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Article: China tells UK to butt out of Hong Kong

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China tells UK to butt out of Hong Kong

Andrew Davis, 15 March 2021

China accused the UK of “groundless slanders” after the British government said Beijing’s crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong wasn’t in compliance with the treaty that paved the way for the city’s return to Chinese control.

“The UK has no sovereignty, jurisdiction or right of ‘supervision’ over Hong Kong after the handover, and it has no so-called ‘obligations’ to Hong Kong citizens,” China said in a statement posted Sunday (Monday AEDT) on the website of its London embassy. “No foreign country or organisation has the right to take the Joint Declaration as an excuse to interfere in Hong Kong affairs, which are China’s internal affairs.”

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Article: The Big Texas Shootout: Where Did The Deep Freeze Money Go?

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The Big Texas Shootout: Where Did The Deep Freeze Money Go?

Llewellyn King, 15 March 2021

The shootout is a deeply revered piece of Texas mythology, even though the most famous shootout of all was in Arizona at the O.K. Corral. In fact, only half a dozen public disputes which were settled with the gun took place in Texas, but the myths endure and are cherished.

A shootout of another type has started in Texas — one which will last longer than any brief gunplay and will substitute legal briefs for bullets. This dispute is over the exorbitant charges for power generated during the mid-February deep freeze.

The first to draw was Brazos, the state’s oldest and largest electric power cooperative, which filed for bankruptcy. Some think it will be the first in a long column. Then Denton, the municipally owned utility, sued the Texas grid manager, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), contesting a $200-million electric charge during the winter storm.

On March 12, San Antonio’s CPS Energy, the largest municipally owned utility in Texas, drew a bead on ERCOT and fired off a number of heavy rounds in a complaint that pitted the otherwise progressive and low-key utility against ERCOT.

‘Illegal Wealth Transfers’
The complaint, filed in the District Court of Bexar County, seeks immediate and permanent injunctive relief. It states: “CPS Energy sues ERCOT its officers and directors, who are presiding over one of the largest illegal wealth transfers in the history of Texas.”

The lawsuit states that CPS Energy plans to conduct discovery under the Texas civil code and its purpose is to protect its customers from “excessive and illegitimate power and natural gas costs.”

CPS Energy President and CEO Paula Gold-Williams said at a press conference, “We are fighting to protect our customers from the financial impacts of the systemic failure of the ERCOT market, and the outrageous and unlawful costs associated with that failure.”

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Article: GameStop Update | Armstrong Economics

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GameStop Update | Armstrong Economics

Martin Armstrong, 15 March 2021

Gamestop has rallied back during the week of March 8th after all the hoopla. Cyclically, it was 13 years down and it was due for a bounce. Even our pattern recognition models picked up the rally starting in August 2020. Quite frankly, this has all the hallmarks of manipulation, but not what you may think. The classic manipulation is to pump up a market touting some player but the pros have already been in the market. This is how the Buffet manipulation of silver was done in 1998 and even the entire Hunt Brothers silver rally back in 1980. Continue reading “Article: GameStop Update | Armstrong Economics”

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Article: SEC Obtains Emergency Asset Freeze, Charges California Trader with Posting False Stock Tweets

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SEC Obtains Emergency Asset Freeze, Charges California Trader with Posting False Stock Tweets

Washington D.C., March 15, 2021 —

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced fraud charges and an asset freeze and other emergency relief against an Irvine, California-based trader who used social media to spread false information about a defunct company, while secretly profiting by selling his own holdings of the company’s stock.

Continue reading “Article: SEC Obtains Emergency Asset Freeze, Charges California Trader with Posting False Stock Tweets”

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Article: Market Manipulation Chatter Rises as Digital Art Scene Explodes

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Market Manipulation Chatter Rises as Digital Art Scene Explodes

Brandon Kochkodin, 13 March 2021

A digital artwork by Beeple set auction records Thursday when it sold at Christie’s for a mind-bending $69 million. Twitter Inc. co-founder Jack Dorsey is auctioning the non-fungible token for the first tweet ever, “just setting up my twttr,” with the highest bid coming in at $2.5 million, so far. LeBron James highlights are fetching six figures.

If you were somehow unaware, digital assets are booming, with buyers paying up for so-called NFTs that give them exclusive ownership of electronic tchotchkes. Explanations for why, say, a GIF of a cat with a rainbow trail commands a king’s ransom aren’t hard to come by. The more prosaic theories say the price per pixel is surging as Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies mint new millionaires every day and those newly rich digital natives look to spend in their adopted domain. And sure, it could be as simple as a good old mania around the latest shiny object that’s caught people’s attention.

