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Mark Gimein’s piece on MRIs, “The Machine That’s Bankrupting America” was not received well by TBM readers. “Wow. Thanks for misrepresenting the state of Americn healthcare,” milano87 writes before itemizing her clarifications on the piece and the healthcare system.

In his testimony before the members of the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner talked a lot about the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency. That’s the independent body that will be in charge of safeguarding consumers from misleading or abusive credit card, mortgage, and other loan practices. Geithner said that the agency won’t treat all financial firms as equals though. “The CFPA will allocate its oversight resources on the basis of risk to consumers,” he said.

An AP story today notes that the estimates of how much investor money Bernie Madoff lost have been wildly exaggerated. You'll recall that since Madoff's arrest last December, the figure of $50 billion was widely cited.

This week, the Securities and Exchange Commission moved forward with its attempt to shed light on the “dark corners” of the U.S. stock market. The commission proposed a ban on so-called “flash orders,” which “allow a select group of traders to see requests to buy and sell stocks and other securities a split second before the rest of the market,” the Washington Post reports.

Later this month, The Big Money Editor James Ledbetter will conduct an exclusive one-on-one interview with Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor and author of the just-released book SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth and Social Good.

Later this month, The Big Money Editor James Ledbetter will conduct an exclusive one-on-one interview with Robin Chase, founder and former CEO of the pioneering car-sharing service Zipcar, and currently the CEO of the ride-sharing service GoLoco. We'll be talking about car-sharing, innovation and technology.

A front-page story in Sunday’s New York Times discussed what the paper describes as Wall Street’s next big money-making scheme: buying “life settlements.” What’s a life settlement? Basically, it’s the selling of your life insurance policy to some third party in exchange for cash. The buyer becomes your policy’s beneficiary and takes over payment of the premiums. Upon your death, whoever bought your policy no longer has to pay the premiums and gets to collect your death benefit.

As we approach the anniversary of Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy, new meltdown memes are entering the media stream. Over the weekend, Richard Beales of Breakingviews.com assessed the state of the prime brokerage business (that is, helping hedge funds to manage and trade against their holdings) and concluded: Everything has changed.

Floyd Norris’s New York Times column this morning is not exactly pegged to this month’s anniversary of the meltdown. Nonetheless, Norris offers up a meme we suspect will recur throughout this month’s coverage, namely: Ben Bernanke is a genius.

Facebook has rarely been the platform for propriety. And yet, when a barrier is crossed like, say, buying people, it shocks the senses. That’s where uSocial comes in.

“Friends: people say they can't be bought, though in this day and age it's simply not the case,” is the marketing battle cry of this upstart with a simple mission. They promise that their Facebook marketing service can net you friends “in packages up to 5,000.”