Fast Traders Are Getting Data From SEC Seconds Early

The SEC uses Tradeworx datas to analyze the market and causes of flashcrashes, while high-frequency traders get a prime access to the SEC’s datas to place bets. Fair trade.

Hedge funds and other rapid-fire investors can get access to market-moving documents ahead of other users of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s system for distributing company filings, giving them a potential edge on the rest of the market.

→ WSJ

Revisiting the Lehman Brothers Bailout That Never Was

Inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, time was running out to answer a question that would change Wall Street forever.

At issue that September, six years ago, was whether the Fed could save a major investment bank whose failure might threaten the entire economy.

The firm was Lehman Brothers. And the answer for some inside the Fed was yes, the government could bail out Lehman, according to new accounts by Fed officials who were there at the time.

***

Those teams had provisionally concluded that Lehman might, in fact, be a candidate for rescue, but members of those teams said they never briefed Mr. Geithner, who said he did not know of the results.

→ The New York Times

Inside the New York Fed: Secret Recordings and Culture Clash

The audio is muddy but the words are distinct. So is the tension. Segarra is in Silva’s small office at Goldman Sachs with his deputy. The two are trying to persuade her to change her view about Goldman’s conflicts policy.

“You have to come off the view that Goldman doesn’t have any kind of conflict-of- interest policy,” are the first words Silva says to her. Fed officials didn’t believe her conclusion — that Goldman lacked a policy — was “credible.”

And here is the audio report from This American Life.

→ ProPublica

What Timothy Geithner Really Thinks

Geithner paused for a moment. “Can you design a system ever that allows you to be indifferent to the failure of any institution, in any state of the world?” he asked aloud before answering his own question. “You can design a system, and I think we have, that allows you to be indifferent in most states of the world: the five-year flood, the 15-year flood, the 30-year flood, maybe even the 50-year flood,” he said. “But there are constellations of storms, of panics, of fires that are so bad that it’s very hard to imagine that you could be indifferent to the failure of the financial system.”

→ The New York Times Magazine

Credit Suisse Helped U.S. Clients Hide Assets

I am pretty sure these clients were part of a jury, selecting the 2014 Swimsuit models for SI.

The report describes one instance in which a Credit Suisse banker “traveled to the United States to meet with the customer at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and, over breakfast, handed the customer bank statements hidden in a Sports Illustrated magazine.”

And then, the Goldman Sachs elevator,

One client also recalled, when visiting a Credit Suisse office, taking an elevator with “no buttons” that was “controlled remotely.”

→ The New York Times