SEC waives automatic penalties for criminal conduct, commissioner issues scathing dissent:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...ushpmg00000013Securities and Exchange Commissioner Kara Stein on Monday denounced the regulator's decision to continue providing special benefits to a big bank after its conviction for manipulating interest rates.
The SEC spared Royal Bank of Scotland Group from losing its regulatory status as a well-known seasoned issuer on Friday. The bank was criminally convicted earlier this year for manipulating the Libor benchmark interest rate. The bank's crimes, Stein said Monday in a dissent to the SEC decision, harmed individuals, businesses and governments worldwide.
The SEC issued a waiver to another well-known seasoned issuer after criminal misconduct last fall. Stein said the regulator was wrong then, and "compounded that error when it granted a waiver for another criminal wrongdoer" -- Royal Bank of Scotland Group.
"The arguments in both instances implicate a structural problem with our policy, whether dealing with criminal or civil misconduct," wrote Stein, who was appointed to the SEC by President Barack Obama. "They rest largely upon the notion that the triggering conduct is insignificant when considered in the context of a large financial ins ution with global operations."
Stein faulted the commission for repeatedly waiving disqualification provisions set out by Congress and the SEC at the risk of harming investors and markets. The SEC reserves the well-known seasoned issuer tag for companies that raise large amounts of capital and are widely followed in the market, according to Reuters. Benefits include allowing companies to raise money immediately from securities offerings without waiting for SEC review of do ents.
"We need to step back and think broadly about what these provisions are intended to accomplish, and ask ourselves -- are we achieving the intended goals? Are they being fairly applied to all firms and individuals? Large ins utions should be treated no differently, neither better nor worse, than small and medium-sized issuers," she wrote.
the financial sector (which of course includes govt financial regulatory agencies), all countries, is 100% corrupt, rotten, putrid, septic from top to bottom, and laughing its ass off at how it fleeces the planet with impunity.
Anybody in Congress going to be outraged to any effect? no. financial sector OWNS Congress.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 04-29-2014 at 10:24 AM.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/10/...f-u-s-charges/The Justice Department is preparing a fresh round of attacks on the world’s biggest banks, again questioning Wall Street’s role in a broad array of financial markets.
With evidence mounting that a number of foreign and American banks colluded to alter the price of foreign currencies, the largest and least regulated financial market, prosecutors are aiming to file charges against at least one bank by the end of the year, according to interviews with lawyers briefed on the matter. Ultimately, several banks are expected to plead guilty.
Interviews with more than a dozen lawyers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations open a window onto previously undisclosed aspects of an investigation that is unnerving Wall Street and the defense bar. While cases stemming from the financial crisis were aimed at ins utions, prosecutors are planning to eventually indict individual bank employees over currency manipulation, using their instant messages as incriminating evidence.
one banker in UK was convicted for LIBOR, others to come. of course, top bankers claim ignorance
many banks will plead guilty. the black eye remains and enforcement is ongoing. bankers may actually go to jail.
Geithner supposedly knew about LIBOR fixing, did nothing.
how unsurprising
It doesn't seem to bother SpursTalkers much, but yeah.
or Fox News, or Repugs, or even Dems(except for the tiny few Warrens, Sanders, Merkleys, etc). The financial sector OWNS the planet, starting the US govt at all levels.
One can only hope.
David Dayen follows up on SEC waivers:
http://www.salon.com/2014/10/28/big_...nk_of_america/Kara Stein, a Democratic Commissioner who previously served as a Banking Committee aide to Sen. Jack Reed, has openly rebelled against the waiver policy since arriving at the SEC in August 2013, voting against waivers on five occasions. This April, she went public with a blistering dissent against a waiver for Royal Bank of Scotland, after the criminal conviction of their subsidiary over rigging the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). Thanks to the waiver, Royal Bank of Scotland could continue to offer securities to investors as a “well-known seasoned issuer,” without SEC approval of each offering. This was the 30th such waiver since 2010, 29 of which went to large ins utions and broker-dealers. “I fear that the commission’s action to waive our own automatic disqualification provisions arising from RBS’s criminal misconduct may have enshrined a new policy,” Stein said, “that some firms are just too big to bar.”
Stein, a pro-reform regulator whose insistence on loophole closures significantly improved the final Volcker rule, has persuaded Luis Aguilar, her Democratic colleague, to agree with her stance that automatic penalties from civil or criminal misconduct should not be waived. “The commission and its staff should not be in the business of rubber-stamping and approving all waiver applications simply because a request is made,” Aguilar has said.
The two were able to change SEC policies on waivers, forcing signoff by the commissioners rather than at the staff level. But because SEC chairwoman Mary Jo White typically voted with the commission’s two Republicans, the waivers continued to go through.
In the Bank of America case, however, White had to recuse herself from the decision. As a private attorney, White represented Ken Lewis, who was CEO of Bank of America at the time that they fraudulently sold mortgage-backed securities to investors without disclosing the poor quality of the underlying loans. So without her vote, the commission is deadlocked at 2-2, threatening Bank of America’s ability to secure the waivers.
