Bankers bet with their bank's capital, not their own. If the bet goes right, they get a huge bonus; if it misfires, that's the shareholders' problem.
Sebastian Mallaby. Council on Foreign Relations, as quoted by Avital Louria Hahn, "Missing:  How Poor Risk-Management Techniques Contributed to the Subprime Mess," CFO Magazine, March 2008, Page 53 --- http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10755469/c_10788146?f=magazine_featured
Now that the Fed is going to bail out these crooks with taxpayer funds makes it all the worse.

The bourgeoisie can be termed as any group of people who are discontented with what they have, but satisfied with what they are
Nicolás Dávila

This one on the report card business schools seemed too important to pass up.  I think it relates to the points Dr. Brazil made in the quotation that I placed (with permission) in http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book05q1.htm#020805
(You have to scroll down some distance to find the Brazil quotation.)

Today's Bourgeoisie
Education molds not just individuals but also common assumptions and conventional wisdom. And when it comes to the business world, our universities - and especially their graduate business schools - are powerful shapers of the culture.

History suggests it was always this way. Even Isaac Newton, of gravity fame but who also held the position of master of the mint, lost money in the South Sea Bubble. He got out, thinking it was a bubble, then got back in when it kept going up. He lost a small fortune in the process when it finally collapsed. Human greed, coupled with hubris, hasn't changed in the four centuries for which we have some sense of economic history.
Lawrence B. Lindsey, "Loosen Deposit Insurance Rules To Prevent a Bank Run," The Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2008 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122161066927045759.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Jensen Comment
You can read about the South Sea Bubble in 1720 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_bubble
The South Sea Company was selling shares in itself and calling it income.

Mortgage Backed Securities are like boxes of chocolates. Criminals on Wall Street and one particular U.S. Congressional Committee stole a few chocolates from the boxes and replaced them with turds. Their criminal buddies at Standard & Poors rated these boxes AAA Investment Grade chocolates. These boxes were then sold all over the world to investors. Eventually somebody bites into a turd and discovers the crime. Suddenly nobody trusts American chocolates anymore worldwide. Hank Paulson now wants the American taxpayers to buy up and hold all these boxes of turd-infested chocolates for $700 billion dollars until the market for turds returns to normal. Meanwhile, Hank's buddies, the Wall Street criminals who stole all the good chocolates are not being investigated, arrested, or indicted. Momma always said: '"Sniff the chocolates first Forrest." Things generally don't pass the smell test if they came from Wall Street or from Washington DC.
Forrest Gump as quoted at http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Rec/rec.sport.tennis/2008-10/msg02206.html


                           Forrest Gump's Momma

The Sleazy Subprime Mortgage Lending Companies Have a New (actually renewed old) Scheme to Make Billions at Taxpayer Expense
As if they haven't done enough damage. Thousands of subprime mortgage lenders and brokers—many of them the very sorts of firms that helped create the current financial crisis—are going strong. Their new strategy: taking advantage of a long-standing federal program designed to encourage homeownership by insuring mortgages for buyers of modest means. You read that correctly. Some of the same people who propelled us toward the housing market calamity are now seeking to profit by exploiting billions in federally insured mortgages. Washington, meanwhile, has vastly expanded the availability of such taxpayer-backed loans as part of the emergency campaign to rescue the country's swooning economy.
Chad Terhune and Robert Berner, "FHA-Backed Loans: The New Subprime The same people whose reckless practices triggered the global financial crisis are onto a similar scheme that could cost taxpayers tons more," Business Week, November 19, 2008 --- http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_48/b4110036448352.htm?link_position=link2
Jensen Comment
That's right. The greedy slime balls "Borne of Sleaze, Bribery, and Lies" are resurfacing with Barney Frank's blessing --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze

"Financial Reversals:  Everything bad is good again," by  Jacob Sullum, Reason Magazine, November 19, 2008 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/130142.html

"Proposed new Bailout Plan," by Andreas Hippin, Bloomberg, November 20, 2008 ---
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/proposed-new-bailout-plan

The Somali pirates, renegade Somalis known for hijacking ships for ransom in the Gulf of Aden, are negotiating a purchase of Citigroup.

The pirates would buy Citigroup with new debt and their existing cash stockpiles, earned most recently from hijacking numerous ships, including most recently a $200 million Saudi Arabian oil tanker. The Somali pirates are offering up to $0.10 per share for Citigroup, pirate spokesman Sugule Ali said earlier today. The negotiations have entered the final stage, Ali said. ``You may not like our price, but we are not in the business of paying for things. Be happy we are in the mood to offer the shareholders anything," said Ali.

The pirates will finance part of the purchase by selling new Pirate Ransom Backed Securities. The PRBS's are backed by the cash flows from future ransom payments from hijackings in the Gulf of Aden. Moody's and S&P have already issued their top investment grade ratings for the PRBS's.

Head pirate, Ubu Kalid Shandu, said "we need a bank so that we have a place to keep all of our ransom money. Thankfully, the dislocations in the capital markets has allowed us to purchase Citigroup at an attractive valuation and to take advantage of TARP capital to grow the business even faster." Shandu added, "We don't call ourselves pirates. We are coastguards and this will just allow us to guard our coasts better."

I'm suspicious that Andreas Hippin, in the above tidbit, was inspired by "The End" by Michael Lewis
"The End," by Michael Lewis December 2008 Issue The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#TheEnd 

From the Financial Clippings Blog on October 22, 2008 --- http://financeclippings.blogspot.com/

I wrote earlier that credit rating agencies seem to be run like protection rackets..

from CNBC

In a hearing today before the House Oversight Committee, the credit rating agencies are being portrayed as profit-hungry institutions that would give any deal their blessing for the right price.

Case in point: this instant message exchange between two unidentified Standard & Poor's officials about a mortgage-backed security deal on 4/5/2007:

Official #1: Btw (by the way) that deal is ridiculous.

Official #2: I know right...model def (definitely) does not capture half the risk.

Official #1: We should not be rating it.

Official #2: We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.

A former executive of Moody's says conflicts of interest got in the way of rating agencies properly valuing mortgage backed securities.

Former Managing Director Jerome Fons, who worked at Moody's until August of 2007, says Moody's was focused on "maxmizing revenues," leading it to make the firm more "issuer friendly."

Fraud and incompetence among credit rating agencies --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#CreditRatingAgencies

The New York Stock Exchange's report on the pay package given to its former chairman, Dick Grasso, made clear the excessiveness of the compensation and the ineffectiveness of the safety controls that failed to stop it. What the report didn't provide, however, was an answer to an obvious question: Why did nobody on the exchange's board look at that astronomical sum and feel some personal responsibility to find out what was happening?  I can't read minds, but I think it's fair to say that to some extent the players in this drama - as well as those in the ones now being played out in courtrooms and starring former executives of Tyco, WorldCom and HealthSouth - have been shaped by the broader business culture they have worked in for so long. And, as with any situation in which we are puzzled by how a group of people can think in a seemingly odd way, it helps to look back to how they were educated. Education molds not just individuals but also common assumptions and conventional wisdom. And when it comes to the business world, our universities - and especially their graduate business schools - are powerful shapers of the culture.
Robert J. Shiller, "How Wall Street Learns to Look the Other Way," The New York Times, February 8, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/opinion/08shiller.html 

Ending a bitter public fight over whether former New York Stock Exchange Chief Executive Dick Grasso was paid too much, a state appeals court ruled that Mr. Grasso can keep every penny collected from his $187.5 million multiyear compensation package. The 3-to-1 ruling by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court was a vindication for the relentless Mr. Grasso, who was ousted after details of his lucrative pay were revealed in 2003.
Aaron Lucchetti, "Grasso Wins Court Fight, Can Keep NYSE Pay," The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2008; Page A1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121492781324819635.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

Clinton's famously crude remark
And I hope that comes through in the book (Infectious Greed).  I am very critical of the tax law changes that created the incentives for companies to pay executives with stock options, which were made at the beginning of the Clinton Administration to appease populist anti-corporation forces among his supporters by appearing to do something about what, even then, was alleged to be excessive pay for corporate executives.  Not to mention his Administration's hands-off approach to Wall Street (when Arthur Levitt headed the SEC).  There's that great story --- perhaps apocoryphal --- that I recount in the book about Clinton's famously crude remark when he discovered that voters cared much more about whether the stocks were going up than his economic program.
Frank Partnoy, Partnoy's Solutions, welling@weeden, October 21, 2005

Symptoms include "excessive and sometimes fraudulent risks
Add to the growing number of recently diagnosed diseases in America the Icarus Syndrome. This malady, discovered by a law professor, is said to affect corporations in particular. The symptoms include "excessive and sometimes fraudulent risks." The disease has attacked corporate America not only in our own scandal-plagued times but, it seems, since about 1873.  Icarus in the Boardroom (Oxford University Press, 250 pages, $25) is an attempt to alert public-health officials, so to speak, to the dangers of this contagion. David Skeel, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, labels all sorts of apparently admirable traits -- "self-confidence, visionary insight, the ability to think outside the box" -- as potential Icaran qualities, full of danger. They "may spur entrepreneurs to take misguided risks," he writes, "in the belief that everything they touch will eventually turn to gold." Fortunately, he offers a number of cures, ranging from small doses of regulation to massive doses of regulation.  And little wonder. What is most interesting about "Icarus in the Boardroom" is the vast divide it reveals -- between American lawyers who study corporations and, well, everybody else. Following common sense and economic logic, most people view corporate risk-taking and corporate fraud as different things: Fraud involves lying; risk-taking does not. As in the case of Enron and WorldCom, fraudulent executives often misstate how much risk their investors will assume.  For academic lawyers such as Mr. Skeel, however, it seems that risk-taking and fraud are points on a continuum. Risk-taking quickly fades into "excessive" risk-taking, which then morphs into fraud. Mr. Skeel never says just how we are to distinguish acceptable risks from the excessive and fraudulent kind. Apparently, though, lawmakers and regulators will figure out a formula, for it falls to them, in Mr. Skeel's view, "to prevent risk-taking that edges toward market manipulation or fraud."
Jonathan R. Macey, "A Risky Proposition," The Wall Street Journal,  March 15, 2005; Page D8 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111083993718979142,00.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal 

That some bankers have ended up in prison is not a matter of scandal, but what is outrageous is the fact that all the others are free.
Honoré de Balzac

Two months ago, shortly before Japan ordered Citigroup to close its private banking unit there for, among other things, failing to guard against money laundering, Charles O. Prince, the chief executive, commissioned an independent examination of his bank's lapses. When he received the assessment in mid-October, he got an eyeful.
"It's Cleanup Time at Citi," by Timothy L. O'Brien and Landon Thomas, Jr., The New York Times, November 7, 2004 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/business/yourmoney/07citi.html  

The Sleazy Subprime Mortgage Lending Companies Have a New (actually renewed old) Scheme to Make Billions at Taxpayer Expense
As if they haven't done enough damage. Thousands of subprime mortgage lenders and brokers—many of them the very sorts of firms that helped create the current financial crisis—are going strong. Their new strategy: taking advantage of a long-standing federal program designed to encourage homeownership by insuring mortgages for buyers of modest means. You read that correctly. Some of the same people who propelled us toward the housing market calamity are now seeking to profit by exploiting billions in federally insured mortgages. Washington, meanwhile, has vastly expanded the availability of such taxpayer-backed loans as part of the emergency campaign to rescue the country's swooning economy.
Chad Terhune and Robert Berner, "FHA-Backed Loans: The New Subprime The same people whose reckless practices triggered the global financial crisis are onto a similar scheme that could cost taxpayers tons more," Business Week, November 19, 2008 --- http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_48/b4110036448352.htm?link_position=link2
Jensen Comment
That's right. The greedy slime balls "Borne of Sleaze, Bribery, and Lies" are resurfacing with Barney Frank's blessing --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze

"Financial Reversals:  Everything bad is good again," by  Jacob Sullum, Reason Magazine, November 19, 2008 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/130142.html

"Proposed new Bailout Plan," by Andreas Hippin, Bloomberg, November 20, 2008 ---
http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/proposed-new-bailout-plan

The Somali pirates, renegade Somalis known for hijacking ships for ransom in the Gulf of Aden, are negotiating a purchase of Citigroup.

The pirates would buy Citigroup with new debt and their existing cash stockpiles, earned most recently from hijacking numerous ships, including most recently a $200 million Saudi Arabian oil tanker. The Somali pirates are offering up to $0.10 per share for Citigroup, pirate spokesman Sugule Ali said earlier today. The negotiations have entered the final stage, Ali said. ``You may not like our price, but we are not in the business of paying for things. Be happy we are in the mood to offer the shareholders anything," said Ali.

The pirates will finance part of the purchase by selling new Pirate Ransom Backed Securities. The PRBS's are backed by the cash flows from future ransom payments from hijackings in the Gulf of Aden. Moody's and S&P have already issued their top investment grade ratings for the PRBS's.

Head pirate, Ubu Kalid Shandu, said "we need a bank so that we have a place to keep all of our ransom money. Thankfully, the dislocations in the capital markets has allowed us to purchase Citigroup at an attractive valuation and to take advantage of TARP capital to grow the business even faster." Shandu added, "We don't call ourselves pirates. We are coastguards and this will just allow us to guard our coasts better."

I'm suspicious that Andreas Hippin, in the above tidbit, was inspired by "The End" by Michael Lewis
"The End," by Michael Lewis December 2008 Issue The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/11/11/The-End-of-Wall-Streets-Boom?tid=true
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#TheEnd 

From the Financial Clippings Blog on October 22, 2008 --- http://financeclippings.blogspot.com/

I wrote earlier that credit rating agencies seem to be run like protection rackets..

from CNBC

In a hearing today before the House Oversight Committee, the credit rating agencies are being portrayed as profit-hungry institutions that would give any deal their blessing for the right price.

Case in point: this instant message exchange between two unidentified Standard & Poor's officials about a mortgage-backed security deal on 4/5/2007:

Official #1: Btw (by the way) that deal is ridiculous.

Official #2: I know right...model def (definitely) does not capture half the risk.

Official #1: We should not be rating it.

Official #2: We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it.

A former executive of Moody's says conflicts of interest got in the way of rating agencies properly valuing mortgage backed securities.

Former Managing Director Jerome Fons, who worked at Moody's until August of 2007, says Moody's was focused on "maxmizing revenues," leading it to make the firm more "issuer friendly."

Fraud and incompetence among credit rating agencies --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#CreditRatingAgencies

In the years after Enron, many chief executives had been operating in a defensive crouch. Last year, however, they switched to offense, yelping about the new securities rules — way too strict and so time-consuming — and whining that Eliot Spitzer and his meddlesome investigations could wreck the nation’s economy. The United States Chamber of Commerce even sued the Securities and Exchange Commission, hoping to overturn its new rule requiring mutual fund chairmen to be independent.  So as 2005 dawns, it is again time to grant the Augustus Melmotte Memorial Prizes, named for the charlatan who parades through “The Way We Live Now,” the novel by Anthony Trollope. Mr. Melmotte, who would fit just fine into today’s business world, is a confidence man who takes London by storm in the late 1800’s.
Gretchen Morgensen, "The Envelopes, Please," The New York Times, January 1, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/01/business/yourmoney/02award.backup.html?oref=login 
Bob Jensen's threads on corporate governance are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm#Governance 

Who's Preying on Your Grandparents?
Back in February, Jose and Gloria Aquino received a flier in the mail inviting them to a free seminar on one of their favorite topics: protecting their financial assets. As retirees, they were always on the lookout for safe investment strategies as well as tips on how to make sure they didn't outlive their savings. Besides, the flier promised a free lunch for anyone attending the workshop, so what did they have to lose? Potentially plenty, they would soon discover.
Gretchen Morgenson, "Who's Preying on Your Grandparents?" The New York Times, May 15, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/business/yourmoney/15vict.html?

How the Gatekeepers Failed in Their Responsibilities to Protect the Public from Corporate and Banking Fraud

Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission --- suggested that government should at least study whether some regulation might make sense, a stampede of lobbyists, members of Congress, and other regulators --- including Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin --- ran her over, admonishing her to keep quiet.  Derivatives tightened the connections among various markets, creating enormous financial benefits and making global transacting less costly --- no one denied that.  But they also raised the prospect of a system-wide breakdown.  With each crisis, a few more dominos fell, and regulators and market participants increasingly expressed concerns about systematic risk --- a term that described a financial-market epidemic.  After Long-Term Capital collapsed, even Alan Greenspan admitted that the financial markets had been close to the brink.  
Frank Partnoy, Infectious Greed (Henry Holt and Company, 2004, Page 229)

Throughout 1994 and 1995, Brickell (the banking industry's pit bull in Washington) and Levitt (Head of the SEC) worked to protect the finance industry from new legislation.  In early 1994, lobbyists waited for investors to calm down from the shock of how much money-fund managers and corporate treasures had lost gambling on interest rates.  When legislation was introduced, Brickell fought it and Levitt gave speeches saying the financial industry should police itself.  The issues were complicated, and the public --- once angered by the various scandals ---  ultimately lost interest.  Instead of new derivatives regulation, Congress, various federal agencies, and even the Supreme Court created new legal rules that insulated Wall Street from liability and enabled financial firms to regulate themselves.   Under the influence of Levitt and Brickell, regulators essentially left the abuses of the 1990s to what Justice Cardozo had called the "morals of the market place."
Frank Partnoy, Infectious Greed (Henry Holt and Company, 2004, Page 143)

In God, but not our financial advisor, we trust!
Declining trust has spurred some 25% of the affluent investors surveyed to move a portion of their assets out of their financial-services firms in the past two years, according to a study by Spectrem Group, a Chicago research and consulting firm. A litany of complaints, including poor investment performance, conflicts of interest, hidden fees and financial scandals, prompted wealthy investors to move their business elsewhere.
Rachel Emma Silverman, "Wealthy Lose Trust in Advisers," The Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2005, Page D2 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110730662305243216,00.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal 

One of the world's most widely known and respected economists, Henry Kaufman is almost single-handedly responsible for founding the spectator sport known as "Fed watching." He began a 26-year career at Salomon Brothers in 1962, when he was probably the only Wall Street employee with a doctorate. There he built one of the most prestigious securities research departments and became a senior partner and vice chairman. In the last 30 years, he has been one of the most vocal critics of insufficient financial oversight and regulation, and his pronouncements and prognostications have often moved markets. We interviewed Dr. Kaufman in his New York office, where he heads his own international economic consulting firm.
Wall Street Wisdom --- http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/41979/102-2649781-5248131 

Question
What is the SEC's new NMS?
In the best possible marketplace, all buyers see the prices asked by all sellers and all sellers see the prices offered by all buyers -- and little guys are treated the same as big ones. The result: competition that insures the most efficient interplay of supply and demand. In theory, it sounds great. And indeed, this is the idea behind the Security and Exchange Commission's push for an integrated stock market called the National Market System, or NMS. But could the best intentions backfire? Wharton finance professor Marshall E. Blume answers that question in a new research paper titled, "Competition and Fragmentation in the Equity Markets: The Effect of Regulation NMS."
"Will the SEC's National Market System Stifle the Innovation It Hopes to Promote?" Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, Knowledge@Wharton, April 4, 2007 --- Click Here

Question
"U.S. Securities Law: Does 'High Intensity' Enforcement Pay Off?" Knowledge@Wharton, May 30, 2007 ---
Click Here

Strong enforcement is critical to obtaining good governance and adding value to corporations, and investors stand to gain from it.

. . .

In the U.K., the FSA budget for enforcement is between 12.5% and 13% of its total budget, which Coffee said is consistent with many other countries. The SEC spends around 40% of its overall budget on enforcement, and Australia spends even more -- nearly 47% in 2005. Coffee also noted that the SEC has 1,200 attorneys working full time for the agency. The FSA, he said, maintains a "skeletal" legal staff and outsources cases when necessary. In Britain and many other countries, regulators place more emphasis on negotiating settlements to avoid formal enforcement actions. "They don't like to keep a legal enforcement staff because they see enforcement as a last-ditch effort."

. . .

In the wake of corporate scandals in the U.S., criminal enforcement is the "ultimate deterrence," Coffee said. Citing research from cases between 1978 and 2004, he noted that some 755 individuals and 40 firms were indicted for "financial misrepresentation," which he said is just a small subset of securities violations. In all, 1,230.7 years of incarceration and 397.5 years of probation were imposed, with an average sentence of 4.2 years.

Continued in article

There's a shelf of financial bestsellers whose titles now sound absurd: Ravi Batra's The Great Depression of 1990; James Glassman's Dow 36,000; Harry Figgie's Bankruptcy 1995: The Coming Collapse of America and How to Stop It. There’s BusinessWeek’s 1979 description of "the death of equities as a near permanent condition,
Michael Lewis, "The Evolution of an Investor," Blaine-Lourd Profile, December 2007 ---
http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2007/11/19/Blaine-Lourd-Profile#page3
As quoted by Jim Mahar in his Finance Professor Blog at http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/

As a group, professional money managers control more than 90 percent of the U.S. stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole, minus whatever fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more...Nobody knows which stock is going to go up. Nobody knows what the market as a whole is going to do, not even Warren Buffett. A handful of people with amazing track records isn’t evidence that people can game the market. Nobody knows which company will prove a good long-term investment. Even Buffett’s genius lies more in running businesses than in picking stocks. But in the investing world, that is ignored. Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.
Michael Lewis, "The Evolution of an Investor," Blaine-Lourd Profile, December 2007 ---
http://www.portfolio.com/executives/features/2007/11/19/Blaine-Lourd-Profile#page3
As quoted by Jim Mahar in his Finance Professor Blog at http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/

A second paper in this series will examine the theoretical justifications for the importance of the stock market as perhaps the central financial institution in the United States.
"Who Needs the Stock Market? Part I: The Empirical Evidence," by Lawrence E. Mitchell George Washington University - Law School, SSRN, October 30, 2008 --- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1292403

Data on historical and current corporate finance trends drawn from a variety of sources present a paradox. External equity has never played a significant role in financing industrial enterprises in the United States. The only American industry that has relied heavily upon external financing is the finance industry itself. Yet it is commonly accepted among legal scholars and economists that the stock market plays a valuable role in American economic life, and a recent, large body of macroeconomic work on economic development links the growth of financial institutions (including, in the U.S, the stock market) to growth in real economic output. How can this be the case if external equity as represented by the stock market plays an insignificant role in financing productivity? This paradox has been largely ignored in the legal and economic literature.

