Big news out of the online lending space, as Lending Club’s chair and CEO—Renaud Laplanche—has resigned after an internal review “showed a violation of the company’s business practices” related to sales of $22 million in loans to a single investor in a manner against the investor’s wishes. LC’s been struggling to meet expectations after its late-2014 IPO, and shares were down more than 30% on the news of Laplanche’s departure – NYTimes and WSJ and Bloomberg
The news certainly isn’t helping the peer-to-peer lending community as a whole – NYTimes and WSJ
And the investigation isn’t likely to stay internal, either – Bloomberg
Streetwise looks at the numbers behind dividend yields and concludes that as attractive as they may seem at the moment, they’re actually only deceptively so – WSJ
With news that Puerto Rico is facing yet another default in short order (this time of more than $800 million), Treasury Secretary Jack Lew visited the island commonwealth yesterday in an attempt to “pressure Republicans in Congress to move quickly on a rescue package” – NYTimes
We’ve got some initial results from the global negative interest experiments, and they’re a bit surprising—especially as compared to traditional QE – WSJ
German-backed JAB Holding has sweetened its offer to take Krispy Kreme private (and add it to JAB’s Keurig Green Mountain, Peet’s, and Caribou portfolio), but Breakingviews suggests others looking to take a bite out of KK could mean this is not an entirely done deal – NYTimes and WSJ
Desperate for the inside scoop (about a year after the fact) on the goings-on behind the scenes at Valeant? Please enjoy a look at some of the exchanges between Bill Ackman and former CEO Mike Pearson – MarketWatch
Britain’s FCA added two convictions to a handful of guilty pleas in its crackdown on insider trading [known as “conspiracy to ‘insider deal’” in the UK] that sprang from its Operation Tabernula investigation and March 2010 raids – NYTimes and Bloomberg
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca is far from the only law firm embroiled in the massive Panama Papers leak. New docs show that plenty of big-name US firms were right there in the mix – Law360
ESPN3 (“the Tres”) went back to some of its parent’s old-school roots by airing a slightly lesser-known competition this week. That would be the Mathcounts national championship for middle-school mathletes. Good on you, the Tres (and good for those kids. Whoa nelly) – Deadspin