First there’s Andrew Cuomo going after Charles Schwab for their misdeeds.

In an official notice sent to Charles Schwab & Co. Friday, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo warned that his office plans to sue the largest online brokerage firm for civil fraud over its marketing and sales of auction-rate securities to clients. Emails and testimony cited in the letter show Schwab’s brokers had little idea of what they were selling and later failed to tell clients that the market was collapsing.

Auction-rate securities — short-term debt instruments whose prices reset in periodic auctions — caused billions in losses for investors after the $330 billion market collapsed in early 2008.

They’ve played their part in harming our economy. But as Robert Kuttner says they’re not the only ones.

In addition, the financial sector has not yet returned to health, despite outsized profits (and bonuses) reported by the likes of Goldman Sachs. This is the kind of purely financial engineering that caused the collapse. The fevered activity at Goldman is a sign of lingering economic illness, not economic health. The rest of the economy, which depends on the financial sector for real investment capital, is still deeply depressed.

The banks with their bailouts are like vampires sucking the US economy dry it would seem.  I also think the first paragraph of Kuttner’s piece neatly describes the current state.

We are still at the stage of the recession where economic downdrafts are producing more downdrafts. Reduced purchasing power leads to fewer retail and factory sales and more layoffs, further reducing consumer demand. The Obama stimulus package, about 2.5 percent of GDP for each of two years, doesn’t make up enough of the difference. But the federal deficit, caused mainly by falling revenues and not by increased public spending, is alarming the budget hawks. The administration worries, correctly, that deficits will be high for several years to come and wonders who will keep lending Uncle Sam the money. Yet cutting back spending before recovery comes would be suicidal.

At this point how can you trust the financial sector? What is worse is their refusal to be regulated.