This paper surveys the history of American corporate finance, presents original and secondary data demonstrating the paradox, and raises questions regarding the structure of American capital markets, the appropriate rights of stockholders, the desirable regulatory structure (whether the stock market should be regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, for example), and the overall relationship between finance and growth.

The answers to these questions are particularly pressing in light of a dramatic increase in stock market volatility since the turn of the century creating distorted incentives for long-term corporate management, especially trenchant in light of the recent global financial collapse.

A second paper in this series will examine the theoretical justifications for the importance of the stock market as perhaps the central financial institution in the United States.

Shocking 25 Minute Video
A Rigged Trading System: "The odds are better in Las Vegas than on Wall Street"
This is the same fraud as the one committed by Max in the Broadway show called The Producers (watch the Bloomberg video of how the fraud works)
Max sold over 100% of the shares in his play.
A fraudulent market manipulation contributed to the Wall Street meltdown
Phantom Shares and Market Manipulation (Bloomberg News video on naked short selling) --- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4490541725797746038

Labor Unions Want Less Financial Disclosure and accountability

From day one of the Obama era, union leaders want the lights dimmed on how they spend their mandatory member dues. The AFL-CIO's representative on the Obama transition team for Labor is Deborah Greenfield, and we're told her first inspection stop was the Office of Labor-Management Standards, or OLMS, which monitors union compliance with federal law. Ms. Greenfield declined to comment, citing Obama transition rules, but her mission is clear enough. The AFL-CIO's formal "recommendations" to the Obama team call for the realignment of "the allocation of budgetary resources" from OLMS to other Labor agencies. The Secretary should "temporarily stay all financial reporting regulations that have not gone into effect," and "revise or rescind the onerous and unreasonable new requirements," such as the LM-2 and T-1 reporting forms. The explicit goal is to "restore the Department of Labor to its mission and role of advocating for, protecting and advancing the interests of workers." In other words, while transparency is fine for business, unions are demanding a pass for themselves.
"Quantum of Solis Big labor wants Obama to dilute union disclosure rules," The Wall Street Journal, December 21, 2008 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122990431323225179.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

The entire year 2006 ethics flap about climbers not rendering aid to a supposedly dying climber on Mt. Everest was preceded by a great 1983 real world case called the Parable of the Sadhu from the Harvard Business School --- Click Here

The Parable of the Sadhu was and still is widely used in ethics courses, especially regarding issues of situational ethics and group versus individual ethics. The author Bowen H. McCoy was the managing director of the investment banking firm Morgan Stanley & Co. After returning to New York, McCoy was conscious stricken about leaving a dying religious man during an Everest climb. The climbers at that time shed some clothes to keep the dying man warm. But climbers from various nations (U.S., Switzerland, and Japan) actually moved on and did not help the man down to shelter because they all felt that he was going to die in any case. Also, the weather was such that the climbers could not complete their climbing goal if they delayed to carry the dying man to shelter.

McCoy wrote the following after returning to New York:

We do not know if the sadhu lived or died. For many of the following days and evenings Stephen and I discussed and debated our behavior toward the sadhu. Stephen is a committed Quaker with deep moral vision. He said, "I feel that what happened with the Sadhu is a good example of the breakdown between the individual ethic and the corporate ethic. No one person was willing to assume ultimate responsibility for the sadhu. Each was willing to do his bit just so long as it was not too inconvenient. When it got to be a bother everyone just passed the buck to someone else and took off . . . "

. . .

Despite my arguments, I feel and continue to feel guilt about the sadhu. I had literally walked through a classic moral dilemma without fully thinking through the consequences. My excuses for my actions include a high adrenaline flow, super-ordinate goal, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity --- factors in the usual corporate situation, especially when one is under stress.

Real moral dilemmas are ambiguous and many of us hike right through them, unaware that they exist. When, usually after the fact, someone makes an issue of them, we tend to resent his or her bringing it up. Often, when the full import of what we have done (or not done) falls on us, we dig into a defensive position from which it is very difficult to emerge. In rare circumstances we may contemplate what we have done from inside a prison.

Had we mountaineers have been free of physical and mental stress caused by the effort and the high altitude, we might have treated the sadhu differently. Yet isn't stress the real test of personal and corporate values? The instant decisions executives make under pressure reveal the most about personal and corporate character.

Among the many questions that occur to me when pondering my experience are:  What are the practical limits of moral imagination and vision? Is there a collective or institutional ethic beyond the ethics of the individual? At what level of effor or commitment can one discharge one's ethical responsibilities?

Continued in this 1983 Harvard Business School Case.

Jensen Comment
I might add that this 1983 case was written before the breakdown in ethics during the 1990s high tech bubble in which investment banking, executive compensation, corporate governance, and corporate ethics in general sometimes become Congress to the core --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudCongress.htm

********************

You can read more about the 2006 repeat of the dilemma at
"Everest pioneer appalled that climber was left to die," by Steve McMorran, Seattle Times, May 25, 2006 --- http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003017177_everest25.html

May 28, 2006 reply from Andrew Priest [a.priest@ECU.EDU.AU]

Hi Bob

And you can contrast this action and the 2006 with the help given to Lincoln Hall again this year (events still going on). Lincoln was left on the mountain, assumed dead. He was not and is lower down the mountain and doing okay. Details at < http://www.mounteverest.net/news.php?id=3315>  and more details at
< http://www.mounteverest.net/news.php?id=3311> .

Compassion and caring wins out every time in my view over selfishness.

Andrew

"Remarks by Chairman Alan Greenspan Before a conference sponsored by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Washington, D.C. October 14, 1999 --- http://federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/1999/19991014.htm 

Measuring Financial Risk in the Twenty-first Century

During a financial crisis, risk aversion rises dramatically, and deliberate trading strategies are replaced by rising fear-induced disengagement. Yield spreads on relatively risky assets widen dramatically. In the more extreme manifestation, the inability to differentiate among degrees of risk drives trading strategies to ever-more-liquid instruments that permit investors to immediately reverse decisions at minimum cost should that be required. As a consequence, even among riskless assets, such as U.S. Treasury securities, liquidity premiums rise sharply as investors seek the heavily traded "on-the-run" issues--a behavior that was so evident last fall.

As I have indicated on previous occasions, history tells us that sharp reversals in confidence occur abruptly, most often with little advance notice. These reversals can be self-reinforcing processes that can compress sizable adjustments into a very short period. Panic reactions in the market are characterized by dramatic shifts in behavior that are intended to minimize short-term losses. Claims on far-distant future values are discounted to insignificance. What is so intriguing, as I noted earlier, is that this type of behavior has characterized human interaction with little appreciable change over the generations. Whether Dutch tulip bulbs or Russian equities, the market price patterns remain much the same.

We can readily describe this process, but, to date, economists have been unable to anticipate sharp reversals in confidence. Collapsing confidence is generally described as a bursting bubble, an event incontrovertibly evident only in retrospect. To anticipate a bubble about to burst requires the forecast of a plunge in the prices of assets previously set by the judgments of millions of investors, many of whom are highly knowledgeable about the prospects for the specific investments that make up our broad price indexes of stocks and other assets.

Nevertheless, if episodic recurrences of ruptured confidence are integral to the way our economy and our financial markets work now and in the future, the implications for risk measurement and risk management are significant.

Probability distributions estimated largely, or exclusively, over cycles that do not include periods of panic will underestimate the likelihood of extreme price movements because they fail to capture a secondary peak at the extreme negative tail that reflects the probability of occurrence of a panic. Furthermore, joint distributions estimated over periods that do not include panics will underestimate correlations between asset returns during panics. Under these circumstances, fear and disengagement on the part of investors holding net long positions often lead to simultaneous declines in the values of private obligations, as investors no longer realistically differentiate among degrees of risk and liquidity, and to increases in the values of riskless government securities. Consequently, the benefits of portfolio diversification will tend to be overestimated when the rare panic periods are not taken into account.

The uncertainties inherent in valuations of assets and the potential for abrupt changes in perceptions of those uncertainties clearly must be adjudged by risk managers at banks and other financial intermediaries. At a minimum, risk managers need to stress test the assumptions underlying their models and set aside somewhat higher contingency resources--reserves or capital--to cover the losses that will inevitably emerge from time to time when investors suffer a loss of confidence. These reserves will appear almost all the time to be a suboptimal use of capital. So do fire insurance premiums.

The above is only a quotation from the speech.

UNEQUAL TREATMENT:  Congress to the Core

"Playing Favorites:  Why Alan Greenspan's Fed lets banks off easy on corporate fraud," by Ronald Fink, CFO Magazine, April 2004, pp. 46-54 --- http://www.cfo.com/article/1,5309,12866||M|886,00.html 

The module below is not in the above online version of the above article.  However, it is on Page 51 of the printed version.

UNEQUAL TREATMENT

IF THE FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD AND THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE Commission pursue the same agenda, why were Merrill Lynch & Co. and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) treated so differently by the Corporate Fraud Task Force--a team with representatives from the SEC, the FBI, and the Department of Justice (DoJ) set up to prosecute perpetrators of Enron's fraud--than were Citigroup and J. P. Morgan Chase & Co.?  After all, all four banks did much the same thing.

Under settlements signed with the SEC last July, Citigroup and Chase were fined a mere $101 million (including $19 million for its actions relating to a similar fraud involving Dynegy) and $135 million, respectively, which amounts to no more than a week of either's most recent annual earnings.  And they agreed, in effect, to cease and desist from doing other structured-finance deals that mislead investors.  That contrasts sharply with the punishment meted out by the DoJ to Merrill and CIBC, each of which not only paid $80 million in fines, but also agreed to have their activities monitored by a supervising committee that reports to the DoJ.  Even more striking, CIBC agreed to exit not only the structured-finance business but also the plain-vanilla commercial--paper conduit trade for three years.  No regulatory agency involved in the settlements would comment on the cases, though the SEC's settlement with Citigroup took note of the bank's cooperation in the investigation.

But Brad S. Karp, an attorney with the New York firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, suggested recently that the terms of the SEC settlement with its client, Citigroup, reflected a lack of knowledge or intent on the bank's part.  As Karp noted more than once at a February conference on legal issues and compliance facing bond-market participants, the SEC's settlement with Citigroup was ex scienter, a Latin legal phrase meaning "without knowledge."

However, the SEC's administrative order to Citigroup cited at least 13 instances where the bank was anything but in the dark about its involvement in Enron's fraud.

As Richard H. Walker, former director of the SEC's enforcement division and now general counsel of Deutsche Bank's Corporate and Investment Bank, puts it, all the banks involved in Enron's fraud "had knowledge" of it.  Yet Walker isn't surprised by their disparate treatment at the hands of regulators.  "The SEC does things its way," he says, "and the Fed does them another."  *Ronald Fink and Tim Reason

Most of us enter the investment business for the same sanity-destroying reasons a woman becomes a prostitute:  It avoids the menace of hard work, is a group activity that requires little in the way of intellect, and is a practical means of manking money for those with no special talent for anything else.
Richard New, The Wall Street Jungle (as quoted by Frank Partnoy in FIASCO:  The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader.)

Behind every great fortune there lies a great crime.
Honore de Balzac (as quoted by Frank Partnoy in FIASCO:  The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader.)

But for Freddie Mac, the other pillar of the colossal U.S. mortgage market, Freddie Mac's restatement has only caused headaches and has even raised new questions about the quality of financial reporting.
Patrick Barta, "Restatement by Freddie Mac Puts Fannie on the Spot," The Wall Street Journal, January 12, 2004, Page C1.

The problem is the companies' (Freddie Mac versus Fannie Mae) business and financial statements have become so complex that they are effectively "unanalyzable" says James Bianco, president of Bianco Research, a Chicago-based fixed-income research firm that has been critical of Fannie and Freddie in the past.  He says the same is becoming true of other large financial institutions, particularly those that, like Fannie and Freddie, use large volumes of derivatives, which are investment contracts that can be used by companies to offset risk from interest rate shifts.
Ibid

The Timeline of the Recent History of Fannie Mae Scandals 2002-2008 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm#FannieMae
"Fannie Mayhem: A History," The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2008

So what's a little business deal among friends?  It's trouble, if the friends are college or college-foundation trustees who benefit personally from the decisions they make on behalf of the institutions they serve.  
Julianne Basinger, "Boars Crack Down on Members' Insider Benefits," The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 6. 2004, Page A1.

Mutual-fund investors sent a record $14 billion in net assets to exchange-traded funds last month as they sought escape from the recent share-trading scandal.
Aaron Lucchetti, The Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2004 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107482213730209735,00.html?mod=mkts_main_news_hs_h 

S. Scott Voynich, Chair of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, has stated that further changes were necessary to regain the confidence of American investors. Voynich was the keynote speaker at the Institute’s 2003 AICPA National Conference on Current SEC Developments  .
http://accountingeducation.com/news/news4675.html 

Nothing wrong with overcharging, so long as everyone else is doing it, right?
Gretchen Morgenson"The Mutual Fund Scandal's Next Chapter," The New York Times, December 7, 2003
(See below)

Are you disgusted enough with mutual funds to raise a stink?  So far, savers don't seem nearly as outraged as they were about Enron--yet deceptive funds and sneaky "financial advisers" have swiped more money, from more people, than all the corporate scandals combined.  The House of Representatives just passed a reform bill, but in the Senate, the going looks tough.  Your legislators are scooping up money from the mutual-fund lobby, which hopes to head off any major change.  To counter the lobby, Congress needs angry protest calls from voters like you.
Jane Bryant Quinn (See Below)

One the one hand, eliminating the middleman would result in lower costs, increased sales, and greater consumer satisfaction;  on the other hand, we're the middleman.
New Yorker Cartoon, Page 29, The New Yorker Book of Business Cartoons
In the context of the recent mutual fund scandals, financial advisors have become those middlemen.

Boyer had also asked Kmart's auditors at PricewaterhouseCoopers in several cases to look into various accounting issues and was unsatisfied with the firm's work, according to the lawsuit.
"Fired From Kmart, Ex-CFO Is Key Figure in Lawsuits," SmartPros (See below)

"I believe this (mutual fund rip-off) is the worst scandal we've seen in 50 years, and I can't say I saw it coming," said Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission for nearly eight years under the Clinton administration. "I probably worried about funds less than insider trading, accounting issues and fair disclosure to investors" by public companies.
Stephen Labaton --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#Cleland 

Illegal or unfair trading isn't hard for directors (or the SEC) to spot, says New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who brought the first of these scandals to light.  They just have to compare their funds' total sales with total redemptions.  When the two are about the same, skimming might be going on.  I asked Lipper, a fund-tracking service, to list the larger funds where redemptions reached 90 to 110 percent of sales.  It found 229, some looking obviously churned.
Jane Bryant Quinn --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#Cleland 

One thing your can count on:  When you invest, a lot of the people you trust are going to cheat.  Billions of investor dollars whirl through the system.  It's all too easy for insiders to stick their hands into that current and grab.  We're not talking about a bad apple here and there.  Cheating runs through Wall Street's very seams --- even in the sainted mutual funds.
Jane Bryant Quinn --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#Cleland 

But Wall Street's Lobbyists Still Have a Firm Grip Where it Counts
While Representative Baker pushes his bill in the House, the Senate is not expected to take up a measure before next year. Some lawmakers have filed bills, but Senator Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican who heads the Senate banking committee, has said he is not convinced of the need for new laws.
Stephen Labaton, "S.E.C. Offers Plan for Tightening Grip on Mutual Funds," The New York Times, November 19, 2003 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/19/business/19sec.html 

You can read more about SEC Chairman William H. Donaldson's defense of his quick and some say marshmallow punishment of mutual fund cheaters at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#Cleland  

What makes this such a big scandal is that the savings of half the households in the U.S. are at stake here.  The tragedy is that now that the scandal is surfacing in the media and in state courts, the SEC is only wrist slapping mutual funds.  This is along with the continued wrist slapping of investment banking (e.g., why is Merrill Lynch still in existence after frauds dating back to Orange County ?) is the real evidence of industry power over regulators.  Sarbanes-Oxley won’t do it!  It’s still Congress to the core in Washington DC as long as industries have regulators in their well-financed  pockets --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#Cleland 

New York State Attorney General Eliott Spitzer's charges of improper trading practices by several leading mutual fund families are another blow to public trust in financial institutions. Mutual funds have been the place you would advise the most unsophisticated investors to go: Mutual funds were designed for grandpa and grandma, and repeatedly recommended to them by all kinds of benevolent authorities. Thus scandals in the mutual fund sector are potentially much more damaging to public trust in our financial institutions than are scandals in other sectors -- such as the one playing out in the New York Stock Exchange right now.
See Robert Shiller's article below.

If you don't know jewelry, know your jeweler.
Warren Buffett,

Lowly investors who lost their retirement accounts following the advice of Citigroup's Jack Grubman or followed the "research" of some other firm that was bought and paid for by favored clients can only burn with shame and disbelief. Restore investor confidence in Wall Street? Not likely for baby boomers, who've already been publicly fleeced in broad daylight. Wall Street will have to wait for another generation of innocents to prey upon.
Richard Dooling, The New York Times, May 4, 2003

Mr. Quattrone's rise shows how some who were on the inside during the tech boom piled up huge fortunes in part through special access, unavailable to other investors, to the machinery of that era's frenzied stock market. But now he faces a crunch. The steep yearlong downturn in tech stocks has hurt the profits of his technology group. And in recent weeks, the group he heads has come under scrutiny in connection with a federal probe into whether some investment-bank employees awarded shares of hot IPOs in exchange for unusually high commissions, and whether those commissions amounted to kickbacks.
Susan Pulliam and Randall Smith, The Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2003 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB988836228231147483,00.html?mod=2_1040_1

The Investment Banker Who Got Away to Start Another Day
The (Frank Quattrone) deal marks the end of a sorry chapter in American business history. While high-profile white-collar crime persists, the dramatic criminal cases that were launched just after the dotcom economy fizzled are now mostly completed. The icons of massive, turn-of-the-century corporate fraud--Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling of Enron, Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom, Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz of Tyco--are convicted and, in Lay's case, dead. Even Martha Stewart has served time. And many, if not most, of the cases the feds brought against smaller fish--to help assuage a share-owning public that had been scammed by phony accounting and overhyped stock--are resolved. The government claims that since mid-2002 it has won more than 1,000 corporate-fraud convictions, including those of more than 100 CEOs and presidents.
Barbara Kiviat, "The One Who Got Away:  The decision to abandon a high-profile case against a dotcom poster boy marks the end of a sorry era,"  Time Magazine, August 27, 2006 --- Click Here

Cleaning Up Corporate Japan
Is Japan Inc. finally moving toward more responsible corporate governance? After last week's arrest of Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, owner of the country's major railway, hotel and resort conglomerate Seibu group, there's at least reason to believe that the government is finally demanding more accountability from its corporate leaders.  Mr. Tsutsumi, former chairman of Seibu railway and its holding company, Kokudo, was arrested on Thursday on charges of insider trading and falsification of documents. While his guilt of these charges is still to be determined, the Japanese press has not held back from criticizing the politically influential Mr. Tsutsumi and his business empire, portraying them as powerful symbols of corporate Japan's lack of transparency and disregard for shareholder interests.
"Cleaning Up Corporate Japan," The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2005 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111040748350775119,00.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep 

Hi Milt,

I think the problem in the investment banking industry that spilled over into accounting, banking, mutual funds, securities dealers, and large corporations is truly "infectious greed." When deregulations came 8n 1995, executives watched as investment bankers became filthy rich and many, certainly not all, decided to join in the fun.

What is important in Parnoy's latest book is a greater explanation of "how" it was done.

And yes, I think that many would do it again even if they knew they would get caught. See http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudconclusion.htm#CrimePays  
Many of the perpetrators in the 1990s are now sitting in places like London and Switzerland enjoying a very nice life with no longer having to work. Many of them will gladly sacrifice pride for wealth, which is something that I gather would never appeal to you.

As for Nixon, I think his years in public office drove him to pathological paranoia. He was driven more by fear than greed. I think he wanted to go down in history as a great statesman, and he feared his enemies were out keep him from realizing his dream.

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message----- 
From: MILT COHEN [mailto:uncmlt@juno.com]  
Sent: Sunday, April 25, 2004 9:06 AM 
To: Jensen, Robert 
Subject: comment on your comments

Hi Bob

I read your comments on various books written on securities fraud and related "fun & games" with investors per Cheryl Dunn's request --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm#Quotations 

Just a couple of comments from my view. I read one of the books you wrote on - namely Liar's Poker and I also read a book on Michael Milkens dealings during his days at Drexel, his downfall along with Drexel's, and how others of that era that were involved in those dealings.

It seems to me that most of these books get muddled down into the same expose type of writing and/or reporting. It's like, wow! Is that what really happened? Or, I guess I forgot about that. Each book seems to be a primer for the next "hero" who wlll take investors and accountants for another fleecing. And make lawyers rich.

My question to you (and you may have the same feeling I have) is why are there so many fraudulent happenings in the security arena? One would think that with jail sentences and monetary fines being given (even Martha Stewart), people's reputations driven into a ditch - perhaps forever (notwithstanding Michael Milken's good deeds in medicine and education) is the wealth obtained so worthy of being convicted of being a thief? Does anyone have that answer? Is it all worth it just to get out of jury duty? Back in history when I was an under grad back in the 1950s the big defalcation (as it was titled) was the McKesson Robbins inventory cover-up of the 1930s. The next one that comes to my mind was the Equity Funding matter of the 1960-1970 era that centered on the fraud of writing nonexistent life insurance contracts that brought attention to the firm of Seidman & Seidman (I had a friend working for them during that era). 

After Equity Funding, the fraud circuit was quiet for awhile, but in the last fifteen or so years, it seems we experience one hit after another (like airplanes in a flight plan at LAX) - all centering on the oversight of audits that have gone on for years or even decades. The latest being the B of A involvement with the Italian dairy company. (how a bank account could be overlooked or confirmed when it didn't exist is beyond me). My conclusion after 45 years in this "game" is that it all relates back to Richard Nixon. Nixon in his day depicted the worst of fraud and lying in the matter of Watergate. (He also was depicted as a less than ethical politician here in California. The name "tricky Dick" didn't come from nowhere). Anyway, he showed the populace that anyone can "get away with it". Fast forward to Bill Clinton and we have another example of not telling the truth. (only he has the definition of sex?) So what can our kids and students think as they trudge through college. If ethics is not emphasized in class (and I assume it is not a major topic these or any other days) and ethical actions are not depicted in real life as well as in movies and TV (look at Ormirosa's actions on the Donald Trump show) how can we expect that these financial frauds will not be a continual event? Perhaps the next reality show should be centered on financial fraud. It might bring in bigger ratings than Trump's show did. (And Trump is such an icon of ethical behavior in business dealings too - (that's a joke)).

