With regulators’ rejection of big-bank living wills still very fresh in mind, the Upshot suggests that keeping powerful banks “on their toes . . . may end up playing a surprisingly important role in keeping the financial regulation effective over time” – NYTimes

Q1 bank and financial firm earnings have been coming in all week.  Not pretty, friends.  Not pretty – NYTimes

Here’s a bizarre side-effect of the negative interest rate craze in certain parts of the world: getting money back on your monthly mortgage statement. Such is the unlikely fate for some property owners in Denmark, for example – WSJ

We know that Verizon and the Daily Mail’s parent company are among the nearly 3 dozen suitors for Yahoo.  What we don’t know—heck, what even they don’t know—is what exactly the current financial landscape looks like at the struggling company, as Yahoo execs “have refused to discuss the outlook for 2017 or answer questions about crucial aspects of the business” – NYTimes

No question, big deals are down, and Wall Street’s plenty willing to throw some serious shade at D.C. for the current state of M&A affairs – NYTimes

In a first-of-its-kind move, the DOJ has arrested and charged two public officials over their “alleged fraud in municipal bond offerings” even as the SEC pursues a parallel civil case against the two men and others – Law360

Dealbook’s William Cohan gives us an updated Bear Stearns postmortem nearly 8 years after the firm’s monumental collapse, thanks in part to a now-public “batch of Bear-related emails from the crisis era” that show internal liquidity concerns beginning as early as 2007 and an unwillingness of Bear’s top execs to raise new equity to fortify its books – NYTimes

For a more recent example [like the past week], here’s the Journal’s play-by-play on the fall of former clean-energy “darling” SunEdison – WSJ

In case you’ve missed news of Starshot amidst all of the day-to-day business on Earth this week, here’s the fascinating plan to launch nanocraft capable of “super fast speeds” to reach Alpha Centauri in just 20 years. We’re talking solar sails and the Lorentz Force and lasers. Gotta love it – Wired

Have a good weekend.