If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
Even though there is never a sure thing on Wall Street, many people thought this would be the exception. After all, it's Facebook we're talking about.
If Congress is truly serious about banking reform, it needs more than just well-intentioned laws: it also needs the right people to enforce those laws, it needs to give those people the resources they require to do their job properly, and it needs to pay them decently.
In the wake of Wall Street recklessness that caused economic collapse, Congress gave shareholders and citizens Dodd-Frank to help them constrain self-dealing corporate executives. The 99% Coalition and shareholders are working with those tools even as Republicans vow to take them away.
Companies should get out of the political spending game and focus on doing what they were created to do: make a profit for their shareholders.
Here we have this enormous dichotomy between insider trading in stocks and bonds, and commodities. The difference being, with commodity trading, most everyone is impacted.
Coming this fall, as President Obama makes his final push for a second term, his Justice Department will finally give the public what it wants in the form of an arrest of a major Wall Street figure for his role in the financial crisis.
This was not really about the long-term good of Walmart, which will now undergo a long, expensive and destructive scandal that will also suck in a new generation of (possibly) innocent executives, employees and shareholders. This was about personal self-interest in the short term.
Outright theft of your assets has now become a family affair. The SEC recently announced two cases where investors lost millions of dollars to family scammers.
Investors who are victims of crime or financial fraud might have an easier time dong background search in trying to avoid Ponzi schemes before making investments than guessing which bank, Future Commission Merchant, or broker goes bankrupt.
The $22 million agreement with Goldman Sachs which the SEC announced yesterday -- another one in which the guilty party "neither confirms nor denies wrongdoing" -- looks like the worst deal yet.
Is the SEC looking into traditional malfeasance -- the usual seamy kickbacks or bribes -- or the more esoteric: faster portals into exchange servers for certain select customers? This range of "advantages" may be built into the very concept of HFT. Will the SEC put HFT itself on trial?
This pending law is a game-changer for the biggest risk-takers in American Capitalism: the entrepreneurs who are creating jobs by starting and growing companies and the investors who provide them with the financial resources to do so. I'm one of the winners of this bill -- but that doesn't mean I'm not attuned to the losers.
The Borsa's solution, especially if it is embraced by other trading destinations, may spawn a new generation of intelligent "sensing" algos.
I find it intriguing that well-educated, successful people would engage in this conduct. It raises these questions: If hedge fund managers have the secret mojo that permits them to obtain outsized returns without taking commensurate risks, why do they have to resort to illegal conduct?
Could the crisis have been averted if our financial regulators were more plugged into the communities that were hit first and hardest?
We've compiled a slideshow of the top 10 oil exporting countries and listed the cost that corruption and financial opacity has on each country's economy.
