes can’t seem to get anything right when it comes to his personal finances. The notorious star of the hit “Blade” trilogy found a new kind of fame last year when he was sentenced to three years in jail for trying to fraudulently obtain $11.4 million of tax refunds between 1999 and 2001.

In what should become the template for the banking industry and Wall Street in all its manifestations, Citigroup this week disposed of its oil trading arm, Phibro, selling it lock stock and oil barrel to Occidental Petroleum. Along with the disposal goes the $100 mm owed its senior oil trader, Andy Hall.

TOKYO When Utako Sakai was changing the background music in her beauty parlor recently, she did not opt for the classical piano pieces she usually chose.

The current recession has stoked deep-seated fears about a declining middle class. A great collective anxiety about such a decline has been floating around for years now, and for good reason.

NEW YORK — Bruce Wasserstein, a prominent Wall Street dealmaker and CEO of Lazard Ltd., was hospitalized with an irregular heartbeat. Wasserstein is in serious but stable condition and is recovering, the company said in a statement late Sunday. Wasserstein, 61, has served as head of Lazard since 2002

NEW YORK — Don’t be alarmed if Bernard Madoff comes knocking this Halloween. The real Madoff pleaded guilty to a decades-long Ponzi scheme that cost investors millions of dollars. The New York financier is now serving a 150-year prison sentence