The process for alerting the commission of cartel activity may surprise you: Companies send a fax to Brussels. A dedicated “leniency fax”—the number is +32 2 299 4585, should you be needing it—is the only way, apparently, for the commission to record the official time and date of first contact with whistleblowers in cartel cases. Thus, UBS’s well-timed fax saved it the equivalent of $3.4 billion in fines.
Category: Regulation
96.8% of Trades Placed in the US Stock Market Are Cancelled
New data from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) show that only 3.2% of the orders placed in the stock market in the second quarter of 2013 actually went through.
The Hunt for Steve Cohen
Barai, Freeman, and Longueuil—who jokingly called themselves the Hindu, the Jew, and the Catholic—had been gathering, swapping, and trading on inside information since at least 2006, when they were all at other firms. They called their exchanges “data dumps” or “data smackdowns,” and Barai later told the F.B.I. that they’d mark them on their calendars as a “threesome” or as “don, sam, noah—sex.” They continued once Freeman and Longueuil joined SAC, in 2008, Freeman in the Boston office, Longueuil in New York. The trio developed a series of valuable sources who had contacts inside several tech companies. One, Freeman later told the F.B.I., was a consultant named Doug Munro, who ran a research firm called Worldwide Market Research and, according to both Freeman and Barai, had inside information on Cisco. Munro, they said, had an e-mail account called juicylucy_xxx@yahoo.com, and he’d send Barai an e-mail saying “lucy is wet” when he was supposed to check the account for new information. (Munro has not been charged.)
How to Save American Finance from Itself
What about the possibility of cutting off the bubbles before they become dangerously large? It has often been proposed that the Fed should limit asset-price inflation in much the same way that it is committed to limiting goods-price inflation. In that view, the Fed should have choked off both the dot-com and house-price bubbles before they became large enough to do much damage. The usual counter-argument is that it is difficult to distinguish an asset bubble from a rise in price that is justified by “fundamentals.”
A Resurgent Goldman Can Reshape Wall Street
Indeed, had such a plan been in place in the years leading up the collapse of Lehman, I bet the bank would still be around, because former Chairman Richard Fuld and his acolytes would have been far more prudent. They would have taken the time to analyze the risk the company was taking on, which is exactly what Goldman Sachs did in late 2006 when it decided to short the mortgage market to take advantage of its competitors’ foolishness.
William D. Cohan is certainly right about his statement. But the problem doesn’t simply lie behind prudent behavior, it is also Goldman not being in-line with its clients, to the mind of general public. Take a look at the comments, no one seems to care about Goldman changing its internal compensation model for the top-tier of the payroll, because to most people’s mind Goldman is morally bankrupt.
Abnormal Capitalist 