Lois Lerner, the IRS official who headed the division that targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups for special tax scrutiny, invoked her Fifth Amendment right to refuse questions before Congress on Wednesday.

But that doesn't mean that she won't be forced to answer questions. In fact, it's relatively easy for Congress to force her to testify.

In general, Congress hates when government officials refuse to answer questions. This time, of course, it is especially those in the House's Republican majority who are unhappy.

Republican Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, required Lerner to come before the committee and invoke her Fifth Amendment in person at the hearing, rather than just letting her lawyer inform the committee that she's not going to answer their questions. That's not something you do to a witness you regard as friendly.

What Warren Buffett once called "financial weapons of mass destruction" are firing again, with securitization and shadow banking at post-financial crisis highs.

The twin powers of bank funding that helped propel the nation into turmoil have regained ground swiftly, and analysts say it's both a challenge for regulators and a sign that the economy is recovering.

Securitization, or the channels through which banks repackage loans and farm them off to investors, has hit volume of $225.6 billion by way of 365 deals this year, according to Dealogic.

That's a 14 percent increase over 2012 but still miles away from the heady days of 2007, which saw a staggering $777 billion in volume at the same point—right before securitization, and the rest of the mortgage market, came crashing down.

(Read More: Housing Trickle-Down Boosts Home Depot's Profit)

JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon on Tuesday won a crucial shareholder vote rejecting a proposal to strip him of his chairman title, a big victory for the brash leader of the country's largest bank.

Thirty-two percent of shareholders supported the split in roles, down significantly from last year's tally of 40 percent on the same issue, a reversal that will emboldened companies that still embrace having one person serve in the chairman and chief executive roles.

Still, the 57-year-old Dimon must grapple moving forward with a third of his shareholder base who are dissatisfied with him, the bank's board structure and its directors. The heightened pressure could force Dimon to push in the short-term for significant changes to the board.

The scrutiny Dimon has faced in recent years is in sharp contrast to the praise heaped on him earlier for steering JPMorgan Chase successfully through the financial crisis when other institutions were chastised for receiving government bailouts. In recent weeks, Dimon even raised the possibility he would step down if his roles were split.

The bank's shares were up nearly 2 percent in trading Tuesday, to $53.50.

All attention turned to JPMorgan Chase's Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon as the bank began its annual shareholder meeting in Tampa, Florida.

Dimon's dual role as chairman and chief executive had been challenged by a shareholder proposal urging the board to divide the positions. The proposal had the backing of several large pension funds as well as the big shareholder advisory groups I.S.S. and Glass Lewis.

Dimon and the board's opposition to the split succeeded to a surprising extent, holding the vote to split down to 32.2 percent. As they say on Wall Street, Dimon "beat expectations."

(See our recap of today's events here.)

Here's how it all went down:

With the $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, Yahoo is putting a serious claim in for the future of social and mobile technology. Whether it turns out to be a boon or a bust for Yahoo shareholders, the deal will be one of the biggest tests for chief executive Marissa Mayer's leadership.

Let's start with the obvious point. The purchase price is a lot of money. Yahoo is not getting Tumblr on the cheap. At $1.1 billion, the company will be spending about one-fifth of the cash and short term investments it had at the end of its last quarterly statement. This is a big bet for Yahoo.

The six best math students at the all-boys Browning School on Manhattan's East Side were given bad news, and then worse news. Their math teacher had suffered a heart attack and would not be returning to teach—that was the bad news. The worse news was that her replacement did not know calculus.

If the students wanted to continue to study calculus, they would have to teach it to themselves.

Three of the students decided the task was hopeless. The other three stuck it out. They'd go to class each day and work through the problems in their textbooks. There was no teacher in the classroom at all. Just the three students, trying to teach themselves one of the most bedeviling subjects a high school student ever faces.

One of the students who kept up with calculus was Jamie Dimon, the guy who would eventually become the chief executive officer and chairman of the board of the largest bank in the country, JPMorgan Chase. At the time, math was not even his favorite subject—that was history—but it was his strongest.

You might think that the administrators and teachers at Browning would be deeply impressed by this academic dedication. But you would be wrong about that. Even though he graduated fourth in his class, Dimon was rejected by Brown University—in part because of a backhanded recommendation letter written by the assistant headmistress of the school.

"His lack of manners, due to his habits of making quick judgments and contradicting others, is greatly improved," the assistant headmistress wrote, according to Duff McDonald's biography of Dimon, Last Man Standing (from which this school days tale is lifted).

She praised Dimon's "keen, analytical mind" and his "dedication and seriousness of purpose." But she could not avoid mentioning what she saw as his problem with authority. Dimon was too headstrong to win her unqualified praise.

Forty years later, Dimon once again finds himself pitted against the corporate governance equivalent of a legion of assistant headmistresses. A pair of influential shareholder advisory groups, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis, have recommended that shareholders vote to split Dimon's role as chairman and chief executive. The AFSCME Employees Pension Plan, the Connecticut Retirement Plans & Trust Funds, Hermes Equity Ownership Services and various New York City pension funds have issued a shareholder proposal calling on JPMorgan Chase to name an independent chairman.

Whatever course it chooses, the Federal Reserve will have to grapple with the reality that while its policies have helped levitate stocks, they've been considerably less effective at expanding the economy.

While rising equity prices help add to total growth, the stock market is not the economy.

The U.S. economy, rather, is propelled by consumption, which accounts for about 70 percent of gross domestic product.

That consumption in turn, is generated by wealth, and the signs are growing that benefits of a skyrocketing stock market have been disproportionate.

"We've made rich people richer," Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher told CNBC in a Monday interview.

High fees plus poor performance: The formula is pretty easy to determine what makes a bad mutual fund.

Some, though, are worse than others—and some are so bad that they've made it into one publication's unofficial hall of shame for charging big fees but delivering small results.

Funds that depend on bad market performance—"bear funds"—for their growth have done particularly poorly, as have those in precious metals.

Wall Street's stock market mania officially has gone full-throttle.

JPMorgan took the lead Friday in the battle of the bulls, raising its year-end price target for the Standard & Poor's 500 to 1,715. That's a big leap from the firm's original projection of 1,580, which the index blew through on April 24.

The forecast is the highest call among Wall Street strategists, who are uniformly optimistic about the market's prospects this year.

Joe Weisenthal is quite harsh on Michael Kinsley's latest attempt to defend "fiscal discipline" (the policy formerly known as austerity), writing that the famed editor and columnist has "humiliated himself."

What happened is that Kinsley responded to an essay by Paul Krugman titled "Austerity Kills" with a piece in The New Republic titled "Paul Krugman's Misguided Moral Crusade Against Austerity."

Near the end of the piece Kinsley writes: "I don't think suffering is good, but I do believe that we have to pay a price for past sins, and the longer we put it off, the higher the price will be."