Most businesses value their customers, but inherent conflicts-of-interest in the financial services industry unfortunately prove this is too often not true. Here’s why: The daily business in financial services is selling financial products, often without regard to fees and overall costs of the investment. Too often, this means more expensive

Very few industries are as blatantly anti-customer as the financial services industry. And for good reason. Basically, the financial service industry is bi-furcated into two very separate operations that, when they work together, are anti-consumer, while simultaneously being pro-banking and pro-corporate. In everyday life, too many individual investors are routinely

As millions of Americans remain concerned about whether they will have enough money to fund their retirement, they can remain assured that the GOP is intent on making these post-working twilight years as difficult as possible. While retirement once had an appealing ring to it over 50 years ago, that

At first glance, the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was drafted by corporate lawyers and lobbyists, and the arrogance of the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) banks may seem like unrelated events. But what if this arrogance hinted at a building confidence that average people worldwide would now be more accountable to corporations

Being an individual investor today is tough. Not only do you have to suffer through increased market volatility, a low-return environment, worrying about job security and whether you will get a raise, but now there is another new source of concern: your financial services industry trade association. While the vast

If the media and financial services industry ever needed more evidence about why investor confidence in the financial system is so low, they do not have to look far. The U.S. Justice department today said that six banks will be forced to plead guilty to price fixing and anti-trust violations

Financial fraud is a large, profitable business, but you would never know that reading the financial press. That’s because banks and investment firms perpetuating these frauds, aka “perps” on “Law and Order,” are so ingrained into the nation’s financial services fabric that criticizing them is verboten in the mainstream financial

Fool’s mate happens in chess when a player, often a novice, is boxed into a position where any action leads to defeat. That’s the case for individual investors today as evidenced by news stories involving two of the nation’s largest financial institutions. Taken together, these events involving JP Morgan, with

Objectivity in the media has always been a very debatable and contested issue even among the most experienced professional journalists and academics, but so far those discussions have centered on everyday beat and political reporting, and not financial journalism. That’s a mistake because financial journalism today, especially as it is

The financial media is replete with articles about why more Americans are failing to accumulate enough wealth for retirement.  There are many seemingly viable answers, but the problem is that they all come from the monolithic perspective of the financial services industry: investment firms, banks, financial planners, investment counselors and