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Article: Whistle-Blower Says Credit Suisse Helped Clients Skip Taxes After Promising to Stop

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Whistle-Blower Says Credit Suisse Helped Clients Skip Taxes After Promising to Stop

Neiman, 13 March 2021

Seven years after Credit Suisse promised federal prosecutors that it would stop helping rich Americans hide their wealth from tax collectors, a whistle-blower is contending that it continued to do just that, raising the possibility that the Swiss bank could face a fresh investigation and steep financial penalties.

The allegations, laid out in documents sent last week to the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service, were made by a former Credit Suisse employee. The former employee said that the bank continued to hide assets for its clients long after it promised prosecutors it would close those accounts, according to copies of documents obtained by The New York Times.

The whistle-blower, whose identity is unknown, is also contending that Credit Suisse lied to federal prosecutors, the Internal Revenue Service and members of Congress during their yearslong inquiry into how Swiss banks helped Americans defraud the government. Those investigations ultimately led to a settlement in May 2014 between Credit Suisse and federal prosecutors, in which the Swiss bank pleaded guilty to helping some of its American clients evade taxes by cloaking their wealth through offshore shell companies.

Credit Suisse was fined a total of $2.6 billion, but avoided even higher fines because it vowed to the Justice Department and a Senate panel that it had not only stopped the practice, but that it would close “any and all accounts of recalcitrant account holders.” The bank also pledged to help the United States pursue other criminal investigations, according to the plea agreement. Credit Suisse’s guilty plea and steep fine were rare in 2014. It was the first time in more than two decades that a lender of its size had admitted wrongdoing in an American court.

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Article: Financial System Fake La La Land – Dr. Mark Skidmore

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Financial System Fake La La Land – Dr. Mark Skidmore

Greg Hunter, USAWatchdog , 13 March 2021

Michigan State Economics Professor Mark Skidmore revealed three years ago there was $21 trillion in what he called “Missing Money” from the Department of Defense (DOD) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD).  To hide what was going on with the federal books, Congress made all government accounting a national security issue, making it impossible to get real accounting of money “We the People” pay in taxes.

Now, even more unofficial and unaccounted for cash has been revealed from the DOD.  It’s an eye popping $94 trillion from the years 2017 to 2019.  So, add in the $30 trillion in official debt, and that means there is at least $145 trillion in overt and covert money floating around in the federal government, not counting Social Security and Medicare commitments.

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Article: Australia’s banking regulator ends Westpac money laundering probe

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Australia’s banking regulator ends Westpac money laundering probe

Reuters Staff, 12 March 2021

(Reuters) – Australia’s banking regulator said on Friday it had closed the investigation against Westpac Banking Corp for possible breaches of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism laws.

The bank was first accused of breaching the laws in 2019 by the country’s financial crime watchdog AUSTRAC, which led to parallel probes by corporate regulator ASIC and banking regulator Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA).

In September last year, Westpac was forced to agree to a record A$1.3 billion ($1.01 billion) payment to settle AUSTRAC’s claims.

APRA said on Friday it had closed its investigation after considering the results of the probe by ASIC, which was closed in December last year.

“Although the investigation has not found evidence of breaches … APRA remains determined to ensure Westpac rectifies its risk governance weaknesses effectively and sustainably,” the APRA Deputy Chair John Lonsdale said.

In a separate statement, Westpac acknowledged APRA’s decision to end the probe.

($1 = 1.2844 Australian dollars)

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Article: Traders’ BitMEX Racketeering Suit Dismissed With A Warning

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Traders’ BitMEX Racketeering Suit Dismissed With A Warning

Elise Hansen, 12 March 2021

A California federal judge on Friday nixed traders’ lawsuit accusing cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX of racketeering and “myriad” illegal activities, and warned the traders “to allege only relevant facts” if they bring their claims again.

U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick said four individual traders and BMA LLC, an entity co-owned by several traders, did not adequately show how they had been harmed by the alleged wrongdoing. While the traders may try again with their claims, Judge Orrick cautioned against the lengthy style of their original complaint. Continue reading “Article: Traders’ BitMEX Racketeering Suit Dismissed With A Warning”

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Article: Trader Arrested as WallStreetBets Phenomenon Finds Echo in Japan

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Trader Arrested as WallStreetBets Phenomenon Finds Echo in Japan

Gearoid Reidy and Shoko Oda, 12 March 2021

(Bloomberg) — A retail investor buys shares in a small company, touts his position on social media and inspires a horde of followers to do the same. The stock price goes to the moon — before crashing back to earth.

