Wall Street misconduct, the SEC, crypto, private equity, hedge funds, sports betting.
103 articles · page 5 of 6
The famous scene in “Casablanca,” in which police commissioner Captain Renault (Claude Rains) tells ex-patriate Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) that he is “shocked” to see gambling going on in the casino-bar, has earned its place in movie history. Now, investors will be similarly “shocked” to hear that JP Morgan’s brokerage arm is pushing its sales…
Very few industries are as blatantly anti-customer as the financial services industry. As the following stories show, key elements of the financial industry are actively promoting legislative, regulatory and legal campaigns designed to denigrate any benefits to customer-investors, including a powerful campaign underway by a financial trade group to derail any pro-fiduciary actions from the…
How an SEC Employee, Kathleen Furey, Confronted Intentional Inaction at the SEC As noted on this site for a few years, the SEC is working against investor interests on a daily basis. Either through inaction, delays, obfuscation of the facts or derailing investor complaints, the SEC has a long history of being anti-investor, with too…
There is more bad news for hedge funds, which saw $1 trillion in redemptions in 2007-2008. A new study in Alpha magazine study shows there is more good reason to question hedge funds. The reason: Most do not even beat the S&P 500 index. Plus, the managers also don’t pay their full share of taxes…
Regulatory capture, or the practice which occurs when government regulators become too friendly with the industry they are regulating, is a well-documented sociological-political event. It happens in every industry regulated by state and federal governments, especially those agencies which regulate the financial services industry. What makes regulatory capture among financial regulators especially egregious is that…
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” (Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose) –French Proverb Today’s announcement that the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. (FINRA), the brokerage industry’s regulator, will be looking at information from 14 large firms regarding potential conflicts of interest related to compensation and product sales, should…
The nomination of Mary Jo White to be the next SEC chairwoman raises serious questions about that agency’s revolving door policy and how conflicts-of-interest can be publicly flaunted without any serious repercussions. Based on reports from the New York Times, when White’s name was floated for the top SEC position, she was offered a stipend…
“The more things change, the more they remain the same” (Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose) is an old French expression that conveys the pessimism of established practices. This is especially evident in the phrase plus ça change that “indicates a certain disillusionment or resignation regarding whatever is being talked about. A company…
The developing scandal involving years of price rigging of the London Interbank Offering Rate (LIBOR) should not be relegated to the financial pages alone. Instead, it should become a key element to counter the Republican’s incessant push towards deregulation as the most recent large scale example of abuses in the deregulated markets. As recent news…
It is certainly no surprise to readers of this site that the financial services industry ranks as one of the most reactionary in the U.S. For hundreds of years, it has always been “heads I win, tails you lose” for the individual investor. Now, the group dedicated to pushing through the adoption of a fiduciary…
While all men are created equal, history proves that over time, some men become more equal than others. That is certainly the case at the highest levels of Wall Street where the ability to move markets give the largest and most secure profits to those who are more equal than others. On Monday (April 16,…
If individual investors have not gotten the message so far, here is another message that comes from the mutual fund industry: The commissions your broker generates are more important than any investment return you receive. Or in investment industry jargon, it’s all about the “yield to broker” and not about anything the client earns.
Belittling and attacking Greg Smith, the ex-Goldman derivatives trader, who wrote about his personal experiences and opinions based on working at Goldman Sachs, has become a cause celeb. But comments from reporters who cover Wall Street show some serious prejudices and deficiencies in their journalistic perspectives.
Just as momentum is building inside Congress to enact new rules prohibiting insider trading among elected officials, an opposing Objectivist view (advocated by adherents of Ayn Rand) is being aired which contends that insider trading should be legalized. The rationale?
Investment pundits have identified at least 15 distinct types of investment risks. Now, we can add another: broker risk. After the Bernie Madoff scandal, investors again saw that sociopathic money managers could steal entire accounts. Now, investors have seen that entire brokerage firms can similarly confiscate customer money, even though it is supposedly held in…
Large banks which set one of the institutional investing world’s most important interest rate-setting benchmarks–LIBOR–are being accused of price fixing by some of the largest regulators in the world. In a series of lawsuits filed in 2011, plaintiffs charge that dating back to the start of the current financial crisis in 2008, 19 international banks…
Federal prosecutions fof certain financial crimes has reached a 20-year low, according to a new report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.
Citigroup Inc. and Deutsche Bank have agreed to pay $165.5 million to settle federal regulators’ claims that they misled five failed credit unions about the risk of securities tied to mortgages. The National Credit Union Administration announced the settlements Monday over securities that the big Wall Street banks sold the five wholesale credit unions. After the…
The ongoing tug-of-war between all parties concerning financial services reform got some added dimensionfrom a report on CBS’s 60 Minutes about legal insider trading involving the elected members of the U.S. Congress. The report found that trading on insider information involving stocks, IPOs and real estate-related legislation which nets elected officials millions, yet is perfectly legal. Those officials…
The 2008 financial crisis has assumed its role in economic and social history, and continues to get ongoing momentum from the severe recession it created, as well as the ongoing social protests. Yet while there has been extensive analysis of the misdirected and Frankenstein financial engineering which precipitated the recession, not much is known about…
