In our current time of intermittent financial panics, the banking sector stands out in its unpopularity: major bank stocks are trading well below the book value of those banks. What has everyone so terrified?

Just a year after JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s cancer diagnosis, another financier health scare: Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who announced to shareholders Tuesday that he has a “highly curable” form of lymphoma. Tough year to be a billionaire banker you say? Sure, I guess.

The Barclays interns who received an absurd email about their upcoming summer at the investment bank may still have to provide their neckties for use as napkins, but it won’t come at the behest of the email’s sender, Justin Kwan, who, according to a source, lost two jobs this week after his missive leaked to the Wall Street Journal.

One in every ten New York residents does not have a bank account. Street homelessness is on the rise. Despite this, there seems to be a new bank branch on every corner. Why? The answer may not surprise you.

Exhaustion may have induced the epileptic seizure that killed a young Merrill Lynch intern in London. The coroner can't be sure, but she told reporters that fatigue is an epilepsy "trigger." The man's family says he didn't complain of strain, but he sometimes sent them emails after ostensibly working through the night.

Goldman Sachs banker Jason Lee was arrested earlier this week after a 20 year old woman accused him of raping her at a rental house in East Hampton, Long Island. According to the New York Times, several East Hampton Town Police officers discovered the victim while responding to an unspecified disturbance at the house Lee was renting with his wife. Lee, speaking through his lawyer, denies everything.

JPMorgan allegedly hired the children of important Chinese officials in order to gain favor when competing for important contracts, according to a new federal investigation.

The recent global economic collapse combined with the cravenness of the banking industry and the general cheez-brained of the American public have made it all but inevitable that eventually the general public would simply start hoarding their few remaining valuables in iron boxes built into their bedframes and/ or outhouses. Some in the safe industry are "reporting sales increases of as much as 40 percent from a few years ago." But what are you people keeping in there?

Having systematically driven the traditional "small town American" hardware store, drug store, grocery store, clothing store, auto parts store, and general store out of business, Wal-Mart has been sitting around, scratching its imaginary head, wondering "What part of traditional American business can I co-opt next, further reducing the traditional American downtown business district to a desolate wasteland and forcing citizens to conduct any and all monetary transactions beneath the sheltering sky of harsh neon lights inside of our very own big, inescapable box?"

The Czech bank Komerční Banka isn't just "a universal bank providing a wide range of services in retail, corporate and investment banking"—it's also a place where you can have satisfying sexual experiences, as this ad proves. The woman featured here just opened up a bank account that charges a low maintenance fee. Just imagine what taking out a loan is like.

I have an idea: I ask you to loan me some money. Then when it's time for me to pay you back, I'll charge you a fee, for holding that money, and another fee, for giving the money back to you. Welcome to the modern American consumer banking system.

You like your precious "free checking?" I bet you do. More like freeloader checking. Sadly, your "free checking" is hurting the needy banking industry, which is why it is going to disappear.

They say you can't take your money with you when you die—and you can't take your debt, either. When people move on to that great air-conditioned lobby in the sky, their banks sometimes ask—and ask, and ask—their grieving families to pay off remaining debts.

We're just one week into the New Year and guess what? We have our first bank failure! The First Commercial Bank of Florida was closed by the FDIC on Friday, and it will only cost $78 million. Not bad.

"Greed, greed, and more fucking greed." We've all heard the schpiel about how we got into this economic mess plenty of times (maybe not enough), but have you heard it from a true Irishman, accent and all? Now you have.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp yesterday announced it was closing four more banks, bringing this year's total to 143 — up from 140 banks closed all of last year. But hey, their total assets should be lower, says the FDIC!

For 12 years, Henrietta Leung drew a $200,000 annual salary at HSBC and Credit Suisse. Laid off during the recession, she's currently exploring a new career path: exposing herself in softly lit photographs. She enjoys it greatly.

After Katrina there were tours of the devastated Ninth Ward. So it makes a kind of twisted sense that, according to Andrew Clark in the Guardian, tourists can now take a guided tour through the financial crisis on Wall Street.

Goldman Sachs is trying its own brand of top kill: The New York Times and Wall Street Journal report the investment bank plans to settle with the SEC for a lesser offense, so it doesn't have to admit to fraud.

Some of the recent financial crisis was blamed on the reckless culture of gambling on Wall Street. The LA Times reports today that they are now literally hiring people with few qualifications beyond a love of poker.