Anyway, I just thought I'd share my feelings on your thoughts and comments on current readings and topical events.

Sincerely,
Milt Cohen Chatsworth, Ca.

Hi Again Milt,

The entire body of agency theory that evolved in the past three decades is built upon the underlying assumption that managers' utility functions are also in the best interest of the prosperity of corporations and shareholders. Agency theory falls apart when managers like Fastow, Kozwalski, Waksal, etc. are willing to loot the company and/or rob shareholders for personal gain even if they know they will get caught and spend some relaxing time in Club Fed --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudconclusion.htm#CrimePays 

We always hope that dastardly managers are few and far between such that your assumptions and agency theory still hold water. What we saw in the late 1990s, however, was that highly infectious greed that commenced to sicken entire industries such as investment banking, energy traders, stock brokers, and securities dealers after Federal regulations were eliminated in 1995 --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudCongress.htm 

Sadly, the auditing profession was not immune to infectious greed as consulting opportunities exploded in auditing clients. We would hope that integrity is being restored in the auditing profession, but the scandals in tax shelter marketing and client billing cheating since the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation have further eroded the credibility of auditing firms --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm#others 

See "ACCOUNTING PROFESSIONALISM: THEY JUST DON'T GET IT" --- http://aaahq.org/AM2003/WyattSpeech.pdf 

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message----- 
From: MILT COHEN [mailto:uncmlt@juno.com]  
Sent: Sunday, April 25, 2004 2:31 PM To: Jensen, Robert 
Subject: Re: comment on your comments

You may be precisely correct in your conclusion, but one would like to think that the greedy bunch wouldn't want to ruin the 'game" for everyone else. That old story about killing the goose that lays the golden eggs is happening. Another story about the bar owner watching a new bartender steal every other drink that is sold. Finally when the bartender pockets two in a row, the owners calls him over and asks, "aren't we partners on that one?" I mean, in order for investors to part with money the thieves have to let others make a few bucks just to sweeten the pot, or the game is over, in my view. The flip side is that with new laws and the emphasis on accountant's trust, many students will opt out of accounting and just head for the finance sign. I tutored a student last year who was trying to understand Intermediate Accounting. He said he did well in the Principle course. His last remark to me was that if he blows the mid-term he'll drop the course and take up Finance just to keep his grade average. So much for tenacity and commitment.

Sincerely Milt Cohen

March 13, 2009 message from Zafar Khan

Why was Sarbanes-Oxley enacted?

Zafar Khan, Ph.D.
Professor
Eastern Michigan University

March 14, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Zafar,

Sarbanes (SOX) was enacted to keep investors from abandoning the U.S. stock market after enormous scandals like Enron, WorldCom, and other huge scandals that revealed CPA audits themselves were becoming both substandard and non-profitable --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnron.htm

To make money, auditing firms themselves were profiting from irresponsible audit cost cutting and non-audit consulting that compromised their auditing independence. Inside corporations, internal controls for responsible financial reporting had broken down or never existed in the first place.

Sarbanes forced auditors to become more independent and also made it possible to double or triple audit fees, thereby restoring auditing to profitable services rather than services that lost money for auditing firms trying to be responsible auditors.

SOX also created the PCAOB that got serious about reviewing auditor performance (including fining Deloitte a million dollars). Many of the large and smaller CPA firms failed the PCAOB tests early on and soon cleaned up their audit practices with the PCAOB breathing down their backs.

Among other things SOX increased government funding for the SEC and the FASB (which before SOX received no taxpayer funding). This, in turn, made the FASB less dependent upon sales of publications. The FASB then made many publications free electronically, most notably free distribution of standards and interpretations. The IASB, sadly, still depends upon publication revenue such that IFRS are not free unless you play games like download the equivalent Hong Kong accounting standards.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes_and_Oxley

A variety of complex factors created the conditions and culture in which a series of large corporate frauds occurred between 2000-2002. The spectacular, highly-publicized frauds at Enron (see Enron scandal), WorldCom, and Tyco exposed significant problems with conflicts of interest and incentive compensation practices. The analysis of their complex and contentious root causes contributed to the passage of SOX in 2002. In a 2004 interview, Senator Paul Sarbanes stated:

The Senate Banking Committee undertook a series of hearings on the problems in the markets that had led to a loss of hundreds and hundreds of billions, indeed trillions of dollars in market value. The hearings set out to lay the foundation for legislation. We scheduled 10 hearings over a six-week period, during which we brought in some of the best people in the country to testify...The hearings produced remarkable consensus on the nature of the problems: inadequate oversight of accountants, lack of auditor independence, weak corporate governance procedures, stock analysts' conflict of interests, inadequate disclosure provisions, and grossly inadequate funding of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

• Auditor conflicts of interest: Prior to SOX, auditing firms, the primary financial "watchdogs" for investors, were self-regulated. They also performed significant non-audit or consulting work for the companies they audited. Many of these consulting agreements were far more lucrative than the auditing engagement. This presented at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. For example, challenging the company's accounting approach might damage a client relationship, conceivably placing a significant consulting arrangement at risk, damaging the auditing firm's bottom line.
   
• Boardroom failures: Boards of Directors, specifically Audit Committees, are charged with establishing oversight mechanisms for financial reporting in U.S. corporations on the behalf of investors. These scandals identified Board members who either did not exercise their responsibilities or did not have the expertise to understand the complexities of the businesses. In many cases, Audit Committee members were not truly independent of management.
   
• Securities analysts' conflicts of interest: The roles of securities analysts, who make buy and sell recommendations on company stocks and bonds, and investment bankers, who help provide companies loans or handle mergers and acquisitions, provide opportunities for conflicts. Similar to the auditor conflict, issuing a buy or sell recommendation on a stock while providing lucrative investment banking services creates at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.
   
• Inadequate funding of the SEC: The SEC budget has steadily increased to nearly double the pre-SOX level. In the interview cited above, Sarbanes indicated that enforcement and rule-making are more effective post-SOX.
   
• Banking practices: Lending to a firm sends signals to investors regarding the firm's risk. In the case of Enron, several major banks provided large loans to the company without understanding, or while ignoring, the risks of the company. Investors of these banks and their clients were hurt by such bad loans, resulting in large settlement payments by the banks. Others interpreted the willingness of banks to lend money to the company as an indication of its health and integrity, and were led to invest in Enron as a result. These investors were hurt as well.
   
• Internet bubble: Investors had been stung in 2000 by the sharp declines in technology stocks and to a lesser extent, by declines in the overall market. Certain mutual fund managers were alleged to have advocated the purchasing of particular technology stocks, while quietly selling them. The losses sustained also helped create a general anger among investors.
   
• Executive compensation: Stock option and bonus practices, combined with volatility in stock prices for even small earnings "misses," resulted in pressures to manage earnings. Stock options were not treated as compensation expense by companies, encouraging this form of compensation. With a large stock-based bonus at risk, managers were pressured to meet their targets.

 

Pay Me More and More and More
Sadly, SOX did not attack the root problems that led to the subsequent subprime lending scandals. These root problems included pay-for-performance compensation plans that motivated mortgage brokers, real estate appraisers, banks, and investment banks to screw both shareholders and home owners.

Pass the Trash
Added to this was Congressional pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack to buy hopeless mortgages that had almost no chance of being repaid. Banks commenced a practice of passing the trash to Freddie, Fannie, and Wall Street investment banks that, in turn, passed the trash to their customers in CDOs that were intended to diversify the bad loan risks (but failed to do so when the real estate bubble burst).

SOX has worked in countless ways, but not all ways
There are countless success stories where SOX led to better internal controls and better auditing with more substantive testing in place of lousy analytical reviews. However, SOX did almost nothing to prevent fraud in the mortgage brokering and banking sectors.

You can read more about subprime sleaze at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Sleaze

You can read more about auditing professionalism at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Professionalism

Fiduciaries turned into whores
One of the most sad things for me is the way that CPA auditing firms failed to signal the public that banks were filling up on toxic loans. Equally unprofessional were the credit rating agencies like Standard and Poors and Moody’s that in essence became Wall Street’s whores.

Why regulations fail and succeed in the turning of the carousel
The main problem with government regulations on industry is that industry eventually runs the regulators (e.g., the Federal Reserve, SEC, FDA, FAA, FCC, etc.) until some enormous scandals force the regulators to use the powers entrusted to them. Then we get new regulations that industry eventually figures out how to circumvent. Then we wait for more huge scandals. And so the carousel goes round and round.

Socialism bypasses the regulation process by owning and running the industries. Then the abuses really begin
The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
Winston Churchill

May 14, 2009 reply from Zafar Khan [zkhan@EMICH.EDU]

Hi Bob, one can always depend upon you to set the record straight. Otherwise, some might continue to believe that this (SOX) was another gratuitous government intervention to disrupt the smooth functioning of our self correcting financial markets.

I also read in a recent post that the government should not do anything about executive compensation despite the obscene abuse of power by the executives of public companies who have enriched themselves while running their companies into the ground because the market will in the end sort it out. My humble response to that is dream on.

Zafar Khan, Ph.D.
Professor
Eastern Michigan University

March 15, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi again Zafar,

After the fall of Andersen you would've thought CPA auditors would've "self corrected" without having SOX since their reputations had hit bottom.

In 2003 a former professor of accounting at the University of Illinois and long-time executive partner with Andersen told accounting professors that the CPA firm executives "still didn't get it." This is probably why we needed SOX and the PCAOB to help them "get it." Art Wyatt’s plenary session speech at the 2003 American Accounting Association annual meetings is at http://aaahq.org/AM2003/WyattSpeech.pdf
Art is also a former AAA President and a member of the Accounting Hall of Fame. His opinions have a lot of clout in both the CPA profession and academe.

From “Topics for Class Debate” at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
This might be a good topic of debate for an ethics and/or fraud course.  The topic is essentially the problem of regulating and/or punishing many for the egregious actions of a few.  The best example is the major accounting firm of Andersen in which 84,000 mostly ethical and highly professional employees lost their jobs when the firm's leadership repeatedly failed to take action to prevent corrupt and/or incompetent audits of a small number audit partners.  Clearly the firm's management failed and deserves to be fired and/or jailed for obstruction of justice and failure to protect the public in general and 83,900 Andersen employees.  A former Andersen executive partner, Art Wyatt, contends that Andersen's leadership did not get the message and that leadership in today's leading CPA firms is still not (just before SOX) getting the message --- http://aaahq.org/AM2003/WyattSpeech.pdf 

Bob Jensen's threads on auditing professionalism are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud001.htm#Professionalism

"8 Accused of Kickbacks, Fraud at Wall Street Brokerage Firms," SmartPros, May 23, 2008 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x61954.xml

"Eliot Spitzer's Case Book," by Elizabeth Weinstein, The Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2005

Eliot Spitzer is a man on the hunt. From mutual funds to music, executive compensation to counterfeit drugs, the New York attorney general has pursued investigations of alleged misdeeds in half a dozen industries.

Though sometimes criticized for focusing too closely on Wall Street -- and on his own bid for New York state governor in 2006 -- Mr. Spitzer's probes have led to stricter controls on Wall Street research and spurred other attorneys general to action. His landmark investigations have zeroed in on high-profile executives, most recently Maurice Greenberg at insurer American International Group.

Last year alone, the New York attorney general's office recovered a record $2.38 billion earmarked for restitution to individual shareholders and other consumers. Mr. Spitzer's office, which has an annual budget of $214 million, has added nearly 50 lawyers to its staff of more than 500 attorneys since 1999.

Here is an overview of key investigations:

Investment Banking ­ Stock research
Probe launched: 2001
At issue: Misleading information in analysts' public research reports

An investigation into the stock research issued by Merrill Lynch & Co.'s Internet group, whose star analyst was Henry Blodget, showed that some analysts harbored different opinions privately from those they expressed in their public research reports. The investigation spawned a wide-ranging probe over nearly two years into the procedures at many firms. Ultimately, 10 of the largest securities firms agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle charges that they routinely issued misleading stock research to curry favor with corporate clients during the stock-market bubble of the late 1990s. The firms consented to the charges without admitting or denying wrongdoing. The $1.4 billion settlement was among the highest ever imposed by securities regulators, and both Mr. Blodget and Jack Grubman of Salomon Smith Barney were banned from the securities business.

Investment Banking - IPOs
Probe launched: 2001
At issue: Unfair allocations of shares in initial public offerings

Mr. Spitzer's office also charged that several big Wall Street firms improperly doled out coveted shares in initial public offerings to corporate executives in a bid to win banking business. Two companies, Citigroup Inc.'s Citigroup Global Markets unit, formerly Salomon Smith Barney, and Credit Suisse Group's Credit Suisse First Boston, settled these charges as part of the $1.4 billion pact with securities firms and did so without admitting or denying wrongdoing. In a related probe, former star CSFB banker Frank Quattrone was convicted of obstruction of justice for impeding and investigation of CSFB's IPO allocations.

Insurance - Improper transactions
Probe launched: 2003
At issue: Whether several AIG business deals were designed to manipulate its financial statements

In 2003, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Mr. Spitzer's office looked into insurance transactions that American International Group Inc. conducted with two firms, cellphone distributor Brightpoint Inc. and PNC Financial Services Group Inc. AIG paid $126 million in a settlement without admitting or denying guilt. Later, both the SEC and Mr. Spitzer's office scrutinized a deal struck between AIG and Berkshire Hathaway's General Reinsurance unit in 2000 to determine if the deal was aimed at making the giant insurer's reserves look healthier than they were. Longtime Chairman Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg retired from the company, and in late March, AIG admitted to a broad range of improper accounting. Other AIG executives were forced out, including chief financial officer Howard Smith. Meanwhile, Berkshire chief Warren Buffett this week told investigators that he didn't know details about the contentious transaction. Mr. Greenberg also was deposed and repeatedly invoked his constitutional right against self incrimination.

Insurance - Broker fees
Probe launched: 2004
At issue: Whether fees paid by insurance companies to insurance brokers and consultants posed a conflict of interest

Mr. Spitzer and other state attorneys general as well as insurance regulators in New York and Illinois alleged that insurance companies routinely paid fees to brokers and consultants who advised employers on where to buy policies for workers, a potential conflict of interest. Mr. Spitzer accused several insurance brokers of accepting undisclosed commissions and, in the case of Marsh & McLennan, of bid-rigging -- soliciting fake bids from insurers to help steer business to favored providers. In February 2005, Marsh agreed to pay $850 million in restitution to clients of its Marsh Inc. insurance brokerage firm who allegedly were cheated by Marsh brokers. Marsh neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.

The investigations shook up an insurance dynasty. Marsh was run by Jeffrey W. Greenberg, the eldest son of AIG's former head Maurice Greenberg, before he was ousted as a result of the probe. Another insurance firm included in the probe, Ace Ltd., is run by Evan Greenberg, Jeffrey's younger brother. Meanwhile, Aon Corp. reached a $190 million settlement without admitting or denying wrongdoing, and earlier this month, insurance broker Willis Group Holdings Ltd. said it would pay $51 million and change its business practices to end an investigation by attorneys general in New York and Minnesota. Willis admitted no wrongdoing or liability.

NYSE - Executive Compensation
Probe launched: 2004
At issue: Whether then-New York Stock Exchange Chairman Dick Grasso's compensation was excessive

Mr. Spitzer sued Mr. Grasso, the NYSE and the Wall Street executive who headed its compensation committee for what Mr. Spitzer claimed was a pay package so huge that it violated the state law governing not-for-profit groups. Mr. Spitzer said the compensation -- valued at nearly $200 million -- came about as a result of Mr. Grasso's intimidation of the exchange's board of directors. Mr. Grasso, who denied there was anything improper about his pay, was forced to resign from the Big Board in September 2003 following a public outcry over his compensation. The lawsuit, which is still in progress, led to new governance oversight at the Big Board.

Retail
Probe launched: 2004
At issue: Antitrust violations by retailers

Mr. Spitzer claimed that Federated Department Stores Inc. and May Department Stores Co. conspired to pressure housewares makers Lenox Inc., a unit of Brown-Forman Corp. and Waterford Wedgwood PLC's U.S. unit to pull out as planned anchors of Bed Bath & Beyond Inc.'s new tableware department. The case was settled in August when the four companies agreed to pay a total of $2.9 million in civil penalties but admit no wrongdoing. Later, Mr. Spitzer charged James M. Zimmerman, Federated's retired chairman, with perjury, alleging that he lied under oath to conceal evidence of possible antitrust violations. Mr. Zimmerman has pleaded not guilty.

Music
Probe launched: 2004
At issue: Payments by music companies middlemen aimed at securing better airplay for the labels' artists

Mr. Spitzer's investigation, which is continuing, centers around independent promoters -- middlemen between record companies and radio stations -- whom music labels pay to help them secure better airplay for their music releases. Broadcasters are prohibited from taking goods or cash for playing songs on their stations. The independent-promotion system has been viewed as a way around laws against payola -- undisclosed cash payments to individuals in exchange for airplay. Last fall, Mr. Spitzer requested information from Warner Music Group, EMI Group PLC, Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Music Group, and Sony Corp. and Bertelsmann AG's Sony BMG Music Entertainment. Warner Music received an additional subpoena last week.

Marketing
Probe launched: 2004
At issue: Software secretly installed on home computers to put ads on screens

After a six-month investigation into Internet marketer Intermix Media Inc., Mr. Spitzer in April 2005 filed suit, claiming the company installed a wide range of advertising software on home computers nationwide. The software, known as "spyware" or "adware," prompts nuisance pop-up advertising on computer screens, setting users up for PC slowdowns and crashes. The programs sometimes don't come with "un-install" applications and can't be removed by most computers' add/remove function. Mr. Spitzer said the suit is designed to combat the practice of redirecting of home computer users to unwanted Web sites, the adding of unnecessary toolbar items and the delivery of unwanted ads that pop up on computer screens. The civil suit accuses Intermix of violating state General Business Law provisions against false advertising and deceptive business practices, and also of trespass under New York common law. Intermix has said it doesn't "promote or condone spyware" and has ceased distribution of the software at issue, which it says was introduced under prior leadership.

Health Care
Probe launched: 2005
At issue: Covert sales of counterfeit drugs

Mr. Spitzer's office has sent subpoenas to three big drug wholesalers -- Cardinal Health Inc., Amerisource Bergen Corp. and McKesson Corp. -- related to the companies' purchase of drugs on the secondary market. Although few details about the probe have emerged, some industry analysts have said that the subpoenas are likely connected to sales transactions involving counterfeit products. Counterfeit drugs are those sold under a product name without proper authorization -- they can include drugs without the active ingredient, with an insufficient quantity of the active ingredient, with the wrong active ingredient, or with fake packaging. The investigation focuses on the secondary market, where the wholesalers buy drugs from each other, often at lower prices, and counterfeit drugs are hard to track. It isn't clear whether the wholesalers are the focus of a probe or just sources of information.

How Grasso Got Greener:  Grasso Took Fifth In SEC Testimony
An official in the office of New York state's attorney general yesterday said former New York Stock Exchange Chief Executive Dick Grasso last year declined to answer certain questions during a deposition by the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding that regulator's probe of trading firms at the Big Board. Avi Schick, a lawyer working for Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, made that assertion during a pretrial hearing in New York state court for a civil lawsuit claiming that Mr. Grasso's $187.5 million pay package as Big Board chief was excessive under New York law covering not-for-profits. (The NYSE has since become a public company, NYSE Group Inc.) The disclosure could be useful to Mr. Spitzer in the compensation case if he can use it to suggest that Mr. Grasso was an inadequate market regulator.
Chad Bray, "Grasso Took Fifth In SEC Testimony, Spitzer Aide Says," The Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2006; Page C3 --- Click Here

Ending a bitter public fight over whether former New York Stock Exchange Chief Executive Dick Grasso was paid too much, a state appeals court ruled that Mr. Grasso can keep every penny collected from his $187.5 million multiyear compensation package. The 3-to-1 ruling by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court was a vindication for the relentless Mr. Grasso, who was ousted after details of his lucrative pay were revealed in 2003.
Aaron Lucchetti, "Grasso Wins Court Fight, Can Keep NYSE Pay," The Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2008; Page A1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121492781324819635.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

American History of Fraud --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/415wp/AmericanHistoryOfFraud.htm

Federal securities class action lawsuits increased 19 percent in 2008, with almost half involving firms in the financial services sector according to the annual report prepared by the Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse in cooperation with Cornerstone Research --- http://securities.stanford.edu/scac_press/20080106_YIR08_Press_Release.pdf

Especially note the 2008 Year in Review link at http://securities.stanford.edu/clearinghouse_research/2008_YIR/20080106.pdf

Instead of adding more regulating agencies, I think we should simply make the FBI tougher on crime and the IRS tougher on cheats

Our Main Financial Regulating Agency:  The SEC Screw Everybody Commission
One of the biggest regulation failures in history is the way the SEC failed to seriously investigate Bernie Madoff's fund even after being warned by Wall Street experts across six years before Bernie himself disclosed that he was running a $65 billion Ponzi fund.

CBS Sixty Minutes on June 14, 2009 ran a rerun that is devastatingly critical of the SEC. If you’ve not seen it, it may still be available for free (for a short time only) at http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5088137n&tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel
The title of the video is “The Man Who Would Be King.”

Between 2002 and 2008 Harry Markopolos repeatedly told (with indisputable proof) the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernie Madoff's investment fund was a fraud. Markopolos was ignored and, as a result, investors lost more and more billions of dollars. Steve Kroft reports.

Markoplos makes the SEC look truly incompetent or outright conspiratorial in fraud.

I'm really surprised that the SEC survived after Chris Cox messed it up so many things so badly.