It’s an all-too-familiar tale to anyone watching the market in 2021, but this wasn’t GameStop Corp. It wasn’t even in America. And it happened in 2018.

It was in the Japanese city of Osaka, where a day trader who goes by the nickname Tonpin was betting on a tiny maker of precision dies and molds called Nichidai Corp. and broadcasting the fact on Twitter, where he has more than 55,000 followers. The stock surged more than sixfold in the first three months of 2018 before losing most of the gains.

The person behind the nickname was Toru Yamada, a former money manager, and he and another man have just been arrested for market manipulation, according to Japanese media reports. He wasn’t arrested for talking the stock up on Twitter, but on suspicion of trying to keep the share price down — albeit so it would have margin-trading restrictions removed which, when it happened, caused the shares to soar to new highs.

The incident shows how regulators sift through unusual trading patterns and come to conclusions often years later. It may pique the interest of protagonists and observers of the recent meme stock rally in the U.S., such as users of the Reddit forum WallStreetBets.

Yamada has yet to be charged, and it’s not clear whether he will be. And while nobody is suggesting that U.S. traders employed similar tactics to those he’s alleged to have used, the case illustrates the risks that can be associated with becoming a high-profile investor on social media. While you’re in the public spotlight, you may also be in the regulators’ crosshairs.

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Article: Citi Must Face Former Trader’s Malicious-Prosecution Lawsuit

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Citi Must Face Former Trader’s Malicious-Prosecution Lawsuit

Bob Van Voris, Jenny Surane and Michael Leonard, Bloomberg News, 12 March 2021

(Bloomberg) — One of three British traders acquitted of using an online chatroom to fix prices in the foreign exchange market can go forward with a lawsuit claiming that Citigroup Inc. “fabricated” a baseless case against him, a judge ruled.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero on Thursday rejected the bank’s attempt to have the case dismissed. Former Citigroup trader Rohan Ramchandani sued in 2019 claiming damages of $112 million.

Read More: Citigroup Framed Me, Acquitted Forex Trader Claims in Suit

The ruling clears the way for Ramchandani, a former London-based trader, to move forward with the malicious-prosecution suit, which he brought in New York against a group of the bank’s affiliates after his acquittal.

“Mr. Ramchandani’s claims of malicious prosecution are without merit and we will contest them vigorously,” Danielle Romero-Apsilos, a spokeswoman for the bank, said in an emailed statement.

A Manhattan federal jury in October 2018 found Ramchandani and two other British traders working for other banks — a group dubbed “the Cartel” — not guilty of conspiring through online chatrooms to manipulate the $5.1-trillion-a-day foreign exchange market.

Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Barclays Plc and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc pleaded guilty to currency manipulation in 2015 as part of a $5.8 billion settlement with the DOJ.

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Article: Goldman Faces New Forex Rigging Suit From Currency Trader

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Goldman Faces New Forex Rigging Suit From Currency Trader

Richard Crump, 12 March 2021

Goldman Sachs is being sued in London over allegations that its traders manipulated foreign exchange markets for profit, in the latest lawsuit filed by a British currency investment firm over trade front-running.

ECU Group alleges that traders at Goldman Sachs International misused its confidential information to make secret profits by trading ahead of foreign exchange transactions by the British company, an illegal tactic known as front-running, according to the High Court claim filed in November but only recently made public. Continue reading “Article: Goldman Faces New Forex Rigging Suit From Currency Trader”

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Article: Newly Obtained Audit Report Details How Shady Clients from Around the World Moved Billions Through Estonia

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Newly Obtained Audit Report Details How Shady Clients from Around the World Moved Billions Through Estonia

Holger Roonemaa and Oliver Kund, KYC360News, 12 March 2021

On a warm Monday morning in June 2014, two auditors from Estonia’s financial regulator stepped into the Tallinn office of Danske Bank, armed with a single piece of graph paper handwritten with the names of 18 of its clients, and demanded to see their records.

At first glance, the customers on the list sounded boring. They were mostly obscure trading companies with generic names like Hilux Services and Polux Management. But the auditors — who had been tipped off by a police unit that tracks financial crime — didn’t have to dig too deep before things got very strange.

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THE DOLLAR HAS NO INTRINSIC VALUE : DO YOUR ASSETS?