More From Ex-SEC Lawyer James Kidney on the Agency’s Failing
Former SEC enforcement lawyer James Kidney discusses the agency’s shortcomings and suggests reforms.
Read more...Category Archives: Legal
General Mills Opens New Frontier in Denying Consumers Right to Sue: Just Use Its Products
To enable it to continue to engage in misleading labeling and advertising, General Mills claims that anyone who buys its products or even merely is dumb enough to like it on Facebook has consented to arbitration.
Read more...Edward Snowden Testimony at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
Snowden’s big messages were familiar: the lack of effective supervision of the US surveillance state, the scope and methods of surveillance, and the ability of citizens to protect themselves if they use strong enough encryption of their data and their communications. But it was striking to see, even in such a formal setting, how seriously European officials took his remarks.
Read more...SEC Lawyer on Goldman CDO Case Describes How the Agency Wimped Out
Susan Beck at American Lawyer (hat tip Abigail Field) has managed to get an inside view of what was going on at the SEC when it launched its case against Goldman and a Goldman vice president, Fabrice Tourre, over a Goldman CDO called Abacus that went spectacularly bad. So was the SEC corrupt or merely incompetent?
Read more...Robert Cowley, 2nd Baron Ardwhallan: A Scammer’s Comeuppance
Robert Cowley, CEO of fake bank Investment Suisse, goes to jail for fraud
Read more...Correcting the Record on Another Misleading CalPERS Press Release
An alert reader sent me a link to a CalPERS press release, dated March 14, before the one we rebutted in the post CalPERS Tries Ineffective Mudslinging in Response to Our Ongoing Private Equity Investigation This earlier press release was not as consequential, so we decided to wait till the weekend to address it.
Read more...Young Owners of Low-Budget GM Cars Weren’t Worth Saving
Writer libbyliberal describes how the Obama Administration’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration worked with GM for years to cover up the automaker’s ignition system defect that would lead to sudden power system failure. That fault is estimated to have caused at least 13 deaths and over 30 crashes. It’s also a textbook case of crapification.
Read more...CalPERS Tries Ineffective Mudslinging in Response to Our Ongoing Private Equity Investigation
Yesterday I learned that a press release that the California Public Employees’ Retirement Systems issued last Friday about our suit against the giant public pension fund. It’s quite a remarkable document, and not in a good way.
Read more...Slumlord Wannabe Blackstone Violates Local Housing Laws by Making Tenants Maintain Rentals
The yawning gap between private equity landlord sales talk and what they are delivering is finally being exposed.
Read more...Reuters Reports that CalPERS “Lawyered Up” in Response to Our Public Records Suit
Reuters is keeping tabs on some of the developments in our ongoing dispute with the nation’s largest public pension fund, CalPERS.
Read more...Chris Whalen Goes Off the Deep End, Issues Error-Filled Screed in Defense of Mortgage Servicers
I once had a good opinion of bank analyst Chris Whalen, despite having some reservations about him. But his error-filled screed against mortgage servicing regulations means he can no longer be taken seriously on the subject of banking. Whalen has become a textbook illustration of the Upton Sinclair saying, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Read more...Los Angeles Public Pension Fund Tells Us It Is a Happy, Trusting Victim of Investment Managers
Our efforts to learn more about the private equity industry are revealing how determined public pension funds are to hiding as much as they can, even when they don’t have a legal leg to stand on.
Read more...CalPERS’ Private Equity Scandals and the Steptoe & Johnson Report Whitewash
A review of the history of CalPERS’ pay to play scandal and the report prepared by Steptoe & Johnson raises quite a few troubling issues. It’s no wonder they are stymieing my requests for information.
Read more...Delaware Chief Justice to Shareholders: Drop Dead
We’ve argued that the notion that companies are obligated to maximize shareholder value is a theory made up by economists and eagerly adopted by corporate executives, with little to no foundation in law. We received confirmation of our thesis in the form of a Columbia Law Review article by the chief justice in Delaware, Leo Strine, arguing that shareholder activism needs to be curbed. As if CEOs are really breaking a sweat over those pesky shareholders.
Read more...Google, Apple, and Other Tech Titans’ Wage-Suppression Conspiracy Estimated to Cover One Million Workers
You have to give credit where credit is due. Technology leaders like acting on a grand scale, and that apparently includes when they engage in criminal conspiracies.
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