As Far as Regulations Go

An annual report issued by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) shows that the U.S. government imposed $1.17 trillion in new regulatory costs in 2008. That almost equals the $1.2 trillion generated by individual income taxes, and amounts to $3,849 for every American citizen. According the 2009 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State, the government issued 3,830 new rules last year, and The Federal Register, where such rules are listed, ballooned to a record 79,435 pages. “The costs of federal regulations too often exceed the benefits, yet these regulations receive little official scrutiny from Congress,” said CEI Vice President Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr., who wrote the report. “The U.S. economy lost value in 2008 for the first time since 1990,” Crews said. “Meanwhile, our federal government imposed a $1.17 trillion ‘hidden tax’ on Americans beyond the $3 trillion officially budgeted” through the regulations.
 Adam Brickley, "Government Implemented Thousands of New Regulations Costing $1.17 Trillion in 2008," CNS News, June 12, 2009 ---
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=49487

Jensen Comment
I’m a long-time believer that industries being regulated end up controlling the regulating agencies. The records of Alan Greenspan (FED) and the SEC from Arthur Levitt to Chris Cox do absolutely nothing to change my belief ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

How do industries leverage the regulatory agencies?
The primary control mechanism is to have high paying jobs waiting in industry for regulators who play ball while they are still employed by the government. It happens time and time again in the FPC, EPA, FDA, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc. Because so many people work for the FBI and IRS, it's a little harder for industry to manage those bureaucrats. Also the FBI and the IRS tend to focus on the worst of the worst offenders whereas other agencies often deal with top management of the largest companies in America.

The Greatest Swindle in the History of the World
"The Greatest Swindle Ever Sold," by Andy Kroll, The Nation, May 26, 2009 ---
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/kroll/print

The legislation's guidelines for crafting the rescue plan were clear: the TARP should protect home values and consumer savings, help citizens keep their homes and create jobs. Above all, with the government poised to invest hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in various financial institutions, the legislation urged the bailout's architects to maximize returns to the American people.

That $700 billion bailout has since grown into a more than $12 trillion commitment by the US government and the Federal Reserve. About $1.1 trillion of that is taxpayer money--the TARP money and an additional $400 billion rescue of mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The TARP now includes twelve separate programs, and recipients range from megabanks like Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase to automakers Chrysler and General Motors.

Seven months in, the bailout's impact is unclear. The Treasury Department has used the recent "stress test" results it applied to nineteen of the nation's largest banks to suggest that the worst might be over; yet the International Monetary Fund, as well as economists like New York University professor and economist Nouriel Roubini and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman predict greater losses in US markets, rising unemployment and generally tougher economic times ahead.

What cannot be disputed, however, is the financial bailout's biggest loser: the American taxpayer. The US government, led by the Treasury Department, has done little, if anything, to maximize returns on its trillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded investment. So far, the bailout has favored rescued financial institutions by subsidizing their losses to the tune of $356 billion, shying away from much-needed management changes and--with the exception of the automakers--letting companies take taxpayer money without a coherent plan for how they might return to viability.

The bailout's perks have been no less favorable for private investors who are now picking over the economy's still-smoking rubble at the taxpayers' expense. The newer bailout programs rolled out by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner give private equity firms, hedge funds and other private investors significant leverage to buy "toxic" or distressed assets, while leaving taxpayers stuck with the lion's share of the risk and potential losses.

Given the lack of transparency and accountability, don't expect taxpayers to be able to object too much. After all, remarkably little is known about how TARP recipients have used the government aid received. Nonetheless, recent government reports, Congressional testimony and commentaries offer those patient enough to pore over hundreds of pages of material glimpses of just how Wall Street friendly the bailout actually is. Here, then, based on the most definitive data and analyses available, are six of the most blatant and alarming ways taxpayers have been scammed by the government's $1.1-trillion, publicly funded bailout.

1. By overpaying for its TARP investments, the Treasury Department provided bailout recipients with generous subsidies at the taxpayer's expense.

When the Treasury Department ditched its initial plan to buy up "toxic" assets and instead invest directly in financial institutions, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. assured Americans that they'd get a fair deal. "This is an investment, not an expenditure, and there is no reason to expect this program will cost taxpayers anything," he said in October 2008.

Yet the Congressional Oversight Panel (COP), a five-person group tasked with ensuring that the Treasury Department acts in the public's best interest, concluded in its monthly report for February that the department had significantly overpaid by tens of billions of dollars for its investments. For the ten largest TARP investments made in 2008, totaling $184.2 billion, Treasury received on average only $66 worth of assets for every $100 invested. Based on that shortfall, the panel calculated that Treasury had received only $176 billion in assets for its $254 billion investment, leaving a $78 billion hole in taxpayer pockets.

Not all investors subsidized the struggling banks so heavily while investing in them. The COP report notes that private investors received much closer to fair market value in investments made at the time of the early TARP transactions. When, for instance, Berkshire Hathaway invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs in September, the Omaha-based company received securities worth $110 for each $100 invested. And when Mitsubishi invested in Morgan Stanley that same month, it received securities worth $91 for every $100 invested.

As of May 15, according to the Ethisphere TARP Index, which tracks the government's bailout investments, its various investments had depreciated in value by almost $147.7 billion. In other words, TARP's losses come out to almost $1,300 per American taxpaying household.

2. As the government has no real oversight over bailout funds, taxpayers remain in the dark about how their money has been used and if it has made any difference.

While the Treasury Department can make TARP recipients report on just how they spend their government bailout funds, it has chosen not to do so. As a result, it's unclear whether institutions receiving such funds are using that money to increase lending--which would, in turn, boost the economy--or merely to fill in holes in their balance sheets.

Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general for TARP, summed the situation up this way in his office's April quarterly report to Congress: "The American people have a right to know how their tax dollars are being used, particularly as billions of dollars are going to institutions for which banking is certainly not part of the institution's core business and may be little more than a way to gain access to the low-cost capital provided under TARP."

This lack of transparency makes the bailout process highly susceptible to fraud and corruption. Barofsky's report stated that twenty separate criminal investigations were already underway involving corporate fraud, insider trading and public corruption. He also told the Financial Times that his office was investigating whether banks manipulated their books to secure bailout funds. "I hope we don't find a single bank that's cooked its books to try to get money, but I don't think that's going to be the case."

Economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, suggested to TomDispatch in an interview that the opaque and complicated nature of the bailout may not be entirely unintentional, given the difficulties it raises for anyone wanting to follow the trail of taxpayer dollars from the government to the banks. "[Government officials] see this all as a Three Card Monte, moving everything around really quickly so the public won't understand that this really is an elaborate way to subsidize the banks," Baker says, adding that the public "won't realize we gave money away to some of the richest people."

3. The bailout's newer programs heavily favor the private sector, giving investors an opportunity to earn lucrative profits and leaving taxpayers with most of the risk.

Under Treasury Secretary Geithner, the Treasury Department has greatly expanded the financial bailout to troubling new programs like the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP) and the Term Asset-Backed-Securities Loan Facility (TALF). The PPIP, for example, encourages private investors to buy "toxic" or risky assets on the books of struggling banks. Doing so, we're told, will get banks lending again because the burdensome assets won't weigh them down. Unfortunately, the incentives the Treasury Department is offering to get private investors to participate are so generous that the government--and, by extension, American taxpayers--are left with all the downside.

Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-prize winning economist, described the PPIP program in a New York Times op-ed this way:

Consider an asset that has a 50-50 chance of being worth either zero or $200 in a year's time. The average "value" of the asset is $100. Ignoring interest, this is what the asset would sell for in a competitive market. It is what the asset is 'worth.' Under the plan by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the government would provide about 92 percent of the money to buy the asset but would stand to receive only 50 percent of any gains, and would absorb almost all of the losses. Some partnership!

Assume that one of the public-private partnerships the Treasury has promised to create is willing to pay $150 for the asset. That's 50 percent more than its true value, and the bank is more than happy to sell. So the private partner puts up $12, and the government supplies the rest--$12 in "equity" plus $126 in the form of a guaranteed loan.

If, in a year's time, it turns out that the true value of the asset is zero, the private partner loses the $12, and the government loses $138. If the true value is $200, the government and the private partner split the $74 that's left over after paying back the $126 loan. In that rosy scenario, the private partner more than triples his $12 investment. But the taxpayer, having risked $138, gains a mere $37."

Worse still, the PPIP can be easily manipulated for private gain. As economist Jeffrey Sachs has described it, a bank with worthless toxic assets on its books could actually set up its own public-private fund to bid on those assets. Since no true bidder would pay for a worthless asset, the bank's public-private fund would win the bid, essentially using government money for the purchase. All the public-private fund would then have to do is quietly declare bankruptcy and disappear, leaving the bank to make off with the government money it received. With the PPIP deals set to begin in the coming months, time will tell whether private investors actually take advantage of the program's flaws in this fashion.

The Treasury Department's TALF program offers equally enticing possibilities for potential bailout profiteers, providing investors with a chance to double, triple or even quadruple their investments. And like the PPIP, if the deal goes bad, taxpayers absorb most of the losses. "It beats any financing that the private sector could ever come up with," a Wall Street trader commented in a recent Fortune magazine story. "I almost want to say it is irresponsible."

4. The government has no coherent plan for returning failing financial institutions to profitability and maximizing returns on taxpayers' investments.

Compare the treatment of the auto industry and the financial sector, and a troubling double standard emerges. As a condition for taking bailout aid, the government required Chrysler and General Motors to present detailed plans on how the companies would return to profitability. Yet the Treasury Department attached minimal conditions to the billions injected into the largest bailed-out financial institutions. Moreover, neither Geithner nor Lawrence Summers, one of President Barack Obama's top economic advisors, nor the president himself has articulated any substantive plan or vision for how the bailout will help these institutions recover and, hopefully, maximize taxpayers' investment returns.

The Congressional Oversight Panel highlighted the absence of such a comprehensive plan in its January report. Three months into the bailout, the Treasury Department "has not yet explained its strategy," the report stated. "Treasury has identified its goals and announced its programs, but it has not yet explained how the programs chosen constitute a coherent plan to achieve those goals."

Today, the department's endgame for the bailout still remains vague. Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, wrote in the Financial Times in May that the government's response to the financial meltdown has been "ad hoc, resulting in inequitable outcomes among firms, creditors, and investors." Rather than perpetually prop up banks with endless taxpayer funds, Hoenig suggests, the government should allow banks to fail. Only then, he believes, can crippled financial institutions and systems be fixed. "Because we still have far to go in this crisis, there remains time to define a clear process for resolving large institutional failure. Without one, the consequences will involve a series of short-term events and far more uncertainty for the global economy in the long run."

The healthier and more profitable bailout recipients are once financial markets rebound, the more taxpayers will earn on their investments. Without a plan, however, banks may limp back to viability while taxpayers lose their investments or even absorb further losses.

5. The bailout's focus on Wall Street mega-banks ignores smaller banks serving millions of American taxpayers that face an equally uncertain future.

The government may not have a long-term strategy for its trillion-dollar bailout, but its guiding principle, however misguided, is clear: what's good for Wall Street will be best for the rest of the country.

On the day the mega-bank stress tests were officially released, another set of stress-test results came out to much less fanfare. In its quarterly report on the health of individual banks and the banking industry as a whole, Institutional Risk Analytics (IRA), a respected financial services organization, found that the stress levels among more than 7,500 FDIC-reporting banks nationwide had risen dramatically. For 1,575 of the banks, net incomes had turned negative due to decreased lending and less risk-taking.

The conclusion IRA drew was telling: "Our overall observation is that US policy makers may very well have been distracted by focusing on 19 large stress test banks designed to save Wall Street and the world's central bank bondholders, this while a trend is emerging of a going concern viability crash taking shape under the radar." The report concluded with a question: "Has the time come to shift the policy focus away from the things that we love, namely big zombie banks, to tackle things that are truly hurting us?"

6. The bailout encourages the very behaviors that created the economic crisis in the first place instead of overhauling our broken financial system and helping the individuals most affected by the crisis.

As Joseph Stiglitz explained in the New York Times, one major cause of the economic crisis was bank overleveraging. "Using relatively little capital of their own," he wrote, banks "borrowed heavily to buy extremely risky real estate assets. In the process, they used overly complex instruments like collateralized debt obligations." Financial institutions engaged in overleveraging in pursuit of the lucrative profits such deals promised--even if those profits came with staggering levels of risk.

Sound familiar? It should, because in the PPIP and TALF bailout programs the Treasury Department has essentially replicated the very over-leveraged, risky, complex system that got us into this mess in the first place: in other words, the government hopes to repair our financial system by using the flawed practices that caused this crisis.

Then there are the institutions deemed "too big to fail." These financial giants--among them AIG, Citigroup and Bank of America-- have been kept afloat by billions of dollars in bottomless bailout aid. Yet reinforcing the notion that any institution is "too big to fail" is dangerous to the economy. When a company like AIG grows so large that it becomes "too big to fail," the risk it carries is systemic, meaning failure could drag down the entire economy. The government should force "too big to fail" institutions to slim down to a safer, more modest size; instead, the Treasury Department continues to subsidize these financial giants, reinforcing their place in our economy.

Of even greater concern is the message the bailout sends to banks and lenders--namely, that the risky investments that crippled the economy are fair game in the future. After all, if banks fail and teeter at the edge of collapse, the government promises to be there with a taxpayer-funded, potentially profitable safety net.

The handling of the bailout makes at least one thing clear, however. It's not your health that the government is focused on, it's theirs-- the very banks and lenders whose convoluted financial systems provided the underpinnings for staggering salaries and bonuses, while bringing our economy to the brink of another Great Depression.

Bob Jensen's threads how your money was put to word (fraudulently) to pay for the mistakes of the so-called professionals of finance --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#Bailout

Bob Jensen's threads on why the infamous "Bailout" won't work --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#BailoutStupidity

Bob Jensen's "Rotten to the Core" threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

"Insider Trading Inside the SEC," by Joe Weisenthal, Business Insider, May 15, 2009 --- http://www.businessinsider.com/insider-trading-at-the-sec-2009-5

Kotz, who told Congress last year he was examining whether frequent trades by the pair broke agency rules, referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington after finding evidence the bets might amount to insider trading, he wrote in the March 3 report released by Senator Charles Grassley. Both lawyers still work for the agency and denied improper conduct.

The report faults the agency for inadequately monitoring trades by employees and relying on an “honor system.” The lawyers frequently discussed stocks at work, traded in at least one company under investigation and didn’t properly disclose some transactions, it says. One lawyer made 247 trades in the two years ending January 2008, and the other made 14.
ead the whole thing >

Question
What are hedge funds, especially after Bernie Madoff made them so famous?

When people ask me this question, my initial response is that a hedge fund no longer necessarily has anything to do with financial risk hedging. Rather a hedge fund is merely a "private" investment "club" that does not offer shares to the general public largely because it would then subject itself to more SEC, stock exchange, and other regulators. Having said this, it's pretty darn easy for anybody with sufficient funds to get into such a "private" club. Minimum investments range from $10,000 to $1,000,000 or higher.

Since Bernie Madoff made hedge funds so famous, the public tends to think that a hedge fund is dangerous, fraudulent, and a back street operation that does not play be the rules. Certainly hedge funds emerged in part to avoid being regulated. Sometimes they are risky due to high leverage, but some funds skillfully hedge to manage risk and are much safer than mutual funds. For example, some hedge funds have shrewd hedging strategies to control risk in interest rate and/or foreign currency trading.

Most hedge funds are not fraudulent. In general, however, it's "buyer beware" for hedge fund investors.

I would never invest in a hedge fund that is not audited by a very reliable CPA auditing firm. Not all CPA auditing firms are reliable (Bernie Madoff proved you can engage a fraudulent auditor operating out of a one-room office). Hence, the first step in evaluating a hedge fund is to investigate its auditor. The first step in evaluating an auditor is to determine if the auditing firm is wealthy enough to be a serious third party in law suits if the hedge fund goes belly up.

But the recent multimillion losses of Carnegie Mellon, the University of Pittsburgh, and other university endowment funds that invested in a verry fraudulent hedge fund purportedly audited by Deloitte suggests that the size and reputation of the auditing firm is not, by itself, sufficient protection against a criminal hedge fund (that was supposedly given a clean opinion by Deloitte in financial reports circulated to the victims of the fraud).

When learning about hedge funds, you may want to begin at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedge_Fund

"What is a hedge fund and how is it different from a mutual fund?" by Andy Samuels, Business and Finance 101 Examiner, June 10, 2009 --- Click Here
Jim Mahar pointed out this link.

Having migrated away from their namesake, hedge funds no longer  focus primarily on “hedging” (attempting to reduce risk) because hedge funds are now focused almost blindly on one thing: returns.

Having been referred to as “mutual funds for the super rich” by investopedia.com, hedge funds are very similar to mutual funds in that they pool money together from many investors. Hedge funds, like mutual funds, are also managed by a financial professionals, but differ because they are geared toward wealthier individuals.

Hedge funds, unlike mutual funds, employ a wider array of ivesting techniques, which are considered more aggresive. For example, hedge funds often use leverage to amplify their returns (or losses if things go wrong).

The other key difference between hedge funds and mutual funds is the amount of regulation involved. Hedge funds are relatively unregulated because investors in hedge funds are assumed to be more sophisticated investors, who can both afford and understand the potential losses. In fact, U.S. laws require that the majority of investors in the fund are accredited.

Most hedge funds draw in investors because of the trustworthy reputations of the executives of the fund. Word-of-mouth praise and affiliations are often the key to success. Bernie Madoff succeed in luring customers based on two leading factors:  (1) His esteemed reputation on Wall Street and (2) His highly regarded connections in the Jewish community where he drew in most of his victims.

A Bit of History
German Chancellor's Call for Global Regulations to Curb Hedge Funds
Germany and the United States are parting company again, this time over Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's call for international regulations to govern hedge funds. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, speaking here Thursday at the end of a five-country European tour, said the United States opposed "heavy-handed" curbs on markets. He said that he was not familiar with the German proposals, but left little doubt about how Washington would react. "I think we ought to be very careful about heavy-handed regulation of markets because it stymies financial innovation," Mr. Snow said after a news conference here to sum up his visit. Noting that the Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed that hedge funds be required to register themselves, he said he preferred the "light touch rather than the heavy regulatory burden."
Mark Landler, "U.S. Balks at German Chancellor's Call for Global Regulations to Curb Hedge Funds," The New York Times, June 17, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/business/worldbusiness/17hedge.html?

Bob Jensen's threads on frauds are linked at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm
In particular see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm

Video 1: "Nobelist Daniel Kahneman On Behavioral Economics (Awesome)!" Simoleon Sense, June 5, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-nobelist-daniel-kahneman-on-behavioral-economics-awesome/

Introduction (Via Fora.Tv)

Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman addresses the Georgetown class of 2009 about the merits of behavioral economics.

He deconstructs the assumption that people always act rationally, and explains how to promote rational decisions in an irrational world.

Topics Covered:

1. The Economic Definition Of Rationality

2. Emphasis on Rationality in Modern Economic Theory

3. Examples of Irrational Behavior (watch this part)

4. How to encourage rational decisions

Speaker Background (Via Fora.Tv)

Daniel Kahneman - Daniel Kahneman is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Professor of Public Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University. He was educated at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem and obtained his PhD in Berkeley. He taught at The Hebrew University, at the University of British Columbia and at Berkeley, and joined the Princeton faculty in 1994, retiring in 2007. He is best known for his contributions, with his late colleague Amos Tversky, to the psychology of judgment and decision making, which inspired the development of behavioral economics in general, and of behavioral finance in particular. This work earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 and many other honors

Video 2:  Nancy Etcoff is part of a new vanguard of cognitive researchers asking: What makes us happy? Why do we like beautiful things? And how on earth did we evolve that way?
Simoleon Sense, June 10, 2009
http://www.simoleonsense.com/science-of-happiness/ 

"Must Read: Why People Fall Victim To Scams," Simoleon Sense, March 18, 2009 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/must-read-why-people-fall-victim-to-scams/
The paper is at http://www.oft.gov.uk/shared_oft/reports/consumer_protection/oft1070.pdf

A fraudulent market manipulation contributed to the Wall Street meltdown
Phantom Shares and Market Manipulation (Bloomberg News video on naked short selling) --- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4490541725797746038

Securities Fraud --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securities_fraud

Securities fraud, also known as investment fraud, is a practice in which investors are deceived and manipulated, resulting in losses.^[1] Generally speaking, securities fraud consists of deceptive practices in the stock and commodity markets, and occurs when investors are enticed to part with their money based on untrue statements.

Securities fraud frequently includes theft of capital from investors and misstatements on a public company's financial reports. The term also encompasses a wide range of other actions, including insider trading.

Sometimes the losses caused by securities fraud are difficult to quantify, but real. For example, insider trading is believed to raise the cost of capital for securities issuers, thus decreasing overall economic growth.

This white collar crime has become increasingly frequent as the Internet and World Wide Web are giving criminals greater access to prey. The trading volume in the United States securities and commodities markets, having grown dramatically in the 1990s, has led to an increase in fraud and misconduct by investors, executives, shareholders, and other market participants. Securities regulators and other prominent groups estimate civil securities fraud totals approximately $40 billion per year. Fraudulent schemes perpetrated in the securities and commodities markets can ultimately have a devastating impact on the viability and operation of these markets.

According to the FBI, securities fraud includes false information on a company's financial statement and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings; lying to corporate auditors; insider trading; stock manipulation schemes, and embezzlement by stockbrokers.

Overview --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Securities_fraud

1 Types of securities fraud 1.1 Internet fraud 1.2 Insider trading 1.3 Microcap fraud 1.4 Accountant fraud 1.5 Boiler rooms 2 Pervasiveness of securities fraud 3 Characteristics of victims and perpetrators 4 Other effects of securities fraud 5 Related subjects 6 See also 7 References

The Way Financial Media Fraud Works
Video from YouTube (not sure how long it will be online)
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwUXx4DR0wo

From Jim Mahar's Blog on March 152, 2009 --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/

 

YouTube - Jon Stewart vs Jim Cramer Interview Fight on Daily Show ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LceizefhP4k

While there was much hype in the days leading up to the show, the actual interview was pretty good. Jon Stewart vs Jim Cramer. Here is the link from The DailyShow for the entire episode.

It is also available (at least temporarily) on YouTube

Jon Stewart vs Jim Cramer Interview Fight on Daily Show ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LceizefhP4k

Some talking points:

* Stewart's main point seems to be that while Cramer and CNBC claim to be looking out for investors, in actuality they are are nothing more than entertainment at best and accomplices at worst.

* It is interesting to see the discussion on Short Selling and the way that Cramer (and by inference other hedge fund managers) essentially lied to drive the price down. I would have to think the SEC might be interested in this.

* Stewart maintains that the financial media plays a role in governance. They dropped the ball.

* Cramer was good in admitting that success (year after year of 30% returns) changes our view and we forget that things go wrong.

* Line of the day from Stewart: "We are both snake oil salesmen, but I let people know I sell snake oil.:

* Line of the day from Cramer: "No one should be spared in this environment."


The whole interview (unedited) is also available. Here is the 3rd part:
 

 

0c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

 

 

 

 

Video from YouTube (not sure how long it will be online)
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwUXx4DR0wo
 

Bernard Madoff, former Nasdaq Stock Market chairman and founder of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, was arrested and charged with securities fraud Thursday in what federal prosecutors called a Ponzi scheme that could involve losses of more than $50 billion.

It is bigger than Enron, bigger than Boesky and bigger than Tyco

"Madoff Scandal: 'Biggest Story of the Year'," Seeking Alpha, December 12, 2008 ---
http://seekingalpha.com/article/110402-madoff-scandal-biggest-story-of-the-year?source=wildcard

According to RealMoney.com columnist Doug Kass, general partner and investment manager of hedge fund Seabreeze Partners Short LP and Seabreeze Partners Short Offshore Fund, Ltd., today's late-breaking report of an alleged massive fraud at a well known investment firm could be "the biggest story of the year." In his view,

it is bigger than Enron, bigger than Boesky and bigger than Tyco.
It attacks at the core of investor confidence -- because, if true, and this could happen ... investors might think that almost anything imaginable could happen to the money they have entrusted to their fiduciaries.

Here are some excerpts from the Bloomberg report, entitled "Madoff Charged in $50 Billion Fraud at Advisory Firm":

Bernard Madoff, founder and president of Bernard Madoff Investment Securities, a market-maker for hedge funds and banks, was charged by federal prosecutors in a $50 billion fraud at his advisory business.

Madoff, 70, was arrested today at 8:30 a.m. by the FBI and appeared before U.S. Magistrate Judge Douglas Eaton in Manhattan federal court. Charged in a criminal complaint with a single count of securities fraud, he was granted release on a $10 million bond guaranteed by his wife and secured by his apartment. Madoff’s wife was present in the courtroom.

"It’s all just one big lie," Madoff told his employees on Dec. 10, according to a statement by prosecutors. The firm, Madoff allegedly said, is "basically, a giant Ponzi scheme." He was also sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Madoff’s New York-based firm was the 23rd largest market maker on Nasdaq in October, handling a daily average of about 50 million shares a day, exchange data show. The firm specialized in handling orders from online brokers in some of the largest U.S. companies, including General Electric Co (GE). and Citigroup Inc. (C).

...

SEC Complaint

The SEC in its complaint, also filed today in Manhattan federal court, accused Madoff of a "multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme that he perpetrated on advisory clients of his firm."

The SEC said it’s seeking emergency relief for investors, including an asset freeze and the appointment of a receiver for the firm. Ira Sorkin, another defense lawyer for Madoff, couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.

...

Madoff, who owned more than 75 percent of his firm, and his brother Peter are the only two individuals listed on regulatory records as "direct owners and executive officers."

Peter Madoff was a board member of the St. Louis brokerage firm A.G. Edwards Inc. from 2001 through last year, when it was sold to Wachovia Corp (WB).

$17.1 Billion

The Madoff firm had about $17.1 billion in assets under management as of Nov. 17, according to NASD records. At least 50 percent of its clients were hedge funds, and others included banks and wealthy individuals, according to the records.

...

Madoff’s Web site advertises the "high ethical standards" of the firm.

"In an era of faceless organizations owned by other equally faceless organizations, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC harks back to an earlier era in the financial world: The owner’s name is on the door," according to the Web site. "Clients know that Bernard Madoff has a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm’s hallmark."

...

"These guys were one of the original, if not the original, third market makers," said Joseph Saluzzi, the co-head of equity trading at Themis Trading LLC in Chatham, New Jersey. "They had a great business and they were good with their clients. They were around for a long time. He’s a well-respected guy in the industry."

The case is U.S. v. Madoff, 08-MAG-02735, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan)

Continued in article

And here is the SEC press release

Also see http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/securities/

What was the auditing firm of Bernard Madoff Investment Securities, the auditor who gave a clean opinion, that's been insolvent for years?
Apparently, Mr Madoff said the business had been insolvent for years and, from having $17 billion of assets under management at the beginning of 2008, the SEC said: “It appears that virtually all assets of the advisory business are gone”. It has now emerged that Friehling & Horowitz, the auditor that signed off the annual financial statement for the investment advisory business for 2006, is under investigation by the district attorney in New York’s Rockland County, a northern suburb of New York City.
"The $50bn scam: How Bernard Madoff allegedly cheated investors," London Times, December 15, 2008 ---
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_and_finance/article5345751.ece

It was at the Manhattan apartment that Mr Madoff apparently confessed that the business was in fact a “giant Ponzi scheme” and that the firm had been insolvent for years.

To cap it all, Mr Madoff told his sons he was going to give himself up, but only after giving out the $200 - $300 million money he had left to “employees, family and friends”.

All the company’s remaining assets have now been frozen in the hope of repaying some of the companies, individuals and charities that have been unfortunate enough to invest in the business.

However, with the fraud believed to exceed $50 billion, whatever recompense investors could receive will be a drop in the ocean.

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Where were the auditors?
What surprised me is the size of this alleged fraud
"This is huge," said David Rosenfeld, associate regional director of the SEC's New York Regional Office.
"This is a truly egregious fraud of immense proportions."

"Carnegie Mellon and Pitt Accuse 2 Investment Managers of $114-Million Fraud," by Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 26, 2009 --- Click Here

The University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University are suing two investment managers who allegedly took $114-million from the institutions and spent it on cars, horses, houses for their wives, and even teddy bears. The two managers, Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh, are said to have taken a total of more than $500-million from the universities and other investors through their company, Westridge Capital Management, and they have also been charged with fraud by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The universities named several associates of Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh in the lawsuit. According to the complaint, the universities became alarmed after the National Futures Association, a nonprofit organization that investigates member firms, tried to audit Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh’s company. The association determined that that Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh had taken hundreds of millions in loans from the investment funds. On February 12 the association suspended their membership after repeatedly trying, and failing, to contact them. That step spurred the universities to try to locate their money. On February 18 they contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission and sought an investigation. According to their lawsuit, Carnegie Mellon had invested $49-million and the University of Pittsburgh had invested $65-million. Today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette listed some of the things that Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh had purchased with their investors’ money: rare books, Steiff teddy bears at up to $80,000 each, a horse farm, cars, and a $3-million residence for Mr. Walsh’s ex-wife. Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh were also handling money for retirement funds for teachers and public employees in Iowa, North Dakota, and Sacramento County, California. In the Post-Gazette, David Rosenfeld, an associate regional director of the SEC’s New York Regional Office, said the case represented “a truly egregious fraud of immense proportions.” Mr. Walsh, it appears, had ties to another university as well. He is a member of the foundation board at the State University of New York at Buffalo, from which he graduated in 1966 with a political-science degree. In a written statement, officials at Buffalo said that he had not been an active board member for the past two years and that foundation policy forbade investing university money with any member of the board.

"Pitt, CMU money managers arrested in fraud FBI says they misappropriated $500 million for lavish lifestyles," by Jonathon Silver, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 26, 2009 --- http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09057/951834-85.stm

Two East Coast investment managers sued for fraud by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University misappropriated more than $500 million of investors' money to hide losses and fund a lavish lifestyle that included purchases of $80,000 collectible teddy bears, horses and rare books, federal authorities said yesterday.

As Pitt and Carnegie Mellon were busy trying to learn whether they will be able to recover any of their combined $114 million in investments through Westridge Capital Management, the FBI yesterday arrested the corporations' managers.

Paul Greenwood, 61, of North Salem, N.Y., and Stephen Walsh, 64, of Sands Point, N.Y., were charged in Manhattan -- by the same office prosecuting the Bernard L. Madoff fraud case -- with securities fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy.

Both men also were sued in civil court by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which alleged that the partners misappropriated more than $553 million and "fraudulently solicited" $1.3 billion from investors since 1996.

The Accused

Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh are accused of misappropriating millions from investors. Here is a look at some of their biggest personal purchases:

• HOME: Mr. Greenwood, a horse breeder, owned a horse farm in North Salem, N.Y., an affluent community that counts David Letterman as a resident.

• BEARS: Mr. Greenwood owns as many as 1,350 Steiff toys, including teddy bears costing as much as $80,000.

• DIVORCE: Mr. Walsh bought his ex-wife a $3 million condominium as part of their divorce settlement.

"This is huge," said David Rosenfeld, associate regional director of the SEC's New York Regional Office. "This is a truly egregious fraud of immense proportions."

Lawyers for the defendants either could not be reached or had no comment.

Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh, longtime associates and former co-owners of the New York Islanders hockey team, ran Westridge Capital Management and a number of affiliated funds and entities.

As late as this month, the partners appeared to be doing well. Mr. Greenwood told Pitt's assistant treasurer Jan. 21 that they had $2.8 billion under management -- though that number is now in question. And on Feb. 2, Pitt sent $5 million to be invested.

But in the course of less than three weeks, Westridge's mammoth portfolio imploded in what federal authorities called an investment scam meant to cover up trading losses and fund extravagant purchases by the partners.

An audit launched Feb. 5 by the National Futures Association proved key to uncovering the alleged deceit and apparently became the linchpin of the case federal prosecutors are building.

That audit came about in an indirect way. The association, a self-policing membership body, had taken action against a New York financier. That led to a man named Jack Reynolds, a manager of the Westridge Capital Management Fund in which CMU invested $49 million; and Mr. Reynolds led to Westridge.

"We just said we better take a look at Jack Reynolds and see what's happening, and that led us to Westridge and WCM, so it was a domino effect," said Larry Dyekman, an association spokesman. "We're just not sure we have the full picture yet."

Mr. Reynolds has not been charged by federal authorities, but he is named as a defendant in the lawsuit that was filed last week by Pitt and CMU.

"Greenwood and Walsh refused to answer any of our questions about where the money was or how much there was," Mr. Dyekman continued.

"This is still an ongoing investigation, and we can't really say at this point with any finality how much has been lost."

The federal criminal complaint traces the alleged illegal activity to at least 1996.

FBI Special Agent James C. Barnacle Jr. said Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh used "manipulative and deceptive devices," lied and withheld information as part of a scheme to defraud investors and enrich themselves.

The complaint refers to a public state-sponsored university called "Investor 1" whose details match those given by Pitt in its lawsuit.

The SEC's Mr. Rosenfeld said the fraud hinged not so much on the partners' investment strategy but on the fact that they are believed to have simply spent other people's money on themselves.

"They took it. They promised the investors it would be invested. And instead of doing that they misappropriated it for their own use," Mr. Rosenfeld said.

Not only do federal authorities believe Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh used new investors' funds to cover up prior losses in a classic Ponzi scheme, they used more than $160 million for personal expenses including:

• Rare books bought at auction;

• Steiff teddy bears purchased for up to $80,000 at auction houses including Sotheby's;

• A horse farm;

• Cars;

• A residence for Mr. Walsh's ex-wife, Janet Walsh, 53, of Florida, for at least $3 million;

• Money for Ms. Walsh and Mr. Greenwood's wife, Robin Greenwood, 57, both of whom are defendants in the SEC suit. More than $2 million was allegedly wired to their personal accounts by an unnamed employee of the partners.

"Defendants treated investor money -- some of which came from a public pension fund -- as their own piggy bank to lavish themselves with expensive gifts," said Stephen J. Obie, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's acting director of enforcement.

It is not clear how Pitt and CMU got involved with Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh. But there is at least one connection involving academia. The commission suit said Mr. Walsh represented to potential investors that he was a member of the University at Buffalo Foundation board and served on its investment committee.

Mr. Walsh is a 1966 graduate of the State University of New York at Buffalo where he majored in political science.

He was a trustee of the University at Buffalo Foundation, but the foundation did not have any investments in Westridge or related firms.

Universities, charitable organizations, retirement and pension funds are among the investors who have done business with Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Walsh.

Among those investors are the Sacramento County Employees' Retirement System, the Iowa Public Employees' Retirement System and the North Dakota Retirement and Investment Office, which handles $4 billion in investments for teachers and public employees.

The North Dakota fund received about $20 million back from Westridge Capital Management, but has an undetermined amount still out in the market, said Steve Cochrane, executive director.

Mr. Cochrane said Westridge Capital was cooperative in returning what money it could by closing out their position and sending them the money.

"I dealt with them exclusively all these years," Mr. Cochrane said.

"They always seemed to be upfront and honest. I think they're as stunned and as victimized as we are, is my guess."

He said Westridge Capital had done an excellent job over the years.

The November financial statement indicated that the one-year return from Westridge Capital was a negative 11.87 percent, but the five-year annualized rate of return was a positive 8.36 percent.

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core threads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

Bernard Madoff's Gangster Family Seems to Have Been Overlooked by Investors

"Pretty v. Ugly at the University," University Diaries Blog, Inside Higher Ed, February 24, 2009 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university_diaries

Bernard Madoff is a classic Mafia-style gangster. He comes from gangsters - his mother was a crook. Investigators are looking into his father-in-law. A lot of his friends and investors are crooks. He was born a crook, has always been a crook.

"The FBI believes Madoff may never have properly invested any of the money entrusted to him," writes Stephen Foley in The Independent. That's <em>never</em>. Madoff is in his seventies.

Psychopathically evil, Madoff makes an exception - again, Mafia-style - for his closest family and friends. His last act before turning himself in was writing big checks to the inner circle.

Tomorrow, Harry Markopolos will tell Congress how easy it was, ten years ago, for him to prove that Madoff was a crook, and how difficult it was for him to convince the SEC, or anyone else, of this obvious truth.

An ugly story, isn't it.... Ugh. Let us turn to the verdant paths of Brandeis University, and walk to the door of its art museum, where pretty canvases hang on the walls and rekindle our sense of the beauty of the world and the goodness of mankind.

Yet all of this beauty will soon be shuttered, because that ugly world is all over Brandeis. It's all over a number of other universities, too -- Yeshiva, Bard, NYU, all the schools who loved charitable Bernie Madoff and his charitable friends.

Madoff, after all, was a philanthropist.

Not that he, as the word suggests, loves people. He hates people.

But he (and benefactors like Carl Shapiro, his closest business associate) gave lots of money to pretty places like universities, places that stand for love, not hate, and beauty, not ugliness. Why did he do that?

For the same reason many other crooks do it. To get their names on buildings, and, much more importantly, to launder their images. Madoff's been cleaning himself up for public consumption all his life, and there's nothing like gifts to universities to do oneself up <em>real</em> good.

University Diaries has covered, over the years, many amusing stories of universities using the latest in stone-blasting technology to get the names of crooks off of buildings the crooks endowed. At any given time, some university in this country is using power tools on its walls in a desperate effort to dissociate itself from scum. Here's the latest case. One of the most amusing was Dennis Kozlowski at Seton Hall.

Even if it doesn't call for power tools, the problem of taking crooks' money can be just as troublesome, as with the University of Missouri-Columbia's Kenneth L. Lay Chair in International Economics.

Sometimes things call for quick-action internet prowess. Recall how, deep in the pre-exposure night, Yeshiva University deleted from its webpages the once-sainted names of Bernard Madoff and his partner, Ezra Merkin.

Our wretched economy will continue to reveal the reputation-laundering enterprise some of our universities have been running.

Just as every Madoff associate or victim claims to be a deceived innocent, so these campuses will tell us they never suspected a thing.

The farce would be fun to watch if it weren't so incredibly destructive.

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on security frauds are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

"Argentina Has a Bond It Wants to Sell You:  Deadbeat nations should be kept out of U.S. capital markets," by Mark Shapiro and Nancy Soderberg, The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123569777717089081.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

In 2001, Argentina defaulted on $81 billion in sovereign bonds. Four years later it presented a unilateral, nonnegotiable restructuring plan worth about 25 cents on the dollar. When half of its foreign lenders said "no thanks," Buenos Aires repudiated their claims.

Since Argentina had earlier agreed to waive sovereign immunity and accept the jurisdiction and judgments of New York courts, more than 160 lawsuits were filed. But the governments of Nestor Kirchner and of his wife and successor, Christina Fernandez, have ignored numerous court judgments. Judge Thomas Griesa has repeatedly condemned their conduct, noting in 2005 that "I have not heard one single word from the [Argentine] Republic except ways to avoid paying those judgments." Nothing has changed since then.

If Argentina gets away with its misdeeds -- offering terrible terms for restructuring its debt and then repudiating its obligations to those who object -- the likelihood of additional defaults could increase substantially. If that occurs, it would inflict another serious blow to a global financial system in crisis.

Already, Buenos Aires's scofflaw behavior is being imitated. Citing Argentina's example, Ecuador recently defaulted on sovereign debts issued in the U.S., though it has the means to meet its obligations. The default drove down the market price of the bonds. The Correa government then entered the American secondary market with a massive repurchase program, scooping up much of its own debt at a very steep discount.

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core threads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

Question
Is the history of Arthur Levitt Jr. at the SEC so pure?
He does charge out at $900 per hour --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Levitt

When he was Director of the SEC, Arthur Levitt and his Chief SEC Accountant gave the large auditing firms considerable trouble (unlike SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt). But to my knowledge Levitt was pretty much hands off on free-wheeling Wall Street financial institutions and is now probably given too much credence in terms of cleaning up the mess after Chris Cox was the disastrous head of the SEC --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm#SEC 

Leavitt was easily duped by his close friend Bernie Madoff, probably not separating church and state when Levitt was head of the SEC and Madoff was committing fraud (for over 28 years of phony stock trades in his investment fund that Levitt, Pitt, and Cox left unregulated to the point of not even requiring audits by registered auditing firms).

From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review on January 23, 2009

Bob Jensen's threads on fraud are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm

Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core threads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

"Madoff Chasers Dug for Years, to No Avail:  Regulators Probed at Least 8 Times Over 16 Years; Congress Starts Review of SEC Today," by Kara Scannell, The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2008 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123111743915052731.html?mod=djem_jiewr_AC

Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC was examined at least eight times in 16 years by the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators, who often came armed with suspicions.

SEC officials followed up on emails from a New York hedge fund that described Bernard Madoff's business practices as "highly unusual." The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the industry-run watchdog for brokerage firms, reported in 2007 that parts of the firm appeared to have no customers.

Mr. Madoff was interviewed at least twice by the SEC. But regulators never came close to uncovering the alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme that investigators now believe began in the 1970s.

The serial regulatory failures will be on display Monday when Congress holds a hearing to probe why the alleged fraud went undetected. Among the key witnesses is SEC Inspector General David Kotz, who was asked last month by the agency's chairman, Christopher Cox, to investigate the mess.

The situation is even more awkward because SEC examiners seemed to be looking in the right places, yet still were unable to unmask the alleged scheme. For example, investigators were led astray by concerns that Mr. Madoff, now under house arrest, was placing orders for favored clients ahead of others to get a better price, a practice known as "front running." Front running isn't thought to have played a role in the firm's collapse.

Concern that the SEC lacks the expertise to keep up with fraudsters is the latest criticism of the agency, which saw the Wall Street investment banks it oversees get pummeled or vanish altogether in 2008. With Congress likely to take a hard look at how to structure oversight of financial markets, the SEC is struggling to maintain its clout.

The failure to stop Mr. Madoff also is an embarrassment for Mary Schapiro, the Finra chief who has been nominated by President-elect Barack Obama as the next SEC chairman. Finra was involved in several investigations of Mr. Madoff's firm, concluding in 2007 that it violated technical rules and failed to report certain transactions in a timely way.

Ms. Schapiro declined to comment. Mr. Cox has previously acknowledged mistakes by the SEC. The agency declined to comment.

Regulatory gaps abound in the paper trail generated by the SEC's scrutiny of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, according to a review of the documents. Many of the details haven't been reported previously.

For years, Mr. Madoff told regulators he wasn't running an investment-advisory business. By saying he instead managed accounts for hedge funds, Mr. Madoff was able to avoid regular reviews of his advisory business.

In 1992, Mr. Madoff had a brush with the SEC's enforcement division, which had sued two Florida accountants for selling unregistered securities that paid returns of 13.5% to 20%. The SEC believed at the time it had uncovered a $440 million fraud.

"We went into this thinking it could be a major catastrophe," Richard Walker, then-chief of the SEC's New York office, told The Wall Street Journal at the time.

The SEC probe turned up money that had been managed by Mr. Madoff. He said he didn't know the money had been raised illegally.

With no investors found to be harmed, the SEC concluded there was no fraud. But the scheme indicated Mr. Madoff was managing money on behalf of other people.

In 1999 and 2000, the SEC sent examiners into Mr. Madoff's firm to review its trading practices. SEC officials worried the firm wasn't properly displaying orders to others in the market, violating a trading rule. In response, Mr. Madoff outlined new procedures to address the findings.

Continued in article

A Tale of Four Investors
Forwarded by Dennis Beresford

Four investors made different investment decisions 10 years ago.  Investor one was extremely risk averse so he put $1 million in a safe deposit box.  Today he still has $1 million.  Investor two was a bit less risk averse so she bought $1 million of 6% Fanny Mae Preferred.  She put the $15,000 she received in dividends each quarter in a safe deposit box.  After receiving 40 dividends, she recently sold her investment for $20,000 so she now has $620,000 in her safe deposit box.  Investor three was less risk averse so he bought and held a $1 million well diversified U.S. stock portfolio which he recently sold for $1 million, putting the $1 million in his safe deposit box.  Investor four had a friend who knew someone who was able to invest her $1 million with Bernie Madoff.  Like clockwork, she received a $10,000 check each and every month for 120 months.  She cashed all the checks, putting the money in her safe deposit box.  She was outraged to learn that she will no longer receive her monthly checks.  Even worse, she lost all her principal.  She only has $1,200,000 in her safe deposit box. She hopes the government will bail her out.

 Lawrence D. Brown
J. Mack Robinson Distinguished Professor of Accounting
Georgia State University
December 18, 2008

Robert Edward Rubin (born August 29, 1938) is Director and Senior Counselor of Citigroup where he was the architect of Citigroup's strategy of taking on more risk in debt markets, which by the end of 2008 led the firm to the brink of collapse and an eventual government rescue [1]. From November to December 2007, he served temporarily as Chairman of Citigroup.[2][3] From 1999 to present, he earned $115 million in pay at Citigroup[4]. He served as the 70th United States Secretary of the Treasury during both the first and second Clinton administrations.
Wikipedia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rubin

A new Citigroup scandal is engulfing Robert Rubin and his former disciple Chuck Prince for their roles in an alleged Ponzi-style scheme that's now choking world banking. Director Rubin and ousted CEO Prince - and their lieutenants over the past five years - are named in a federal lawsuit for an alleged complex cover-up of toxic securities that spread across the globe, wiping out trillions of dollars in their destructive paths.
Paul Tharp, "'PONZI SCHEME' AT CITI SUIT SLAMS RUBIN," The New York Post, December 5, 2008 --- http://www.nypost.com/seven/12042008/business/ponzi_scheme_at_citi_142511.htm

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Why Madoff's Hedge Fund Could Be Audited by Non-registered Auditors
We all know that Bernie Madoff's brokerage firm was audited by an obscure 3-person accounting firm that is not registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.  This was permitted because the SEC exempted privately owned brokerage firms from the SOX requirement that firms are audited by registered accountants.  Floyd Norris reports, in today's NY Times, that the SEC has now quietly rescinded that exemption.  As a result, firms that audit broker-dealers for fiscal years that end December 2008 or later will have to be registered.  However, under another SOX provision, PCAOB is allowed to inspect only audits of publicly held companies.  NYTimes, Oversight for Auditor of Madoff.
"Why an Obscure Accounting Firm Could Audit Madoff's Records," Securities Law Professor Blog, January 9, 2008 ---
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/securities/

"SEC Goes After Another Ponzi Scheme," Securities Law Professor Blog, January 8, 2009 --- http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/securities/

Another Ponzi scheme -- is the SEC seeking atonement for failure to uncover the Madoff fraud?

The SEC announced today that it has filed an emergency civil enforcement action to halt an ongoing affinity fraud and Ponzi scheme orchestrated by Buffalo-based Gen-See Capital Corporation a/k/a Gen Unlimited ("Gen-See") and its owner and president, Richard S. Piccoli.  According to the Commission's complaint, the defendants have raised millions of dollars from investors by promising steady, "guaranteed" returns, ranging from 7.1% to 8.3% per annum, and no fees or commissions. In November 2008 alone, the defendants raised over $500,000 from investors. The defendants have relied heavily on advertisements in newsletters published by churches and dioceses. The complaint further alleges that the defendants told investors that their money was invested in "high quality" residential mortgages that the defendants were able to purchase at a discount. The defendants did not invest the funds as promised, but instead used new investor funds to make payments to earlier investors. In addition, the complaint alleges that Gen-See's offering and sale of securities to the public was not registered with the Commission.

The Commission seeks, among other emergency relief, a temporary restraining order (i) enjoining the defendants from future violations of the federal securities laws; (ii) freezing the defendants' assets; (iii) directing the defendants to provide verified accountings; and (iv) prohibiting the destruction, concealment or alteration of documents. In addition to this emergency relief, the Commission seeks preliminary and permanent injunctive relief and civil money penalties against the defendants as well as disgorgement by the defendants of their ill-gotten gains plus prejudgment interest.

"SEC Takes Action to Halt Ponzi Scheme," Securities Law Professor Blog, January 7, 2009 --- http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/securities/

The SEC filed an emergency action to halt an estimated $50 million Ponzi scheme conducted by Joseph S. Forte (“Forte”) and Joseph Forte, L.P. (“Forte LP”), of Broomall, Pennsylvania. According to the Commission’s complaint, from at least February 1995 to the present, Forte has been operating a Ponzi scheme in which he fraudulently obtained approximately $50 million from as many as 80 investors through the sale of securities in the form of limited partnership interests.  The federal district court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued an order granting a preliminary injunction, freezing assets, compelling an accounting, and imposing other emergency relief. Without admitting or denying the allegations in the Commission’s complaint, Forte and Forte LP consented to the entry of the order.

The Commission’s complaint alleges that in late December 2008, Forte admitted to federal authorities that from at least 1995 through December 2008, he had been conducting a Ponzi scheme. Forte, who has never been registered with the Commission in any capacity, told investors that he would invest the limited partnership funds in a securities futures trading account in the name of Forte LP that would trade in futures contracts, including S&P 500 stock index futures (“trading program”).  Forte has admitted that he misrepresented and falsified Forte LP’s trading performance from the very first quarter. From 1995 through September 30, 2008, the defendants reported to investors annual returns ranging from 18.52% to as high as 37.96%. However, from January 1998 through October 2008, the Forte LP trading account had net trading losses of approximately $3.3 million.

Greenspan's Disastrous Agency Problem
In political science and economics, the principal-agent problem or agency dilemma treats the difficulties that arise under conditions of incomplete and asymmetric information when a principal hires an agent. Various mechanisms may be used to try to align the interests of the agent with those of the principal, such as piece rates/commissions, profit sharing, efficiency wages, performance measurement (including financial statements), the agent posting a bond, or fear of firing. The principal-agent problem is found in most employer/employee relationships, for example, when stockholders hire top executives of corporations. Numerous studies in political science have noted the problems inherent in the delegation of legislative authority to bureaucratic agencies. The implementation of legislation (such as laws and executive directives) is open to bureaucratic interpretation, creating opportunities and incentives for the bureaucrat-as-agent to deviate from the intentions or preferences of the legislators. Variance in the intensity of legislative oversight also serves to increase principal-agent problems in implementing legislative preferences.
Wikipedia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_theory
 

Not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors, but also the financial system as a whole has become more resilient.
Alan Greenspan in 2004 as quoted by Peter S. Goodman, Taking a Good Look at the Greenspan Legacy," The New York Times, October 8, 2008 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/business/economy/09greenspan.html?em

The problem is not that the contracts failed, he says. Rather, the people using them got greedy. A lack of integrity spawned the crisis, he argued in a speech a week ago at Georgetown University, intimating that those peddling derivatives were not as reliable as “the pharmacist who fills the prescription ordered by our physician.”

But others hold a starkly different view of how global markets unwound, and the role that Mr. Greenspan played in setting up this unrest.

“Clearly, derivatives are a centerpiece of the crisis, and he was the leading proponent of the deregulation of derivatives,” said Frank Partnoy, a law professor at the University of San Diego and an expert on financial regulation.

The derivatives market is $531 trillion, up from $106 trillion in 2002 and a relative pittance just two decades ago. Theoretically intended to limit risk and ward off financial problems, the contracts instead have stoked uncertainty and actually spread risk amid doubts about how companies value them.

If Mr. Greenspan had acted differently during his tenure as Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006, many economists say, the current crisis might have been averted or muted.

Over the years, Mr. Greenspan helped enable an ambitious American experiment in letting market forces run free. Now, the nation is confronting the consequences.

Derivatives were created to soften — or in the argot of Wall Street, “hedge” — investment losses. For example, some of the contracts protect debt holders against losses on mortgage securities. (Their name comes from the fact that their value “derives” from underlying assets like stocks, bonds and commodities.) Many individuals own a common derivative: the insurance contract on their homes.

On a grander scale, such contracts allow financial services firms and corporations to take more complex risks that they might otherwise avoid — for example, issuing more mortgages or corporate debt. And the contracts can be traded, further limiting risk but also increasing the number of parties exposed if problems occur.

Throughout the 1990s, some argued that derivatives had become so vast, intertwined and inscrutable that they required federal oversight to protect the financial system. In meetings with federal officials, celebrated appearances on Capitol Hill and heavily attended speeches, Mr. Greenspan banked on the good will of Wall Street to self-regulate as he fended off restrictions.

Ever since housing began to collapse, Mr. Greenspan’s record has been up for revision. Economists from across the ideological spectrum have criticized his decision to let the nation’s real estate market continue to boom with cheap credit, courtesy of low interest rates, rather than snuffing out price increases with higher rates. Others have criticized Mr. Greenspan for not disciplining institutions that lent indiscriminately.

But whatever history ends up saying about those decisions, Mr. Greenspan’s legacy may ultimately rest on a more deeply embedded and much less scrutinized phenomenon: the spectacular boom and calamitous bust in derivatives trading.

Bob Jensen's timeline of derivatives scandals and the evolution of accounting standards for accounting for derivatives financial instruments can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudCongress.htm#DerivativesFrauds

"‘I made a mistake,’ admits Greenspan," by Alan Beattie and James Politi, Financial Times, October 23, 2008 ---
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/aee9e3a2-a11f-11dd-82fd-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders,” he said.

In the second of two days of tense hearings on Capitol Hill, Henry Waxman, chairman of the House of Representatives, clashed with current and former regulators and with Republicans on his own committee over blame for the financial crisis.

Mr Waxman said Mr Greenspan’s Federal Reserve – along with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Treasury – had propagated “the prevailing attitude in Washington... that the market always knows best.”

Mr Waxman blamed the Fed for failing to curb aggressive lending practices, the SEC for allowing credit rating agencies to operate under lax standards and the Treasury for opposing “responsible oversight” of financial derivatives.

Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, defended himself, saying that virtually no one had foreseen the meltdown of the mortgage market, or the inadequacy of banking capital standards in preventing the collapse of institutions such as Bear Stearns.

Mr Waxman accused the SEC chairman of being wise after the event. “Mr Cox has come in with a long list of regulations he wants... But the reality is, Mr Cox, you weren’t doing that beforehand.”

Mr Cox blamed the fact that congressional responsibility was divided between the banking and financial services committees, which regulate banking, insurance and securities, and the agriculture committees, which regulate futures.

“This jurisdictional split threatens to for ever stand in the way of rationalising the regulation of these products and markets,” he said.

Mr Greenspan accepted that the crisis had “found a flaw” in his thinking but said that the kind of heavy regulation that could have prevented the crisis would have damaged US economic growth. He described the past two decades as a “period of euphoria” that encouraged participants in the financial markets to misprice securities.

He had wrongly assumed that lending institutions would carry out proper surveillance of their counterparties, he said. “I had been going for 40 years with considerable evidence that it was working very well”.

Continued in the article

Jensen Comment
In other words, he assumed the agency theory model that corporate employees, as agents of their owners and creditors, would act hand and hand in the best interest for themselves and their investors. But agency theory has a flaw in that it does not understand Peter Pan.

Peter Pan, the manager of Countrywide Financial on Main Street, thought he had little to lose by selling a fraudulent mortgage to Wall Street. Foreclosures would be Wall Street’s problems and not his local bank’s problems. And he got his nice little commission on the sale of the Emma Nobody’s mortgage for $180,000 on a house worth less than $100,000 in foreclosure. And foreclosure was almost certain in Emma’s case, because she only makes $12,000 waitressing at the Country Café. So what if Peter Pan fudged her income a mite in the loan application along with the fudged home appraisal value? Let Wall Street or Fat Fannie or Foolish Freddie worry about Emma after closing the pre-approved mortgage sale deal. The ultimate loss, so thinks Peter Pan, will be spread over millions of wealthy shareholders of Wall Street investment banks. Peter Pan is more concerned with his own conventional mortgage on his precious house just two blocks south of Main Street. This is what happens when risk is spread even farther than Tinkerbell can fly!
Also see how corporate executives cooked the books --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Manipulation

The Saturday Night Live Skit on the Bailout --- http://patdollard.com/2008/10/it-is-here-the-banned-snl-skit-cannot-hide-from-louie/ 

Selling New Equity to Pay Dividends:  Reminds Me About the South Sea Bubble of 1720 ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_bubble

"Fooling Some People All the Time"

"Melting into Air:  Before the financial system went bust, it went postmodern," by John Lanchester, The New Yorker, November 10, 2008 --- http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/11/10/081110crat_atlarge_lanchester

This is also why the financial masters of the universe tend not to write books. If you have been proved—proved—right, why bother? If you need to tell it, you can’t truly know it. The story of David Einhorn and Allied Capital is an example of a moneyman who believed, with absolute certainty, that he was in the right, who said so, and who then watched the world fail to react to his irrefutable demonstration of his own rightness. This drove him so crazy that he did what was, for a hedge-fund manager, a bizarre thing: he wrote a book about it.

The story began on May 15, 2002, when Einhorn, who runs a hedge fund called Greenlight Capital, made a speech for a children’s-cancer charity in Hackensack, New Jersey. The charity holds an annual fund-raiser at which investment luminaries give advice on specific shares. Einhorn was one of eleven speakers that day, but his speech had a twist: he recommended shorting—betting against—a firm called Allied Capital. Allied is a “business development company,” which invests in companies in their early stages. Einhorn found things not to like in Allied’s accounting practices—in particular, its way of assessing the value of its investments. The mark-to-market accounting that Einhorn favored is based on the price an asset would fetch if it were sold today, but many of Allied’s investments were in small startups that had, in effect, no market to which they could be marked. In Einhorn’s view, Allied’s way of pricing its holdings amounted to “the you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me method of accounting.” At the same time, Allied was issuing new equity, and, according to Einhorn, the revenue from this could be used to fund the dividend payments that were keeping Allied’s investors happy. To Einhorn, this looked like a potential Ponzi scheme.

The next day, Allied’s stock dipped more than twenty per cent, and a storm of controversy and counter-accusations began to rage. “Those engaging in the current misinformation campaign against Allied Capital are cynically trying to take advantage of the current post-Enron environment by tarring a great and honest company like Allied Capital with the broad brush of a Big Lie,” Allied’s C.E.O. said. Einhorn would be the first to admit that he wanted Allied’s stock to drop, which might make his motives seem impure to the general reader, but not to him. The function of hedge funds is, by his account, to expose faulty companies and make money in the process. Joseph Schumpeter described capitalism as “creative destruction”: hedge funds are destructive agents, predators targeting the weak and infirm. As Einhorn might see it, people like him are especially necessary because so many others have been asleep at the wheel. His book about his five-year battle with Allied, “Fooling Some of the People All of the Time” (Wiley; $29.95), depicts analysts, financial journalists, and the S.E.C. as being culpably complacent. The S.E.C. spent three years investigating Allied. It found that Allied violated accounting guidelines, but noted that the company had since made improvements. There were no penalties. Einhorn calls the S.E.C. judgment “the lightest of taps on the wrist with the softest of feathers.” He deeply minds this, not least because the complacency of the watchdogs prevents him from being proved right on a reasonable schedule: if they had seen things his way, Allied’s stock price would have promptly collapsed and his short selling would be hugely profitable. As it was, Greenlight shorted Allied at $26.25, only to spend the next years watching the stock drift sideways and upward; eventually, in January of 2007, it hit thirty-three dollars.

All this has a great deal of resonance now, because, on May 21st of this year, at the same charity event, Einhorn announced that Greenlight had shorted another stock, on the ground of the company’s exposure to financial derivatives based on dangerous subprime loans. The company was Lehman Brothers. There was little delay in Einhorn’s being proved right about that one: the toppling company shook the entire financial system. A global cascade of bank implosions ensued—Wachovia, Washington Mutual, and the Icelandic banking system being merely some of the highlights to date—and a global bailout of the entire system had to be put in train. The short sellers were proved right, and also came to be seen as culprits; so was mark-to-market accounting, since it caused sudden, cataclysmic drops in the book value of companies whose holdings had become illiquid. It is therefore the perfect moment for a short-selling advocate of marking to market to publish his account. One can only speculate whether Einhorn would have written his book if he had known what was going to happen next. (One of the things that have happened is that, on September 30th, Ciena Capital, an Allied portfolio company to whose fraudulent lending Einhorn dedicates many pages, went into bankruptcy; this coincided with a collapse in the value of Allied stock—finally!—to a price of around six dollars a share.) Given the esteem with which Einhorn’s profession is regarded these days, it’s a little as if the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had taken the outbreak of the First World War as the timely moment to publish a book advocating bomb-throwing—and the book had turned out to be unexpectedly persuasive.

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Heavy Insider Trading --- http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/ownership/ownership.asp?symbol=ALD

Allied's independent auditor is KPMG
KPMG has a lot of problems with litigation --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud001.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on the collapse of the Banking System are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/2008Bailout.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on fraud are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm
Also see Fraud Rotten at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on accounting theory are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
Also see the theory of fair value accounting at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#FairValue

Bob Jensen's threads on earnings management and creative accounting to cook the books ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm#Manipulation

Keeping Score on the SEC in 2008

"The SEC in 2008: A Very Good Year? A terrific one, the commission says, tallying a fiscal-year record in insider-trading cases, and the second-highest number of enforcement cases overall. But what would John McCain say?" by Stephen Taub and Roy Harris, CFO.com, October 22, 2008 --- http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/12465408/c_12469997

Timeline of Financial Scandals, Auditing Failures, and the Evolution of International Accounting Standards ---- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudCongress.htm#DerivativesFrauds

White Collar Fraud Site --- http://www.whitecollarfraud.com/
Note the column of links on the left.

Online Searching for Law, Accounting, and Finance --- http://securities.stanford.edu/

Stanford University Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse --- http://securities.stanford.edu/

Securities Law Archives --- http://www.bespacific.com/mt/archives/cat_securities_law.html

Securities and Exchange Commission --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Securities_and_Exchange_Commission

Accounting Fraud --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

Question
Why are so many Ivy League alumni behind bars?

From Bloomberg.com July 3, 2008 --- http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=awkNQpGwkfkU&refer=us

No matter which prison former Refco Inc. Chief Executive Officer Phillip Bennett serves the 16-year sentence he received today in Manhattan federal court, chances are he will be the only one there with a master's degree from Cambridge University in England.

The head of what was once the biggest independent U.S. futures broker, Bennett also was ordered to forfeit $2.4 billion in assets for what prosecutors said was ``among the very worst'' white-collar crimes. He faced a possible life sentence after pleading guilty to bank fraud and money laundering.

Bennett, 60, joins at least a dozen other wealthy corporate executives with degrees from elite institutions such as Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who've been incarcerated for white-collar crimes this decade. Exceptional intelligence, self-confidence and feeling special, common among those educated at such schools, can turn into deviousness, arrogance and entitlement, said Tom Donaldson, a professor of ethics and law at Wharton in Philadelphia.

``If the devil exists, he no doubt has a high IQ and an Ivy League degree,'' Donaldson said. ``It's clear that having an educational pedigree is no prophylactic against greed and bad behavior.''

Imprisoned executives with Ivy League degrees include Jeffrey Skilling, 54, former CEO of Enron Corp. (Harvard Business School); Timothy Rigas, 52, former chief financial officer of Adelphia Communications Corp. (Wharton); and William Sorin, 59, former general counsel of New York-based Comverse Technology Inc. (Harvard Law School).

Elite Schools

Some of these convicted executives have multiple degrees. Conrad Black, the former CEO of Chicago-based Hollinger International Inc., now serving a 6 1/2-year sentence for stealing $6.1 million from the company, has two bachelor's degrees from Carleton University, a master's degree from McGill University and a law degree from Laval University, all in Canada.

``There is a correlation between going to an elite school and ending up as a CEO,'' said Edwin Hartman, a professor of business ethics at New York University's Stern School of Business. ``Look at the list of the heads of the 400 elite companies. They certainly didn't go to no-name state schools.''

A top-level education may also cultivate arrogance, said Maurice Schweitzer, who teaches information management at Wharton.

`They Feel Special'

``We tell our students at premier institutions that they are special, and they certainly feel special,'' Schweitzer said. ``We have famous faculty and great resources. They are surrounded by accomplished peers, and recruiters flock to them.''

Massachusetts-based Harvard University spokeswoman Rebecca Rollins said the school didn't have an immediate comment.

Wrongdoing in the executive suite is more about character flaws than alma maters, said Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor who led the U.S. Justice Department task force that investigated the collapse of Enron.

``Just because you went to a good school doesn't mean you have a good moral compass,'' Weissmann said.

Moreover, some of the executives convicted since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was passed in 2002 in response to corporate corruption didn't attend elite schools. HealthSouth Corp. founder Richard Scrushy, 55, sentenced to almost 7 years in prison for bribery, has a bachelor's degree from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Former Tyco International Ltd. CEO L. Dennis Kozlowski, convicted of stealing $137 million from the company and in prison for 8 1/3 to 25 years, has a bachelor's degree from Seton Hall University.

Risk Takers

Executives with top educations may end up trading their pin stripes for prison jumpsuits because they're driven to excel.

``People who succeed in corporate America are risk-takers,'' said Anthony Barkow, a former federal prosecutor and Harvard Law School graduate who is now a New York University Law School professor. ``They're smart, confident and sometimes even arrogant. That's what it takes to succeed. Risk-takers get closer to the line and sometimes cross it.''

Graduates from top-tier universities may feel so special, they think law doesn't apply to them, Wharton's Schweitzer said.

``We encourage our students to explore and think outside the box,'' Schweitzer said. ``In general, this approach is very constructive, but it may prompt people to be less likely to recognize an ethical dilemma.''

Morgenthau's Warning

Current and former prosecutors who've handled white-collar cases said the defendants' most common trait was avarice.

``It doesn't matter if you graduated from the best schools in the world and had every privilege accorded to you or not,'' said Campbell, a member of the Enron Task Force with degrees from Yale University and the University of Chicago School of Law. ``Greed is a strong motivation, and it can cause you to make mistakes.''

Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney who is a graduate of Amherst College and Yale Law School, issued this warning:

``No matter what your position is in life or where you went to school, if you commit a crime in our jurisdiction, we'll be happy to prosecute you.''

Question
What are do so many executives cheat in recent years?

Answer
See Question 1 and Answer 1 at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnronQuiz.htm

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Bob Jensen's "Congress to the Core" threads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudCongress.htm

"Merrill Lynch Settlement With SEC Worth Up to $7B," SmartPros, August 25, 2008 --- http://accounting.smartpros.com/x62971.xml

Federal regulators said Friday that investors who bought risky auction-rate securities from Merrill Lynch & Co. before the market for those bonds collapsed will be able to recover up to $7 billion under a new agreement.

The largest U.S. brokerage will buy back the securities from thousands of investors under a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and other state regulators over its role in selling the high-risk bonds to retail investors. Under that deal, announced Thursday, Merrill agreed to hasten its voluntary buyback plan by repurchasing $10 billion to $12 billion of the securities from investors by Jan. 2.

Merrill also agreed to pay a $125 million fine in a separate accord with state regulators.

The $330 billion market for auction-rate securities collapsed in mid-February.

The SEC's estimate of a $7 billion recovery is based on its projection of the eventual amount of the bonds that will be cashed in by the affected investors, who bought them before Feb. 13. The $10 billion to $12 billion is the total amount that Merrill is committing to buy back. The firm has to offer redemptions to all investors, though not all may cash in the securities.

The SEC said the new agreement will enable retail investors, small businesses and charities who purchased the securities from Merrill "to restore their losses and liquidity."

New York-based Merrill neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing in agreeing to the federal settlement, which is subject to approval by SEC commissioners.

The firm wasn't fined under the accord, but the SEC said Merrill "faces the prospect" of a penalty after completing its obligations under the agreement. The amount of the penalty, if any, would take into account the extent of Merrill's misconduct in marketing and selling auction-rate securities, and an assessment of whether it fulfilled its obligations, the SEC said.

"Merrill Lynch's conduct harmed tens of thousands of investors who will have the opportunity to get their money back through this agreement," Linda Thomsen, the agency's enforcement director, said in a statement. "We will continue to aggressively investigate wrongdoing in the marketing and sale of auction-rate securities."

Merrill, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank on Thursday brought to eight the number of global banks that have settled a five-month investigation into claims they misled customers into believing the securities were safe.

The auction-rate securities market involved investors buying and selling instruments that resembled regular corporate debt, except the interest rates were reset at regular auctions - some as frequently as once a week. A number of companies and retail clients invested in the securities because, thanks to the regular auctions, they could treat their holdings as liquid, almost like cash.

Major issuers included companies that financed student loans and municipal agencies like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. When big banks ceased backstopping the auctions with supporting bids because of concerns about credit exposure, the bustling market collapsed. That left some issuers paying double-digit interest rates because of the terms under which they issued the securities.

Regulators have been investigating the collapse in the market to determine who was responsible for its demise and whether banks knowingly misrepresented the safety of the securities when selling them to investors.

Jensen Comment
It's unbelievable how many huge frauds there are in which Merrill Lynch has been an active participant. For example, do a word search for "Merrill" in this document that you are reading now.

"Market and Political/Regulatory Perspectives on the Recent Accounting Scandals," by Ray Ball at the University of Chicago, SSRN, September 17, 2008 --- (free download) --- http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1272804

Not surprisingly, the recent accounting scandals look different when viewed from the perspectives of the political/regulatory process and of the market for corporate governance and financial reporting. We do not have the opportunity to observe a world in which either market or political/regulatory processes operate independently, and the events are recent and not well-researched, so untangling their separate effects is somewhat conjectural. This paper offers conjectures on issues such as: What caused the scandalous behavior? Why was there such a rash of accounting scandals at one time? Who killed Arthur Andersen – the SEC, or the market? Did fraudulent accounting kill Enron, or just keep it alive for too long? What is the social cost of financial reporting fraud? Does the US in fact operate a “principles-based” or a “rules-based” accounting system? Was there market failure? Or was there regulatory failure? Or both? Was the Sarbanes-Oxley Act a political and regulatory over-reaction?

Jensen Comment
Although Professor Ball is best known for empirical research of capital markets data, the above article is best described as a commentary of his personal opinion. On many issues I agree with him, but on some issues I disagree.

Would market forces have killed Enron even if there was no criminal case for document destruction?

Ray Ball (opinion with no supporting evidence)
I conclude that market forces, left to their own devices, would have closed Andersen.

Bob Jensen (agrees completely with supporting evidence)
I don't think there's any doubt that Andersen would've folded due to market forces of a succession of failed audits for which it did not change its fundamental behavior and questions of auditor independence after losing a succession of failed audit lawsuits prior to Enron. For example, it continued to hire hire the in-charge auditor of Waste Management even after his felony conviction.

When the Securities and Exchange Commission found evidence in e-mail messages that a senior partner at Andersen had participated in the fraud at Waste Management, Andersen did not fire him. Instead, it put him to work revising the firm's document-retention policy. Unsurprisingly, the new policy emphasized the need to destroy documents and did not specify that should stop if an S.E.C. investigation was threatened. It was that policy David Duncan, the Andersen partner in charge of Enron audits, claimed to be following when he shredded Andersen's reputation.
Floyd Norris, "Will Big Four Audit Firms Survive in a World of Unlimited Liability?," The New York Times, September 10, 2004


Although Ray Ball does not cite the empirical evidence, there is empirical evidence that ultimately, due to a succession of incompetent or fraudulent audits, having Andersen as an auditor raised a client's cost of capital.

"The Demise of Arthur Andersen," by Clifford F. Thies, Ludwig Von Mises Institute, April 12, 2002 --- http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=932&FS=The+Demise+of+Arthur+Andersen

From Yahoo.com, Andrew and I downloaded the daily adjusted closing prices of the stocks of these companies (the adjustment taking into account splits and dividends). I then constructed portfolios based on an equal dollar investment in the stocks of each of the companies and tracked the performance of the two portfolios from August 1, 2001, to March 1, 2002. Indexes of the values of these portfolios are juxtaposed in Figure 1.

From August 1, 2001, to November 30, 2001, the values of the two portfolios are very highly correlated. In particular, the values of the two portfolios fell following the September 11 terrorist attack on our country and then quickly recovered. You would expect a very high correlation in the values of truly matched portfolios. Then, two deviations stand out.

 

In early December 2001, a wedge temporarily opened up between the values of the two portfolios. This followed the SEC subpoena. Then, in early February, a second and persistent wedge opened. This followed the news of the coming DOJ indictment. It appears that an Andersen signature (relative to a "Final Four" signature) costs a company 6 percent of its market capitalization. No wonder corporate clients--including several of the companies that were in the Andersen-audited portfolio Andrew and I constructed--are leaving Andersen.

Prior to the demise of Arthur Andersen, the Big 5 firms seemed to have a "lock" on reputation. It is possible that these firms may have felt free to trade on their names in search of additional sources of revenue. If that is what happened at Andersen, it was a big mistake. In a free market, nobody has a lock on anything. Every day that you don’t earn your reputation afresh by serving your customers well is a day you risk losing your reputation. And, in a service-oriented economy, losing your reputation is the kiss of death.

Did (undetected) fraudulent accounting keep Enron alive too long?

Ray Ball
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that market forces caused Enron’s bankruptcy, for the simple reason that it had invested enormous sums and by 2000 was not generating profits. Conversely, its accounting transgressions kept the company alive for some period (perhaps one or two years) longer than would have occurred if it had reported its true profitability. The welfare loss arose from keeping an unprofitable company alive longer than optimal, and wasting capital and labor that were better used elsewhere.

Bob Jensen (disagrees with the power of GAAP in the case of Enron)
I think Ray Ball is attributing too much to financial reports of past transactions. Even if Enron's financial reports were "true" in terms of conformance with GAAP, the market may well have kept Enron alive because of profit potential of some of the huge, albeit presently losing, ventures. The counter example here is the more legitimate reporting losses in Amazon.com  for almost its entire history and the willingness of investors to "bet on the come" of Amazon's ventures in spite of the reported losses in conformance with GAAP. Furthermore, Enron's executives were so skilled at sales pitches, I think Enron might've actually kept going much, much longer if it conformed to GAAP and simply pitched its sweet-sounding ventures and political connections in Washington DC. Enron was primarily brought down by fraud that commenced to appear in the media and the pending lawsuits that formed overhead due to the fraud.

Who killed Enron – the SEC or the market?

Ray Ball
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that market forces caused Enron’s bankruptcy, for the simple reason that it had invested enormous sums and by 2000 was not generating profits. Conversely, its accounting transgressions kept the company alive for some period (perhaps one or two years) longer than would have occurred if it had reported its true profitability. The welfare loss arose from keeping an unprofitable company alive longer than optimal, and wasting capital and labor that were better used elsewhere.

Bob Jensen (disagrees because losing divisions could've been dropped in favor of continued operations of highly profitable divisions)
What Ray does not seek out is the first tip of the demise of Enron. The single event that commenced Enron's dominos to fall has to be the reporting of illegal related party transactions by a Wall Street Journal Reporter. Once these became known, the SEC had to act and commenced a chain of events from which Enron could not possibly survive in terms of lawsuits and market reactions with lawsuit risks that bore down on the market prices of Enron shares.

After John Emshwiller's WSJ report, determining whether the market or the SEC brought down Enron is a chicken versus egg question!

Eichenwald states the following on pp. 490-492 in Conspiracy of Fools --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudEnronQuiz.htm#22

It was section eight, called "Related Party Transactions," that got John Emshwiller's juices flowing. After being assigned to follow the Skilling resignation, Emshwiller had put in a request for an interview, then scrounged up a copy of Enron's most recent SEC filing in search of any nuggets. What he found startled him.  Words about some partnerships run by an unidentified "senior officer."  Arcane stuff, maybe, but the numbers were huge.  Enron reported more than $240 million in revenues in the first six months of the year from its dealings with them. One fact struck Emshwiller in particular.  This anonymous senior officer, the filing said, had just sold his financial interest in the partnerships.  Now, it said, the partnerships were no longer related to Enron. The senior officer had just sold his interest, Skilling had just resigned.  The connection seemed obvious. Could Enron have actually allowed Jeff Skilling to run partnerships that were doing massive business with the company?  Now that, Emshwiller thought, would be a great story. Emshwiller was back on the phone with Mark Palmer.  With no better explanation for Skilling's resignation, he said, the Journal was going to dig through everything it could find.  Right now he was focusing on these partnerships.  Were those run by Skilling? "No, that's not Skilling," Palmer replied, almost nonchalantly.  "That's Andy Fastow." A pause.  "Who's Andy Fastow?" Emshwiller asked. The message was slipped to Skilling later that day.  A Journal reporter was pushing for an explanation of his departure and now was rooting around, looking for anything he could find.  Probably best just to give the paper a call. Emshwiller was at his desk when the phone rang. "Hi," a soft voice said.  "It's Jeff Skilling." It was a startling moment.  Emshwiller had been on the hunt, and suddenly the quarry just walked in and lay down on the floor, waiting for him to fire.  So he did: why was Skilling quitting his job? "It's all pretty mundane," Skilling replied.  He'd worked hard and accomplished a lot but now had the freedom to move on.  His voice was distant, almost depressed. He and been ruminating about it for a while, Skilling went on, but had wanted to stay on at the company until the California situation eased up.  Then, he took the conversation in a new direction. "The stock price has been very disappointing to me," Skilling said.  "The stock is less than half of what it was six months ago.  I put a lot of pressure on myself.  I felt I must not be communicating well enough." Skilling rambled as Emshwiller took it down.  India.  California.  Expense cuts.  The good shape of Enron. "Had the stock price not done what it did..."  He paused.  "I don't think I would have felt the pressure to leave if the stock price had stayed up." What?  Had Emshwiller heard that right?  Was all this stuff about "personal reasons" out the window?  Had Skilling thrown in the towel because of the stock price? "What was that, Mr. Skilling?" Emshwiller asked. The employees at Enron owned lots of shares, Skilling said.  They were worried, always asking him about the direction of the price.  He found it very frustrating. "Are you saying that you don't think you would have quit if the stock price had stayed up?" Skilling was silent for several seconds. "I guess so," he finally mumbled. Minutes later, Emshwiller burst into his boss's office.  "You're not gong to believe what Skilling just told me!"

 

What are the incentives to commit fraud?

Ray Ball
My view, based on mainly anecdotal experience, is that non-financial motives are more powerful than is commonly believed, and sometimes are the dominant reason for committing accounting fraud. An important motivator seems to be maintaining the esteem of one’s peers,ranging from co-workers to the public at large. Enron executives reportedly were celebrities in Houston, and in important places like the White House.

Bob Jensen (disagrees as to level of importance of non-financial motives except in isolated instances such as possibly Ken Lay)
Although there are instances where non-financial motives may have been powerful, I believe that they generally pale when compared to the financial reasons for committing all types of financial fraud, including accounting fraud --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudCongress.htm

Was Sarbanes-Oxley Necessary?

Ray Ball (who is generally critical of the need for Sarbanes-Oxley relative to market forces without such regulation and fraud penalties)
Markets need rules, and rely on trust. U.S. financial markets historically had very effective rules by world standards, the rules were broken, and there were immense consequences for the transgressors.

Bob Jensen (strongly disagrees)
One need only look how the market-based system worldwide moved in cycles of being Congress to the core among the major corporations, investment banks, insurance companies, and credit rating companies --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudCongress.htm
After getting caught these firms simply moved on to new schemes without fear of market forces.

Nowhere is the wild west of market-based fraud more evident than in the timeline history of derivative financial instruments frauds --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudCongress.htm#DerivativesFrauds

I do agree with Ray Ball that regulation in and of itself is not panacea when either preventing or detecting fraud.

If auditors and their clients do not take there professional and ethical responsibilities more seriously then neither market forces nor regulators will prevent frauds from increasingly undermining our prized capital markets.

Bob Jensen's Congress to the Core threads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudCongress.htm

Bob Jensen's Fraud Conclusions are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudConclusion.htm

The Most Criminal Class Writes the Laws

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop

Congress is our only native criminal class.
Mark Twain --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain

Why should members of Congress be allowed to profit from insider trading?
Amid broad congressional concern about ethics scandals, some lawmakers are poised to expand the battle for reform: They want to enact legislation that would prohibit members of Congress and their aides from trading stocks based on nonpublic information gathered on Capitol Hill. Two Democrat lawmakers plan to introduce today a bill that would block trading on such inside information. Current securities law and congressional ethics rules don't prohibit lawmakers or their staff members from buying and selling securities based on information learned in the halls of Congress.
Brody Mullins, "Bill Seeks to Ban Insider Trading By Lawmakers and Their Aides," The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2006; Page A1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114351554851509761.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

The Culture of Corruption Runs Deep and Wide in Both U.S. Political Parties:  Few if any are uncorrupted
Committee members have shown no appetite for taking up all those cases and are considering an amnesty for reporting violations, although not for serious matters such as accepting a trip from a lobbyist, which House rules forbid. The data firm PoliticalMoneyLine calculates that members of Congress have received more than $18 million in travel from private organizations in the past five years, with Democrats taking 3,458 trips and Republicans taking 2,666. . . But of course, there are those who deem the American People dumb as stones and will approach this bi-partisan scandal accordingly. Enter Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi, complete with talking points for her minion, that are sure to come back and bite her .... “House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) filed delinquent reports Friday for three trips she accepted from outside sponsors that were worth $8,580 and occurred as long as seven years ago, according to copies of the documents.
Bob Parks, "Will Nancy Pelosi's Words Come Back to Bite Her?" The National Ledger, January 6, 2006 --- http://www.nationalledger.com/artman/publish/article_27262498.shtml 

And when they aren't stealing directly, lawmakers are caving in to lobbying crooks
Drivers can send their thank-you notes to Capitol Hill, which created the conditions for this mess last summer with its latest energy bill. That legislation contained a sop to Midwest corn farmers in the form of a huge new ethanol mandate that began this year and requires drivers to consume 7.5 billion gallons a year by 2012. At the same time, Congress refused to include liability protection for producers of MTBE, a rival oxygen fuel-additive that has become a tort lawyer target. So MTBE makers are pulling out, ethanol makers can't make up the difference quickly enough, and gas supplies are getting squeezed.
"The Gasoline Follies," The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2006; Page A20  --- Click Here
 

Once again, the power of pork to sustain incumbents gets its best demonstration in the person of John Murtha (D-PA). The acknowledged king of earmarks in the House gains the attention of the New York Times editorial board today, which notes the cozy and lucrative relationship between more than two dozen contractors in Murtha's district and the hundreds of millions of dollars in pork he provided them. It also highlights what roughly amounts to a commission on the sale of Murtha's power as an appropriator: Mr. Murtha led all House members this year, securing $162 million in district favors, according to the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense. ... In 1991, Mr. Murtha used a $5 million earmark to create the National Defense Center for Environmental Excellence in Johnstown to develop anti-pollution technology for the military. Since then, it has garnered more than $670 million in contracts and earmarks. Meanwhile it is managed by another contractor Mr. Murtha helped create, Concurrent Technologies, a research operation that somehow was allowed to be set up as a tax-exempt charity, according to The Washington Post. Thanks to Mr. Murtha, Concurrent has boomed; the annual salary for its top three executives averages $462,000.
Edward Morrissey, Captain's Quarters, January 14, 2008 --- http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/016617.php

Question
This is some of the best material ever for legal-writer John Grisham --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Grisham
But will he have the courage to venture into this ethical snakepit?

"Lawsuit, Inc.," The Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2008; Page A14 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120389878913889385.html

Should state Attorneys General be able to outsource their legal work to for-profit tort lawyers, who then funnel a share of their winnings back to the AGs? That's become a sleazy practice in many states, and it is finally coming under scrutiny -- notably in Mississippi, home of Dickie Scruggs, Attorney General Jim Hood, and other legal pillars.

The Mississippi Senate recently passed a bill requiring Mr. Hood to pursue competitive bidding before signing contracts of more than $500,000 with private lawyers. The legislation also requires a review board to examine contracts, and limits contingency fees to $1 million. Mr. Hood is trying to block the law in the state House, and no wonder considering how sweet this business has been for him and his legal pals.

We've recently examined documents from the AG's office detailing which law firms he has retained. We then cross-referenced those names with campaign finance records. The results show that some of Mr. Hood's largest campaign donors are the very firms to which he's awarded the most lucrative state contracts.

The documents show Mr. Hood has retained at least 27 firms as outside counsel to pursue at least 20 state lawsuits over five years. The law firms are thus able to employ the full power of the state on their behalf, while Mr. Hood can multiply the number of targets.

Those targets are invariably deep corporate pockets: Eli Lilly, State Farm, Coca-Cola, Merck, Boston Scientific, Vioxx and others. The vast majority of the legal contracts were awarded on a contingency fee basis, meaning the law firm is entitled to a big percentage of any money that it can wring from defendants. The amounts can be rich, such as the $14 million payout that lawyer Joey Langston shared with the Lundy, Davis firm in an MCI/WorldCom settlement.

These firms are only too happy to return the favor to Mr. Hood via campaign contributions. Campaign finance records show that these 27 law firms -- or partners in those firms -- made $543,000 in itemized campaign contributions to Mr. Hood over the past two election cycles.

The firm of Pittman, Germany, Roberts & Welsh was hired by Mr. Hood on a contingency basis to prosecute State Farm. According to finance documents, partner Crymes Pittman donated $68,570 to Mr. Hood's campaign, and other Pittman partners chipped in $33,500 more.

Partners in the Langston Law Firm gave more than $130,000 to elect Mr. Hood, having been retained to sue Eli Lilly. Lead partner Joey Langston has separately pleaded guilty to conspiracy to corruptly influence a judge.

Among others: The Wolf Popper firm from New York was retained to pursue Sonus Networks, a telecommunications firm; Wolf Popper and its partners gave $27,500 to Mr. Hood's campaign. Bernstein, Litowitz sued at least four different companies for the AG, and the firm and its partners chipped in $41,500. Partners at Schiffren, Barroway went after Coca-Cola and Viacom, and donated $37,500.

Then there are the law firms that have piggybacked their class action suits on Mr. Hood's state prosecutions. Mr. Scruggs and his Katrina litigation partners realized a nearly $80 million windfall after Mr. Hood used his powers to pressure State Farm into settling both the state and Scruggs suits. Mr. Scruggs gave $33,000 to Mr. Hood in the 2007 election cycle. (Mr. Scruggs and his son Zach have been indicted in an unrelated bribery case, and claim to be innocent.) David Nutt, a partner in Mr. Scruggs's Katrina litigation, also gave $25,500 to Mr. Hood's campaign last year.

The Mississippi AG has also benefited from the national network of trial lawyers and its ability to funnel money into the state. We've examined finance records of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, a so-called 527 group that helps elect liberal prosecutors. In 2007, law firms that have benefited from Mr. Hood gave the organization $572,000, and in turn the group wrote campaign checks in 2007 to Mr. Hood for $550,000. Guess who supplied no less than $400,000 to the group? Messrs. Scruggs and Langston.

Add all of this up, and in 2007 alone Mr. Hood received some $790,000 from partners and law firms that have benefited financially from his office. That is more than half of all of Mr. Hood's itemized contributions for 2007.

This kind of quid pro quo is legal in Mississippi and most other states. However, if this kind of sweetheart arrangement existed between a public official and business interests, you can bet Mr. Hood would be screaming about corruption. Yet Mr. Hood and his trial bar partners are fighting even Mississippi's modest attempt to require more transparency in their contracts. The AG says it's all part of a plot to undermine his attempts to "recoup the taxpayers' money from corporate wrongdoers."

The real issue is the way this AG-tort bar mutual financial interest creates perverse incentives that skew the cause of justice. A decision to prosecute is an awesome power, and it ought to be motivated by evidence and the law, not by the profit motives of private tort lawyers and the campaign needs of an ambitious Attorney General. Government is supposed to act on behalf of the public interest, not for the personal profit of trial lawyers. The tort bar-AG cabal deserves to be exposed nationwide.

Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

The Most Criminal Class Writes the Laws --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120389878913889385.html

"The Government Is Wasting Your Tax Dollars! How Uncle Sam spends nearly $1 trillion of your money each year," by Ryan Grim with Joseph K. Vetter, Readers Digest, January 2008, pp. 86-99 --- http://www.rd.com/content/the-government-is-wasting-your-tax-dollars/4/

1. Taxes:
Cheating Shows. The Internal Revenue Service estimates that the annual net tax gap—the difference between what's owed and what's collected—is $290 billion, more than double the average yearly sum spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

About $59 billion of that figure results from the underreporting and underpayment of employment taxes. Our broken system of immigration is another concern, with nearly eight million undocumented workers having a less-than-stellar relationship with the IRS. Getting more of them on the books could certainly help narrow that tax gap.

Going after the deadbeats would seem like an obvious move. Unfortunately, the IRS doesn't have the resources to adequately pursue big offenders and their high-powered tax attorneys. "The IRS is outgunned," says Walker, "especially when dealing with multinational corporations with offshore headquarters."

Another group that costs taxpayers billions: hedge fund and private equity managers. Many of these moguls make vast "incomes" yet pay taxes on a portion of those earnings at the paltry 15 percent capital gains rate, instead of the higher income tax rate. By some estimates, this loophole costs taxpayers more than $2.5 billion a year.

Oil companies are getting a nice deal too. The country hands them more than $2 billion a year in tax breaks. Says Walker, "Some of the sweetheart deals that were negotiated for drilling rights on public lands don't pass the straight-face test, especially given current crude oil prices." And Big Oil isn't alone. Citizens for Tax Justice estimates that corporations reap more than $123 billion a year in special tax breaks. Cut this in half and we could save about $60 billion.

