A global crackdown on bank secrecy and offshore tax havens is gaining steam due to  the worldwide financial crisis, the head of the OECD told CNBC.

The watchdog of the Securities and Exchange Commission has found that three agency exams and two investigations of Bernard Madoff's business were incompetent, despite ample warnings of the multibillion-dollar fraud.

R. Allen Stanford’s relationship with the chief regulator of his Antigua bank was closer than most. At a meeting in 2003, they became blood brothers, cutting their wrists and mixing their blood in a “brotherhood ceremony” that Mr. Stanford’s chief financial officer said promoted an elaborate scheme to hide a multibillion-dollar fraud from American and other regulators.

Late Tuesday, a federal appeals court, without explanation, denied Allen Stanford's petition to remove U.S. District Judge David Hittner from his criminal case.

The industry self-regulatory organization that was supposed to police the brokers at the Stanford Financial Group acknowledges it received a tip from an employee in 2003 that the company was running a Ponzi scheme, but did not follow up on it because of the agency's own policy.

Several banks, including two in the U.S., face new scrutiny as investors and regulators try to sort out the alleged Stanford Ponzi scheme, CNBC has learned. At issue: what the banks and regulators knew about massive deposits and withdrawals from Stanford over the years.

A deal with Switzerland settling U.S. demands for the names of suspected tax dodgers from a Swiss bank has a lot of wealthy Americans with offshore accounts nervously running to their tax advisers -- and the Internal Revenue Service.

This week General Electric agreed to pay $50 million to settle a suit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission that said the company fiddled with its books repeatedly early in this decade. In at least one case, that allowed it to preserve its reputation for making the numbers. Some of the details are eerily reminiscent of Enron.

The SEC said Thursday that former American International Group CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg agreed to pay a $15 million fine to settle fraud charges.

A regulatory ban on so-called flash trading, which gives some big brokerage firms a split-second advantage in buying and selling stocks, will take time to implement, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro told CNBC.

The financial crisis may have left investment banking bruised and embarrassed, but analysts say an industry comeback is on the way, even if it means competing in a dramatically different marketplace.

The mayors of two New Jersey cities, a current and former state legislator and five rabbis were among more than three dozen people arrested Thursday in a sweeping corruption investigation.

The Obama administration on Tuesday sent Congress legislation seeking to tighten government oversight of Wall Street's credit rating agencies and stem potential conflicts of interest in their business practices to protect investors.

Though Sonia Sotomayor is widely expected to win confirmation to the US Supreme Court, the business community is still wondering just what kind of justice she'll be

Federal prosecutors in North Carolina filed criminal fraud conspiracy charges against Beazer Homes USA on Wednesday, but they agreed to dismiss the case if the company complies with an agreement accepting responsibility for certain wrongdoing and pays millions to victims.