The penalties kick in as soon as a judge approves the settlement, so Bank of America has sought to delay approval, pending the status of the waivers. As long as Stein and Aguilar hold firm, the sanctions will trigger, or the entire SEC settlement will disintegrate, creating more legal exposure for Bank of America
SEC reopening cases against banks that violated their settlements:
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/10/...=fb-share&_r=0
I'd love to see Liz Warren as Hillary's head of the SEC or running Treasury
nothing but false hopes, smokescreen.
and the SEC, Treasury can't touch the unregulated private banking INDUSTRY.
and payday predator lenders are STILL untouched
There so much financial , fraud, predation, stealing
Student Loan Servicers Tricked Borrowers Into Paying More, Made Illegal Collection Calls
http://consumerist.com/2014/10/29/st...lection-calls/
and then there's these ripoff artists
Obama Administration Rules Target For-Profit Colleges
The Obama administration on Thursday will publish new regulations intended to target for-profit career colleges that leave students with debts they cannot repay.
The U.S. Department of Education rules will sanction schools with students who carry too much debt compared with their earnings after graduation. Programs that fail to meet debt-to-income requirements for two out of three consecutive years would lose eligibility for federal student loans and grants — the primary revenue stream at for-profit colleges.
The for-profit college industry includes schools such as the University of Phoenix, ITT Technical Ins ute and Everest College, owned by Corinthian Colleges Inc., based in Orange County, Calif. Corinthian has been in the crosshairs of more than a dozen state and federal regulators for more than a year amid allegations that the company falsified student job placement rates and steered students into high-interest loans.
The Santa Ana, Calif.-based company announced in July that it would sell the vast majority of its campuses, after the Department of Education restricted access to federal student loans and grants.
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the new regulations are intended to weed out programs that rely heavily on taxpayer subsidies but don’t follow through on promises of career training.
“The quality of these programs today varies tremendously,” Duncan said in a briefing with reporters Wednesday. “While some are strong, today too many of these programs fail to provide the training (students) need, while burying them in debt they cannot repay.”
http://www.nationalmemo.com/obama-ad...ofit-colleges/
Does any serious person question why Repugs/VRWC/conservatives HATE ALL regulations?
and it was Repugs who blocked Warren's bill to allow students-indebted-past-death to re-finance their $1T+ of college debt.
topicality's not really your thing, is it?
file under "100% corrupt, predatory (international, globalized, deregulated, unpoliced) financial sector".
$4B in fines, no prosecutions for six banks caught with their hands in the cookie jar:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/aa81231...1e4-9f65-00144
five big banks get $5B in fines and plead guilty to crimes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/bu...ases.html?_r=0Adding another entry to Wall Street’s growing rap sheet, five big banks have agreed to pay more than $5 billion and plead guilty to multiple crimes related to manipulating foreign currencies and interest rates, federal and state authorities announced on Wednesday.
The Justice Department forced four of the banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland — to plead guilty to an rust violations in the foreign exchange market as part of a scheme that padded the banks’ profits and enriched the traders who carried out the plot. The traders were supposed to be compe ors, but much like companies that rigged the price of vitamins and automotive parts, they colluded to manipulate the largest and yet least regulated market in the financial world, where some $5 trillion changes hands every day, prosecutors said.
Underscoring the collusive nature of their contact, which often occurred in online chat rooms, one group of traders called themselves “the cartel,” an invitation-only club where stakes were so high that a newcomer was warned, “Mess this up and sleep with one eye open.” To carry out the scheme, one trader would typically build a huge position in a currency and then unload it at a crucial moment, hoping to move prices. Traders at the other banks agreed to, as New York State’s financial regulator put it, “stay out of each other’s way.”
Federal prosecutors had previously agreed not to prosecute the Swiss bank over the Libor scheme. But in a rare stand against corporate recidivism, the Justice Department voided that non-prosecution agreement after UBS was accused of taking part in the effort to manipulate currency prices.
Mr. Lawsky has said that he is examining whether Barclays and other banks used electronic foreign exchange trading platforms to cheat their clients. The settlement announced on Wednesday did not release the bank from any future penalties.
my assumption is that the entire financial industry is a corrupt cesspool, and many within it agree
Pressure To Act Unethically Looms Over Wall Street, Survey Finds
A new survey of financial professionals tends to confirm the widely held belief that the financial industry has an ethics problem.
Among the more than 1,200 financial professionals in the U.S. and Britain who were surveyed, about half the respondents believe their compe ors in the industry have behaved unethically or illegally to gain an advantage in the market.
Ann Tenbrunsel, one of the authors of the study, says that perception, even if it's just a su ion, does not bode well for the industry.
"Our behavior is influenced by the norms that we believe exist in the industry, the norms that we believe exist in the organization," she says. "If there's an increased salience of the fact that everybody else is doing this, we also know from psychological research on peer pressure that I will be more likely to do it myself."
Tenbrunsel, of the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, partnered with the law firm Labaton Sucharow to do the study. The firm, which often represents whistleblowers in cases involving financial industry wronging, did a previous study in 2012.
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/19/408010...t-survey-finds
And Repugs/VRWC want to hand $Ts in Soc Sec funds to these thieving s bags.
Lloyd Blankfein claims Goldman Sacks is doing God's work
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