Your customized headlines for Sat, Mar 17, 2012

March 16 (Bloomberg) -- Attorney Lynn Szymoniak had spent a career investigating insurance fraud when a bank moved to foreclose on her Florida home in 2008. Almost four years later, the fraud she said she uncovered by combing through mortgage documents earned her $18 million.

Greg Smith doesn't know the half of it.

Smith, now the most famous former Goldman Sachs derivatives salesman on the planet, went off on his former employer in the opinion pages of the New York Times this past week — much to the amazement of nearly everyone — because he claimed that during his 12years at the firm, the ethics and morals of his co-workers deteriorated so dramatically that he just couldn't take it anymore.

Sen. Kent Conrad has been the Democrats' balanced-budget guy for more than a decade, and the job takes a toll. His wife paints the North Dakotan as a lonely Cassandra with Power Point slides, warning of a debt-ridden future liberals and conservatives alike would rather ignore.

AS OF DECEMBER, the U.S. government is no longer in the business of minting $1 coins with the faces of U.S. presidents on them, except a limited number for collectors. The Obama administration said that the decision would cut government waste. Americans use so few coins that banks end up returning 40 percent of their allotments to the Federal Reserve each year. The Fed has accumulated 1.4 billion of them, which it must store in warehouses at considerable expense. Suspending production of new coins for circulation will save $50 million per year over the next few years, according to the administration.

By now, you've probably heard of Americans Elect, the political-reform group funded by a collection of Wall Street executives (some of whom remain anonymous) who hope to field a bipartisan presidential ticket in 2012.

Sen. Kent Conrad has been the Democrats' balanced-budget guy for more than a decade, and the job takes a toll. His wife paints the North Dakotan as a lonely Cassandra with Power Point slides, warning of a debt-ridden future liberals and conservatives alike would rather ignore.

— Ezra is guest-hosting "Up with Chris Hayes" on MSNBC this weekend.

—Why finish books?

—Confronting South by Southwest's white male nerd culture.

—Perhaps the House's GOP freshmen weren't that defiant after all.

It wouldn't be a Friday afternoon without a federal regulation dump, and today is no exception. The White House has just put out new rules on its contraceptives mandate that, among other things, could disappoint some college students.

A former Goldman Sachs employee suggests an alternative way to rein in the excesses of Wall Street. John Coates left the industry to become a neuroscientist, and he believes that excess cortisol levels contributed to the recent financial crisis, the Financial Times reports: