Financial advisers are winning large arbitration awards against their former firms. During the past three months at least three arbitration panels have ordered financial services firms to pay millions of dollars to financial advisers formerly employed by the firms.
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Sixty-five years ago, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against 17 investment banks seeking to break them up for creating “an integrated, overall conspiracy and combination … to eliminate competition and monopolize” the investment banking business. It failed. Today, the investment banking business is much larger and more profitable, and much more concentrated than it was back then. Only 6 Wall Street firms monopolize the even richer investment banking business today, according to William D. Cohan’s Bloomberg article (“Cohan: How Wall Street Turned a Crisis Into a Cartel”).
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The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) announced that it has reached settlements with Citigroup and Deutsche Bank regarding potential claims relating to the sale of residential mortgage-backed securities to five failed wholesale credit unions. NCUA said that it is the first regulatory agency to recover losses on behalf of failed financial institutions that resulted from investments in residential mortgage-backed securities.
Occupy Wall Street has swept the globe and is generating enormous sympathy and interest in Asia as well as Europe. The spread of Occupy Wall Street to Asia – especially Japan – is further evidence that it is a mistake to dismiss a global groundswell of anger over the flow of money from banks to governments that concentrates wealth in the hands of the 1 percent.
In Japan, the protesters gathered at the swanky Roppongi Hills complex where Goldman Sachs maintains offices. Bloomberg News columnist William Pesek was there, reporting signs saying “No Greed,” “Taxiderm the Rich” and “Stop Vampire Squids,” a reference to Goldman Sachs, which Rolling Stone colorfully characterized as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity” (See “The 1 percent meets 2 billion in search of answers,” Daily Report).
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Many investors, both individuals and corporations, were misled by their brokers and harmed during the credit crisis. For various reasons, however, many such investors have not yet taken action to recover their losses. Some have delayed taking action in order to see whether the misconduct warranted legal action while others just put it off until a later time. Investors need to appreciate that time is running out on their claims, and they should act now or forever hold their peace.
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The crisis in confidence dragging down the economy and financial markets is multi-factorial, but surely a significant part of the problem is that you just can’t trust Wall Street financial institutions to tell the truth about their own financial health, according to John Carney’s CNBC.com article entitled “Wall Street’s Credibility Problem.” He cites Morgan Stanley’s assertion on September 29, 2008, two weeks after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, that it had a “strong capital and liquidity position.” In fact, however, almost all of its available cash was borrowed from the Federal Reserve. The firm actually reached its borrowing peak of $107.3 billion on the very same day it said it had a “strong capital and liquidity position.”
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Matt Taibbi’s recent Rolling Stone article entitled “Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street’s Crimes?” questions whether corruption plagues the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In that article Taibbi meticulously contends that Wall Street banks and their law firms have, over and over again, shut down fraud investigations by influencing senior SEC officials, who later take lucrative jobs at the very banks that were the targets of the investigations or at the law firms representing those banks.
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SEC Enforcement Chief Robert Khuzami recently stated that the SEC’s decision not to charge top executives of Wall Street banks with wrongdoing in cases involving structured products was appropriate, according to Suzanne Barlyn’s Wall Street Journal article entitled “SEC: Structured-Product Cases Haven’t Reached Top Bank Officers.” According to Mr. Khuzami, top executives were not involved in, and did not know about, the key decisions relating to structured product problems.
J.P. Morgan Securities LLC has agreed to pay $153.6 million to settle SEC charges that it misled investors in a complex “built to fail” mortgage securities transaction just as the housing market was starting to plummet.
Best-selling “Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led To Economic Armegeddon,” by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, “calls out greedy guys behind mortgage mess,” according to a USA Today book review by Kathryn Caravan. See also “Home Truths,” by James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal. Both reviews provide examples of how the book peels back layer after layer of a bad onion to reveal how a nice-sounding idea (home ownership for all) turned into a house of cards that was doomed to collapse, after being propped up by private greed and public corruption.
Continue reading "The Subprime Mortgage Mess: How the American Dream Turned into a Nightmare" »
Investors in today’s markets, particularly seniors, are caught between extremely low interest rates and the risk of pursuing higher returns they want or need. Brokerage firms are capitalizing on that dilemma by selling structured products as a way to earn above-market returns purportedly without market risk. But as Robert Powel, editor of MarketWatch’s Retirement Weekly, points out in his article entitled “Investors warned about risky structured products,” structured product sellers routinely overstate the potential upside and understate the potential downside of these investments. The net result has been the rampant destruction of investors’ wealth.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission is broadening its investigation into the world of “built to fail” collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) by looking at Merrill Lynch’s CDO business, according to articles by Marian Wang of Pro Publica (“Merrill Lynch Investigated for CDO Deal Involving Magnetar”) and Kara Scannell of the Financial Times (“SEC Probes $1.5 Billion Merrill CDO Sale). The news is apparently “sending chills” through other banks that put together deals with Magnetar, such as Citigroup, UBS, Wachovia (now Wells Fargo) and Deutsche Bank, according to John Carney of CNBC (“Who Else Did Magnetar Deals?”).
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UBS and other Wall Street banks have found a way to profit from the Madoff ponzi scheme, swooping in like vultures to snap up claims from defrauded investors at a fraction of their nominal value, according to Michael Rothfield’s Wall Street Journal article entitled “Madoff Claims Lure Banks.” At the same time, UBS is being sued by the Madoff bankruptcy trustee for allegedly ignoring warning signs of the fraud while receiving fees as a custodian and sponsor of funds that invested with Madoff. By defending this suit, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland (another bank being sued by the Madoff trustee in connection with the fraud) are effectively “fighting off victims of the fraud, while at the same time seeking to profit from payouts based on other claims.”
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Defense-minded institutions that have long remained on the sidelines when defrauded have finally woken up and are jumping on the plaintiff-recovery bandwagon as they seek to protect themselves against a variety of wrongdoing, according to Vanessa O’Connell’s Wall Street Journal article entitled “Company Lawyers Sniff Out Revenue.” These actions include waves of claims against Wall Street financial institutions for fraud in the sale of mortgage backed securities, CDOs and related exotic investments.
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A California federal court has unsealed a whistleblower suit accusing AIG, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, and Societe Generale of perpetrating a fraudulent scheme to dupe the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the U.S. Department of the Treasury into issuing AIG more than $137 billion in bailout loans during the 2008 financial crisis, according to a Law 360 article by Derek Hawkins entitled “Whistleblower Accuses AIG, Banks of $137B Bailout Fraud,” referencing an amended complaint that had been under seal since September 2010.
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Federal prosecutors have filed a civil mortgage fraud lawsuit against Deutsche Bank and MortgageIT unit for alleged “reckless lending practices,” according to a New York Times Dealbook article entitled “U.S. Sues Deutsche Bank Over Mortgages.” Deutsche Bank acquired MortgageIT in July 2006. The complaint reportedly seeks over $1 billion in treble damages and penalties under the False Claims Act.
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Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the U.S. Senate panel that investigated the causes of the financial crisis, said that federal prosecutors should consider bringing perjury charges against Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and others who testified before Congress last year, according to a Bloomberg article entitled “Goldman Sachs Misled Congress After Duping Clients, Levin Says.”
A 650-page Senate report on the causes of the financial crisis, citing internal documents and private communications of bank executives, regulators, credit ratings agencies and investors, identifies culprits whose business practices were rife with conflicts and deception, according to a New York Times article by Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story called “Naming Culprits in the Financial Crisis.”
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In a decision “likely to ripple across Germany’s banking sector,” a German court ruled that Deutsche Bank failed to disclose the “real and ruinous” risks and its “gross conflict of interest” in selling interest rate swaps to a business client, according to a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Deutsche Bank Loses Swaps Case” by Laura Stevens and David Crawford. The risks were stacked in Deutsche Bank’s favor, and the bank failed to disclose that the contract’s starting value was less than the purchase price, which would have signaled which way the swap’s risks were stacked, according to the German court.
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Expecting licensed professionals who provide investment advice to act in their clients’ best interests “should be a basic tenet of the business,” but brokerage firms and their brokers don’t want that fiduciary yoke, says Karen Blumenthal in her InvestmentNews article, “When Your Adviser Can’t Be Trusted.” Moreover, they don’t want the public to know that they don’t want to be held to a fiduciary standard. So, while brokerage firms profess to be trusted advisers or like a member of a client’s family in their advertising, their lobbyists are working hard to persuade the SEC to weaken the “devil in the details” definition of the term “fiduciary” for purposes of governing brokers’ relationships with customers.
