Jeff Horwitz

The painful and embarrassing loss at the bank's chief investment office "plays right into the hands of a bunch of pundits out there," the CEO admits.

Many of the country's largest banks received $6 billion in kickbacks from mortgage insurers over the course of a decade, according to a previously undisclosed investigation by the Inspector General of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Warren Buffett's $5 billion public vote of confidence in Bank of America, happily for him, does not require actual confidence. The terms of the legendary investor's deal, which grants Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. $5 billion in perpetual preferred stock and warrants to buy B of A stock at just over $7 a share, include no lockup period.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has petitioned to intervene in the proposed $8.5 billion Bank of America Corp. private label mortgage settlement.

David Stevens arrived as a commissioner at the Federal Housing Administration in 2009 vowing to restore financial discipline to a government housing body facing the stresses of a post-crash world. A former mortgage banker himself, Stevens, now 54, bolstered the agency's finances and pursued alleged wrongdoing at nonbank lenders including Berkshire Hathaway and Goldman Sachs & Co. affiliates.