If there's one firm that has sought to make integrity and squeaky clean customer interactions a marketing priority, it is Charles Schwab. Its appeal was predicated on the down-home, no-nonsense persona of its founder. So it is an outright disaster that New York's Andrew Cuomo intends to bring civil charges against the company.

The state apparently believes that Charles Schwab & Co's brokers "had little idea of what they were selling" when it came to ARSs and failed to inform customers when the market was collapsing, according to Reuters. The firm has come out swinging: "Schwab brokers, while trained to levels beyond industry standards, could not be expected to foresee and disclose market risks that even regulators and market experts did not foresee, or that were intentionally veiled by the underwriters." 

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