Tag: Bank of America

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Web: Jim Cramer Called Onto The Carpet By Jon Stewart

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Jim Cramer Called Onto The Carpet By Jon Stewart

Bob O’Brien

Sanity Check via Wayback, 13 March 2009

Everyone needs to watch these three segments of the Jon Stewart show. They are remarkable, because they show an intelligent, reasoned man confronting the intellectual dishonesty, if not larceny, that is financial reporting in America.

What makes them so remarkable is that Stewart is not a top economist, nor a seasoned DA, nor an expert on financial markets, nor a skilled attorney. He’s a comedian. He makes funny remarks about things, and mocks the world, and is generally hysterically funny in his efforts.

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Article: Fed Defies Transparency Aim in Refusal to Disclose

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Fed Defies Transparency Aim in Refusal to Disclose

Mark Pittman, Bob  Ivry, Alison Fitzgerald

Bloomberg cited by Yonkers Tribune

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn’t require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.

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Article: Complaint Over Auction Rate Securities Market Details Brokers’ Greed

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Complaint Over Auction Rate Securities Market Details Brokers’ Greed

Courthouse News Service, 5 September 2008

In a federal filing replete with lurid examples of document destruction, inside trading, naked greed, lies and market manipulation, the City of Baltimore joins the long list of plaintiffs demanding treble damages from Citigroup, UBS, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Lehman Bros., Wachovia and other banks that conspired to prop up the auction rate securities market, until it collapsed in a $300 billion rubble heap from which investors are still digging out.

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Article: Did It Help to Curb Short Sales?

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Did It Help to Curb Short Sales?

Floyd Norris

The New York Times, 12 August 2008

A rule that made it harder to short some financial stocks and that may have helped raise prices and reduce the volume of shorting in those stocks expired Tuesday, as the Securities and Exchange Commission considers whether to tighten the rules on all short selling.

It may be a coincidence, but the announcement of the rule on July 15 coincided with the bottom of the bear market for financial stocks, which leaped that day and are now well above where they were. And the final day proved to be a very bad day for those shares.

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Article: Lawsuit Filed Against Major Financial Institutions Alleging a Conspiracy to Engage in Illegal Naked Short Selling of TASER International Inc. and to Create, Loan and Sell Counterfeit Shares of TASER Stock

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Lawsuit Filed Against Major Financial Institutions Alleging a Conspiracy to Engage in Illegal Naked Short Selling of TASER International Inc. and to Create, Loan and Sell Counterfeit Shares of TASER Stock

MarketWatch cited by RGB Communications via Wayback, May 28, 2008

Today the legal consortium of The O’Quinn Law Firm and Christian Smith & Jewell, both of Houston, Texas and Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore, LLP of Atlanta, Georgia filed a Complaint in the State Court of Fulton County, Georgia on behalf of certain shareholders of TASER International Inc. (“TASER”) against eight of the largest Wall Street firms, including Bank of America Securities LLC, Bear Stearns Securities Corp., Credit Suisse USA Inc., Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc., Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc., UBS Securities LLC.

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Article: Refco – When Smart Money Isn’t So Smart

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Refco: When Smart Money Isn’t So Smart

Matthew Goldstein

Bloomberg, 16 July 2007

The titans of the private equity world fancy themselves smarter, shrewder, and more sophisticated than any one else on Wall Street. Investors have bought into the sentiment as they’ve scooped up the shares of the private equity firms that have gone public recently: Blackstone Group (BX) and Fortress Investment Group (FIG). But a recent report on the spectacular collapse of Refco—the once-dominant commodities broker that was laid waste by a massive accounting fraud—paints an unflattering portrait of the private equity firm that engineered Refco’s August, 2004, leveraged buyout and its initial public offering a year later (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/11/07, “Kill the Private-Equity Tax Break”).

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Article: Hedge Fund Hell

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Hedge Fund Hell

Liz Moyer

Forbes cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 28 July 2006

Toronto-based Fairfax Financial Holdings filed a $5 billion lawsuit against SAC Capital, Rocker Partners and a number of other hedge funds, claiming they manipulated the insurance company’s stock, shearing its market cap by one-third.

Earlier this week, the regulatory arm of NYSE Group, fined Daiwa Securities America, Goldman Sachs Execution & Clearing, Credit Suisse Securities, and Citigroup Global Markets $1.25 million for violations of Regulation SHO–a rule put in place in January 2005 to clamp down on abuses–related to how they handle and monitor short-sale transactions by hedge funds and other clients.

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Article: Lawsuits Accuse “Prime Brokers” of Securities Fraud

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Lawsuits Accuse “Prime Brokers” of Securities Fraud

Wayne Jett

San Gabriel Valley Tribune cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 19 July 2006

Two class-action lawsuits filed in Manhattan federal court in April allege fraud by the world’s largest “prime brokers” in securities lending practices.

Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Banc of America Securities, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank Securities, UBS Financial and Bank of New York allegedly charge high fees to lend securities for short selling, but fail to deliver the securities sold short by hedge funds.

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Web: Suit Against Prime Brokers for Phony Stock Borrow Charges Filed

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Suit Against Prime Brokers for Phony Stock Borrow Charges Filed

Bud Burrell, Chad Bray

Dow Jones Newswires cited by Sanity Check via Wayback, 12 April 2006

An antitrust lawsuit was filed Wednesday against the securities industry’s largest brokerage firms over fees charged as a result of “naked short selling.”

The lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan by Electronic Trading Group LLC alleges that the major broker-dealers charged unearned fees, commissions or interest on short sales where those broker-dealers failed to borrow or deliver the stock to back a short position.

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Article: Overgrown Hedges

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Overgrown Hedges

Christopher Byron

New York Post cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 26 September 2005

One of the first things any new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission does after getting the job is to clear his throat, put on his best “I mean business” scowl, and announce to the world just how tough he intends to be on the miscreants of Wall Street.

Normally, this harmless ritual lets the man taking on Washington’s most thankless job preen a bit in public before getting smacked to the canvas by a system that basically doesn’t want him to be tough at all.

But these are not normal times — and the one thing this country needs more than anything is a government that knows what it is doing and that deserves to be taken seriously by its citizens.

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THE DOLLAR HAS NO INTRINSIC VALUE : DO YOUR ASSETS?