Banking

Hey, Wall Street? Chicken Little called. She says you need to stop overreacting to JPMorgan Chase's $2 billion trading loss. I mean, it's not as if the sky were falling. For a bank this big, $2 billion? It's practically rounding error.

AIG is on its way to eclipsing Bank of America as the turnaround story of 2012 as it prepares to report earnings after Thursday's close. Analyst bullishness and a New York Fed asset sale have shareholders pumped.

Prankster activists the "Yes Men" got the better of Bank of America recently, but the facts they highlighted are serious. Despite massive government bailouts, BofA executives are still putting their own interests above those of their customers.

It's unlikely that random people will just give you the money you need to float you through your ordinary fiscal troubles. But they might make you a loan. Peer-to-peer lending, where borrowers bypass big banks and get loans directly from other individuals, is getting bigger all the time.

Taking aim at the many Americans who don't have a credit card or checking account but are inclined to shop online, Walmart is now allowing customers to pay in cash for online orders.

On Tuesday morning, my wife and I discovered our Chase Bank account had been hacked. By that afternoon, I realized we were part of something much bigger. But even a data breach that affected up to 1.5 million accounts is only the tip of the bank fraud iceberg.

Faced with the prospect of becoming the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, Stockton, Calif., decided on a novel gambit: They just stopped paying some of their bills.