Last week, Crain’s Business Daily and Fortune reported that a whistleblower has provided the SEC with evidence of massive, ongoing violations of securities laws, specifically, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, by several unnamed private equity firms.
Read more...Coffee, a highly respected securities law professor as well as a frequent critic of regulators., he takes a hard look at the SEC’s claims that its performance has improved and finds them wanting.
Read more...Even during the pre-Lehman days of the financial crisis (yes, Virginia, there were three acute episodes before the Big One), blogs and professional investors in my various e-mail conversations would discuss the idea that the Fed had a “plunge protection team” which would intervene to stem market routs.
Read more...Haim Bodek is a former Goldman and UBS trader, more recently the founder of his own trading firm, who has come firmly out against how stock exchanges work with high frequency traders. Readers spoke approvingly of this recently-released short documentary about his efforts.
Read more...A sceptical look at anti-carbon-scam enforcement activities in the UK.
Read more...At the risk of self-promotion, allow me to point you in the direction of a piece by me running today in The New Republic. It’s about a proposed update to the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule, and how the financial services industry, along with members of both parties, are working to stop it. An excerpt:
Read more...Yesterday, we discussed how a family private equity firm Swift River, which is owned in part by Tony James, Blackstone’s head of private equity business, purchased a software company called iLevel Solutions rom Blackstone itself.
Today, we are going to examine iLevel in greater detail. We will see that this company is built from the ground up as vehicle to convince PE investors and the SEC that Blackstone and other PE firms have implemented robust financial controls over the companies they own. The reality, however, is the opposite
Read more...Yves here. This is a terrific post, and I think readers who are in the unfortunate position of having to invest in the markets will relate to Sethi’s analysis (personally, I hate trading, I wish it were possible to be a long-term investor, but that’s become an awful lot like driving a Model T on a Nascar track). The use of Intrade data and discussing Obama v. Romney-biased speculators is both clever and makes the discussion accessible. And I must confess to being very attached to my “priors” and too willing to fight the tape!
Read more...Nothing like the prospect of someone with a high profile and a track record of going toe to toe with powerful interests and rich enough not to be beholden to party machinery to bring out all sorts of hacks and score-settlers.
Read more...Wall Street must get indigestion every time Frontline rolls out another program showing the depths of its chicanery. The only problem is the industry deserves much worse punishment.
Read more...Yesterday, we featured an important article by Noam Scheiber on how Obama insiders cash out on their connections once they leave the fold. Today, in the Wall Street Journal, we read of the Congressional version in terms of how a tip by a lobbyist (and former Congressional aide) connected to an investment research firm led to a Congressional decision being leaked to investors before it was announced officially.
Read more...By Timothy Wise, Director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and Environment Institute, Tufts University. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
Just when you thought the unhealthy ties between food, fuel, and financial markets couldn’t get more perverse, we get the announcement that Vitol, the world’s largest independent oil trader, is entering the grain-trading business, hiring a team from Viterra, based in Toronto, to run the show. And lest we toss this off as just another corporate deal, Javier Blas in the Financial Times reminds us that Viterra has itself recently been bought by Glencore, perhaps the world’s greatest global commodity speculator.
What could go wrong?
Read more...By Lynn Parramore, a senior editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet
Editor's note: This article is the first in a new AlterNet series, "The Age of Fraud."
Hustlers. Cheaters. Crooks. American business has always had them, and sometimes they’ve been punished. But today, those who cheat and put the rest of us at risk are often getting off scot-free. The recent admission of Attorney General Eric Holder that systemically dangerous megabanks may escape prosecution because of their size has opened a new chapter in fraud history. If you know your company won’t be prosecuted, a perverse logic says that you should cheat and make as much money for shareholders as you can.
Read more...You may have seen a big outbreak in the academic literature and business media of defenses of liquidity for liquidity’s sake, evidently prompted by increased interest in and in the EU, implementation of transaction taxes as a way to tame speculation and secondarily raise revenues.
Read more...It isn’t clear how effective the pushback against stratospheric top-level compensation will be, but the howls in the European media suggests that the corporate overlords really are concerned.
Read more...