Remember credit default swaps? AIG? Hopelessly entangled exotic financial instruments tied to esoteric asset valuations that caused cascading defaults in 2008 and threatened to tank the global financial system unless taxpayers ate all the losses? Remember how we reformed Wall St. to make sure that never repeated itself? Someone tell Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley, because they've teed the whole damn thing up again, this time in Europe.

Michael Bloomberg is yet again treating Wall Street protesters' gripes with his unique style of empathy, "utter dismissiveness." The billionaire, who can thank the robust growth of the financial services sector over the decades for his fortune, knows the truth! The banks did nothing wrong; it was all Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Congress forcing everyone else to give houses to poor people.

Europe will apparently not fall apart after German chancellor Angela Merkel shepherded a deal early Thursday morning to write down Greek's debt. It's complicated, but basically she got a bunch of banks to take a 50% haircut on what Greece owes them. Click on the image on the right to see how one of the negotiators diagrammed it in the middle of the night.

The economy grew at 2.5% last quarter, up from 1.3% the quarter before, according to newly released data from the Commerce Department. That's just enough growth to keep from plunging more people into the ranks of the unemployed, but nowhere near enough to start digging us out of the hole we're in.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who only 13 days ago declared that he was "increasingly concerned about the growing mobs occupying Wall Street and the other cities across the country," appears to have transformed into a radical communist. He's now acknowledging that America's vast income inequality is potentially problematic. He'll flesh out his ideas in a speech tomorrow at that most suffering of institutions, the Wharton School of Business, where most of the people responsible for our income inequality crisis have picked up a degree or two.

What a basketcase: Groupon has slashed its proposed valuation to $12 billion from $30 billion as it ramps up for an initial public offering. So if you're in the market for a technically insolvent online discounter with shady accounting, now is the time to buy! Goldman Sachs is involved, so you just know it's a good deal.

It's been a rough day for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. His company reported a humiliating $428 million quarterly loss this morning, just the second in Goldman's 12-year history as a public company. We figured he might like a sympathy call from the Occupy Wall Street folks, who know how to get by with less. Here's his cell phone number.

Did you think that, maybe, a growing month-long protest directed against the financial services industry would make investment bankers and money managers start to question themselves? Ha! You have never met a banker, have you?

Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit told a Fortune conference on Wednesday that he "would be happy to talk to" Occupy Wall Street protesters "any time they want." That's so cool of him! Here's his cell phone number. He's waiting for your call.

Time's Michael Scherer digs up this photo from the Romney media archives showing our man Mittens and his old Bain Capital buddies playing with money.

Former hedge fund heavyweight Raj Rajaratnam will do a dime and change in federal prison for his insider trading conviction.

The Federal Reserve is working toward monitoring Facebook and Twitter to find out what people online are saying about the government bank's discount rate, open market operations and overall monetary policy. Do we tell them now that no one on Facebook or Twitter has ever given a shit about any of those things, or leave it for a surprise?

Here's a look at the windows of the Chicago Board of Trade, in which a daring band of the nation's money people have fought back against the Occupy Chicago protest onslaught by declaring, "We are the 1%," with some signs in the windows. Stay strong, Producers! Keep on tradin', tradin' futures, tradin' the night away... [Occupy Chicago]

Investors are willing to gamble less and less on Groupon's imaginary future profits, various fund managers told Bloomberg, thanks to the near constant reminders about just how imaginary those profits are. One fund manager thinks the online coupon startup has seen its value fall to as low as $3 billion from $25 billion.

Bank of America's web site has been intermittently down today, which happens to be one day after the company announced a new policy of charging customers for the right to access the money that they gave to Bank of America (think of it as a negative interest rate).

For the first time in two years, Americans' income fell last month. The drop was a meager .1%, but it was accompanied by a .2% increase in spending, which means your costs went up by twice the amount your pay was cut. But don't worry, because analysts estimate that corporate earnings of the S&P 500 companies will increase by 13% this quarter, so maybe you can borrow some from them? Just blue-skying here.

Here's a pretty remarkable interview with independent stock and forex trader Alessio Rastani on the BBC this morning, in which he's either being perfectly candid about how traders are viewing the Eurozone crisis, or he's just trolling. Anyway, he's a sociopath.

The Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee responded to congressional Republicans' unprecedented letter warning that "further intervention by the Federal Reserve could exacerbate current problems or further harm the U.S. economy" by, well, intervening further anyway! Slightly further. Helpfully further? Eh, probably not.

Netflix is a company in crisis. Their stock price is plunging and subscribers are abandoning them en masse, in protest of a 60 percent price increase levied against anyone who wants to retain both streaming and mail service.

"Retirement." Historians tell us that the word refers to an obsolete ancient practice of living out your elderly years engaged in leisure activities, rather than in scavenging soda cans from neighborhood recycling bins to supplement your meager Wal-Mart greeter's paycheck.