The Tab* Tax Shortfall: $290 billion (uncollected taxes) + $2.5 billion (undertaxed high rollers) + $60 billion (unwarranted tax breaks) Starting Tab: $352.5 billion

2. Healthy Fixes.
Medicare and Medicaid, which cover elderly and low-income patients respectively, eat up a growing portion of the federal budget. Investigations by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) point to as much as $60 billion a year in fraud, waste and overpayments between the two programs. And Coburn is likely underestimating the problem.

The U.S. spends more than $400 per person on health care administration costs and insurance -- six times more than other industrialized nations.

That's because a 2003 Dartmouth Medical School study found that up to 30 percent of the $2 trillion spent in this country on medical care each year—including what's spent on Medicare and Medicaid—is wasted. And with the combined tab for those programs rising to some $665 billion this year, cutting costs by a conservative 15 percent could save taxpayers about $100 billion. Yet, rather than moving to trim fat, the government continues such questionable practices as paying private insurance companies that offer Medicare Advantage plans an average of 12 percent more per patient than traditional Medicare fee-for-service. Congress is trying to close this loophole, and doing so could save $15 billion per year, on average, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Another money-wasting bright idea was to create a giant class of middlemen: Private bureaucrats who administer the Medicare drug program are monitored by federal bureaucrats—and the public pays for both. An October report by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform estimated that this setup costs the government $10 billion per year in unnecessary administrative expenses and higher drug prices.

The Tab* Wasteful Health Spending: $60 billion (fraud, waste, overpayments) + $100 billion (modest 15 percent cost reduction) + $15 billion (closing the 12 percent loophole) + $10 billion (unnecessary Medicare administrative and drug costs) Total $185 billion Running Tab: $352.5 billion +$185 billion = $537.5 billion

3. Military Mad Money.
You'd think it would be hard to simply lose massive amounts of money, but given the lack of transparency and accountability, it's no wonder that eight of the Department of Defense's functions, including weapons procurement, have been deemed high risk by the GAO. That means there's a high probability that money—"tens of billions," according to Walker—will go missing or be otherwise wasted.

The DOD routinely hands out no-bid and cost-plus contracts, under which contractors get reimbursed for their costs plus a certain percentage of the contract figure. Such deals don't help hold down spending in the annual military budget of about $500 billion. That sum is roughly equal to the combined defense spending of the rest of the world's countries. It's also comparable, adjusted for inflation, with our largest Cold War-era defense budget. Maybe that's why billions of dollars are still being spent on high-cost weapons designed to counter Cold War-era threats, even though today's enemy is armed with cell phones and IEDs. (And that $500 billion doesn't include the billions to be spent this year in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those funds demand scrutiny, too, according to Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-MN, who says, "One in six federal tax dollars sent to rebuild Iraq has been wasted.")

Meanwhile, the Pentagon admits it simply can't account for more than $1 trillion. Little wonder, since the DOD hasn't been fully audited in years. Hoping to change that, Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation is pushing Congress to add audit provisions to the next defense budget.

If wasteful spending equaling 10 percent of all spending were rooted out, that would free up some $50 billion. And if Congress cut spending on unnecessary weapons and cracked down harder on fraud, we could save tens of billions more.

The Tab* Wasteful military spending: $100 billion (waste, fraud, unnecessary weapons) Running Tab: $537.5 billion + $100 billion = $637.5 billion

4. Bad Seeds.
The controversial U.S. farm subsidy program, part of which pays farmers not to grow crops, has become a giant welfare program for the rich, one that cost taxpayers nearly $20 billion last year.

Two of the best-known offenders: Kenneth Lay, the now-deceased Enron CEO, who got $23,326 for conservation land in Missouri from 1995 to 2005, and mogul Ted Turner, who got $590,823 for farms in four states during the same period. A Cato Institute study found that in 2005, two-thirds of the subsidies went to the richest 10 percent of recipients, many of whom live in New York City. Not only do these "farmers" get money straight from the government, they also often get local tax breaks, since their property is zoned as agricultural land. The subsidies raise prices for consumers, hurt third world farmers who can't compete, and are attacked in international courts as unfair trade.

The Tab* Wasteful farm subsidies: $20 billion Running Tab: $637.5 billion + $20 billion = $657.5 billion

5. Capital Waste.
While there's plenty of ongoing annual operating waste, there's also a special kind of profligacy—call it capital waste—that pops up year after year. This is shoddy spending on big-ticket items that don't pan out. While what's being bought changes from year to year, you can be sure there will always be some costly items that aren't worth what the government pays for them.

Take this recent example: Since September 11, 2001, Congress has spent more than $4 billion to upgrade the Coast Guard's fleet. Today the service has fewer ships than it did before that money was spent, what 60 Minutes called "a fiasco that has set new standards for incompetence." Then there's the Future Imagery Architecture spy satellite program. As The New York Times recently reported, the technology flopped and the program was killed—but not before costing $4 billion. Or consider the FBI's infamous Trilogy computer upgrade: Its final stage was scrapped after a $170 million investment. Or the almost $1 billion the Federal Emergency Management Agency has wasted on unusable housing. The list goes on.

The Tab* Wasteful Capital Spending: $30 billion Running Tab: $657.5 billion + $30 billion = $687.5 billion

6. Fraud and Stupidity.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wants the Social Security Administration to better monitor the veracity of people drawing disability payments from its $100 billion pot. By one estimate, roughly $1 billion is wasted each year in overpayments to people who work and earn more than the program's rules allow.

The federal Food Stamp Program gets ripped off too. Studies have shown that almost 5 percent, or more than $1 billion, of the payments made to people in the $30 billion program are in excess of what they should receive.

One person received $105,000 in excess disability payments over seven years.

There are plenty of other examples. Senator Coburn estimates that the feds own unused properties worth $18 billion and pay out billions more annually to maintain them. Guess it's simpler for bureaucrats to keep paying for the property than to go to the trouble of selling it.

The Tab* General Fraud and Stupidity: $2 billion (disability and food stamp overpayment) Running Tab: $687.5 billion + $2 billion = $689.5 billion

7. Pork Sausage.
Congress doled out $29 billion in so-called earmarks—aka funds for legislators' pet projects—in 2006, according to Citizens Against Government Waste. That's three times the amount spent in 1999. Congress loves to deride this kind of spending, but lawmakers won't hesitate to turn around and drop $500,000 on a ballpark in Billings, Montana.

The most infamous earmark is surely the "bridge to nowhere"—a span that would have connected Ketchikan, Alaska, to nearby Gravina Island—at a cost of more than $220 million. After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Senator Coburn tried to redirect that money to repair the city's Twin Span Bridge. He failed when lawmakers on both sides of the aisle got behind the Alaska pork. (That money is now going to other projects in Alaska.) Meanwhile, this kind of spending continues at a time when our country's crumbling infrastructure—the bursting dams, exploding water pipes and collapsing bridges—could really use some investment. Cutting two-thirds of the $29 billion would be a good start.

The Tab* Pork Barrel Spending: $20 billion Running Tab: $689.5 billion + $20 billion = $709.5 billion

8. Welfare Kings.
Corporate welfare is an easy thing for politicians to bark at, but it seems it's hard to bite the hand that feeds you. How else to explain why corporate welfare is on the rise? A Cato Institute report found that in 2006, corporations received $92 billion (including some in the form of those farm subsidies) to do what they do anyway—research, market and develop products. The recipients included plenty of names from the Fortune 500, among them IBM, GE, Xerox, Dow Chemical, Ford Motor Company, DuPont and Johnson & Johnson.

The Tab* Corporate Welfare: $50 billion Running Tab: $709.5 billion + $50 billion = $759.5 billion

9. Been There,
Done That. The Rural Electrification Administration, created during the New Deal, was an example of government at its finest—stepping in to do something the private sector couldn't. Today, renamed the Rural Utilities Service, it's an example of a government that doesn't know how to end a program. "We established an entity to electrify rural America. Mission accomplished. But the entity's still there," says Walker. "We ought to celebrate success and get out of the business."

In a 2007 analysis, the Heritage Foundation found that hundreds of programs overlap to accomplish just a few goals. Ending programs that have met their goals and eliminating redundant programs could comfortably save taxpayers $30 billion a year.

The Tab* Obsolete, Redundant Programs: $30 billion Running Tab: $759.5 billion + $30 billion = $789.5 billion

10. Living on Credit.
Here's the capper: Years of wasteful spending have put us in such a deep hole, we must squander even more to pay the interest on that debt. In 2007, the federal government carried a debt of $9 trillion and blew $252 billion in interest. Yes, we understand the federal government needs to carry a small debt for the Federal Reserve Bank to operate. But "small" isn't how we would describe three times the nation's annual budget. We need to stop paying so much in interest (and we think cutting $194 billion is a good target). Instead we're digging ourselves deeper: Congress had to raise the federal debt limit last September from $8.965 trillion to almost $10 trillion or the country would have been at legal risk of default. If that's not a wake-up call to get spending under control, we don't know what is.

The Tab* Interest on National Debt: $194 billion Final Tab: $789.5 billion + $194 billion = $983.5 billion

What YOU Can Do Many believe our system is inherently broken. We think it can be fixed. As citizens and voters, we have to set a new agenda before the Presidential election. There are three things we need in order to prevent wasteful spending, according to the GAO's David Walker:

• Incentives for people to do the right thing.

• Transparency so we can tell if they've done the right thing.

• Accountability if they do the wrong thing.

Two out of three won't solve our problems.

So how do we make it happen? Demand it of our elected officials. If they fail to listen, then we turn them out of office. With its approval rating hovering around 11 percent in some polls, Congress might just start paying attention.

Start by writing to your Representatives. Talk to your family, friends and neighbors, and share this article. It's in everybody's interest.

"Taxpayers distrustful of government financial reporting," AccountingWeb, February 22, 2008 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=104680

The federal government is failing to meet the financial reporting needs of taxpayers, falling short of expectations, and creating a problem with trust, according to survey findings released by the Association of Government Accountants (AGA). The survey, Public Attitudes to Government Accountability and Transparency 2008, measured attitudes and opinions towards government financial management and accountability to taxpayers. The survey established an expectations gap between what taxpayers expect and what they get, finding that the public at large overwhelmingly believes that government has the obligation to report and explain how it generates and spends its money, but that that it is failing to meet expectations in any area included in the survey.

The survey further found that taxpayers consider governments at the federal, state, and local levels to be significantly under-delivering in terms of practicing open, honest spending. Across all levels of government, those surveyed held "being open and honest in spending practices" vitally important, but felt that government performance was poor in this area. Those surveyed also considered government performance to be poor in terms of being "responsible to the public for its spending." This is compounded by perceived poor performance in providing understandable and timely financial management information.

The survey shows:

The American public is most dissatisfied with government financial management information disseminated by the federal government. Seventy-two percent say that it is extremely or very important to receive this information from the federal government, but only 5 percent are extremely or very satisfied with what they receive.

 

Seventy-three percent of Americans believe that it is extremely or very important for the federal government to be open and honest in its spending practices, yet only 5 percent say they are meeting these expectations.

 

Seventy-one percent of those who receive financial management information from the government or believe it is important to receive it, say they would use the information to influence their vote.

Relmond Van Daniker, Executive Director at AGA, said, "We commissioned this survey to shed some light on the way the public perceives those issues relating to government financial accountability and transparency that are important to our members. Nobody is pretending that the figures are a shock, but we are glad to have established a benchmark against which we can track progress in years to come."

He continued, "AGA members working in government at all levels are in the very forefront of the fight to increase levels of government accountability and transparency. We believe that the traditional methods of communicating government financial information -- through reams of audited financial statements that have little relevance to the taxpayer -- must be supplemented by government financial reporting that expresses complex financial details in an understandable form. Our members are committed to taking these concepts forward."

Justin Greeves, who led the team at Harris Interactive that fielded the survey for the AGA, said, "The survey results include some extremely stark, unambiguous findings. Public levels of dissatisfaction and distrust of government spending practices came through loud and clear, across every geography, demographic group, and political ideology. Worthy of special note, perhaps, is a 67 percentage point gap between what taxpayers expect from government and what they receive. These are significant findings that I hope government and the public find useful."

This survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of the Association of Government Accountants between January 4 and 8, 2008 among 1,652 adults aged 18 or over. Results were weighted as needed for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, region, and household income. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents' propensity to be online. No estimates of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.

You can read the Survey Report, including a full methodology and associated commentary.

Report on the Transparency International Global Corruption Barometer 2007 ---
http://www.transparency.org/content/download/27256/410704/file/GCB_2007_report_en_02-12-2007.pdf

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY – GLOBAL CORRUPTION BAROMETER 2007...................2

PAYING BRIBES AROUND THE WORLD CONTINUES TO BE ALL TOO COMMON ......3

Figure 1. Demands for bribery, by region 3

Table 1. Countries most affected by bribery 4

Figure 2. Experience of bribery worldwide, selected services 5

Table 2. Percentage of respondents reporting that they paid a bribe to obtain a service 5

Figure 3. Experience with bribery, by service 6

Figure 4. Selected Services: Percentage of respondents who paid a bribe, by region 7

Figure 5. Comparing Bribery: 2006 and 2007 8

CORRUPTION IN KEY INSTITUTIONS: POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE

LEGISLATURE VIEWED AS MOST CORRUPT............................................................8

Figure 6. Perceived levels of corruption in key institutions, worldwide 9

Figure 7. Perceived levels of corruption in key institutions, comparing 2004 and 2007 10

EXPERIENCE V. PERCEPTIONS OF CORRUPTION – DO THEY ALIGN?...................10

Figure 8. Corruption Perceptions Index v. citizens’ experience with bribery 11

LEVELS OF CORRUPTION EXPECTED TO RISE OVER THE NEXT THREE YEARS....11

Figure 9. Corruption will get worse, worldwide 11

Figure 10. Expectations about the future: Comparing 2003 and 2007 12

PUBLIC SCEPTICISM OF GOVERNMENT EFFORTS TO FIGHT CORRUPTION – IN

MOST PLACES .......................................................................................................13

Table 3. How effectively is government fighting corruption? The country view 13

CONCLUSIONS ......................................................................................................13

APPENDIX 1: THE GLOBAL CORRUPTION BAROMETER 2007 QUESTIONNAIRE15

APPENDIX 2: THE GLOBAL CORRUPTION BAROMETER – ABOUT THE SURVEY17

APPENDIX 3: REGIONAL GROUPINGS..................................................................20

GLOBAL CORRUPTION BAROMETER 2007..........................................................20

APPENDIX 4: COUNTRY TABLES..........................................................................21

Table 4.1: Respondents who paid a bribe to obtain services 21

Table 4.2: Corruption’s impact on different sectors and institutions 22

Table 4.3: Views of corruption in the future 23

Table 4.4: Respondents' evaluation of their government's efforts to fight corruption 24

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Private Equity Crooks

"Keep Private Equity Away From Our Banks," by Andy Stern, The Wall Street Journal, July 7, 2008; Page A13 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121538911268431155.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Private-equity firms have made a lavish living on making big bets when no one is looking. Unlike banks and thrifts – which are regulated, transparent and generally publicly owned enterprises – private-equity firms operate in secret, virtually free from regulation. They use tax loopholes around carried interest – and deduct interest payments on the debt they use for buyouts – to extract huge profits from the companies they buy. Private-equity profits are built on big risks, and taking advantage of lax regulation – the very problems that led to the subprime and credit crises.

Shareholders are also paying the price for private-equity investments in banks. Texas Pacific Group's (TPG) recent investment in Washington Mutual (WaMu) massively diluted shareholder stakes by handing 50.2% of the company to TPG and its partners. While the deal – crafted in secret without shareholder input or approval – has already put $50 million in transaction fees in the pocket of TPG, WaMu shareholders have seen their stock value fall to $5.38 a share, the lowest level in 16 years (a nearly 90% drop in the last year alone).

Continued in article

Question
What is the most profit ever made by a speculator on Wall Street?

April 16, 2008 message from David Albrecht [albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]

April 16, 2008
Wall Street Winners Get Billion-Dollar Paydays

By JENNY ANDERSON

Hedge fund managers, those masters of a secretive, sometimes volatile financial universe, are making money on a scale that once seemed unimaginable, even in Wall Street’s rarefied realms.

One manager, John Paulson, made $3.7 billion last year. He reaped that bounty, probably the richest in Wall Street history, by betting against certain mortgages and complex financial products that held them.

Mr. Paulson, the founder of Paulson & Company, was not the only big winner. The hedge fund managers James H. Simons and George Soros each earned almost $3 billion last year, according to an annual ranking of top hedge fund earners by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine, which comes out Wednesday.

Hedge fund managers have redefined notions of wealth in recent years. And the richest among them are redefining those notions once again.

Their unprecedented and growing affluence underscores the gaping inequality between the millions of Americans facing stagnating wages and rising home foreclosures and an agile financial elite that seems to thrive in good times and bad. Such profits may also prompt more calls for regulation of the industry.

Even on Wall Street, where money is the ultimate measure of success, the size of the winnings makes some uneasy. “There is nothing wrong with it ­ it’s not illegal,” said William H. Gross, the chief investment officer of the bond fund Pimco. “But it’s ugly.”

The richest hedge fund managers keep getting richer ­ fast. To make it into the top 25 of Alpha’s list, the industry standard for hedge fund pay, a manager needed to earn at least $360 million last year, more than 18 times the amount in 2002. The median American family, by contrast, earned $60,500 last year.

Combined, the top 50 hedge fund managers last year earned $29 billion. That figure represents the managers’ own pay and excludes the compensation of their employees. Five of the top 10, including Mr. Simons and Mr. Soros, were also at the top of the list for 2006. To compile its ranking, Alpha examined the funds’ returns and the fees that they charge investors, and then calculated the managers’ pay.

Continued at:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/business/16wall.html

Insolvent Vultures Feeding on Creditors and Taxpayers

"Insolvency: a licence to print money:  Chapter 11 is not all it's cracked up," by Prim Sikka, "The Guardian," July 17, 2008 --- http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/17/conservatives

David Cameron wants to reform insolvency procedures. Rather than scrutinising the UK's existing practices, he wants to import the US practices, particularly "Chapter 11" of the US Bankruptcy Code. Chapter 11 has some merits. It gives distressed companies breathing space to reorganise their financial affairs, protect some jobs and forestall bankruptcy, but it also has unexpected outcomes.

WorldCom was one of the biggest US corporate frauds of recent years. The company's reporting of fictitious profits exerted pressure on its competitors and destroyed several of them. The fraud resulted in loss of jobs, savings, investments and pensions. WorldCom also avoided billions of dollars in taxes. In 2002, WorldCom filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, secured new finance and in 2004 re-emerged as MCI. The revamping generated millions of dollars in fees for accountants and lawyers. As part of the bankruptcy processes, creditors agreed to forego some of the amounts due to them. With lower interest charges and depreciation on its assets, WorldCom has been able to portray itself as a sound company. The same advantages are not available to those companies who did not indulge in fraudulent activities.

WorldCom's survival is of little consolation to those who tried to compete honestly with the original entity. Those who originally supported the company now find that their financial interests are less well protected than the new backers.

Chapter 11 proceedings have increasingly been used by companies for "strategic bankruptcies" – in other words, they have used the law to avoid leasing agreements, employee rights, tax payments, damages awarded against them by courts and even to defeat unwelcome takeover bids. Airlines have frequently resorted to Chapter 11 processes to reconstruct their affairs and avoid making debt repayments. One book highlights how Continental Airlines used the process to cut labour costs. A company facing asbestos related claims declared itself insolvent to avoid paying compensation to victims.

Cameron's interest in Chapter 11 may well be a publicity stunt. At the height of the last recession, the then Conservative government could have introduced Chapter 11 reforms, but it did not - as shown by parliamentary replies from ministers. The Conservatives also opposed making the fees charged by insolvency practitioners more transparent, and even the idea of a bankruptcy court that might have adjudicated on disputes between insolvency practitioners and stakeholders.

The UK's woeful current insolvency laws allow viable businesses to be placed into liquidation. The process typically begins with the bank, usually a secured creditor, sending accountants to review the financial health of a debtor company. If the accountants conclude that all is well, they stand to receive a one-off fee from the bank. However, if they raise doubts and then persuade the bank to appoint the same accounting firm as receivers or liquidators, they could be collecting fees for years to come. There is an inevitable conflict of interests and many good businesses have been placed into liquidation. Some years ago, Royal Bank of Scotland declared that it would not award receiverships to any accounting firm which had previously acted as reporting accountants for the client in question. It subsequently reported a 60% reduction in the number of business recommended for receivership and liquidations.

Insolvency is a licence to print money. Practitioners are paid before any creditor and can charge more than £600 for an hour's work. They do not owe a "duty of care" to all stakeholders affected by their practices, and that provides plenty of incentives to prolong insolvencies. Both Maxwell Communication Corporation plc (looted by Robert Maxwell) and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) began liquidation proceedings in 1991. Neither has been finalised, but MCC plc has generated £88m in fees for the insolvency practitioners and BCCI's liquidators have collected over £400m. Nor are these cases unusual. Almost 5,000 companies where the administration or liquidation process began between 10 and fifteen years ago , and 12,571 companies where the administration or liquidation process began more than 15 years ago are not finalised.

David Cameron could advance his new-found interest in business insolvencies by commissioning an independent investigation into the insolvency industry. Currently, seven buck-passing and ineffective regulators regulate around 1,600 licensed practitioners. Theses should be replaced by one independent regulator who owes a duty of care to all stakeholders. Reporting accountants should not be allowed to become receivers and liquidators. There should be an independent complaints investigations procedure, and an ombudsman should adjudicate on disputes. These modest reforms could save many businesses from vultures. Is the Tory leader willing to take on big accounting firms and open a new chapter in saving jobs?

Mutual Fund and Insurance Company Scandals

So where was Levitt before Spitzer did his job?  While heading up the SEC. Levitt always seemed willing to take on the CPA firms, but he treaded lightly (really did very little) while the financial industry on Wall Street ripped off investors bigtime.  It never ceases to amaze me how Levitt capitalizes on his failures.
Forget Enron, WorldCom or mutual funds. The crisis enveloping the insurance industry is "the scandal of the decade, without a question" and "dwarfs anything we've seen thus far."
Arthur Levitt as quoted by SmartPros, October 25, 2004 --- http://www.smartpros.com/x45590.xml 
Bob Jensen's threads on insurance frauds are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudCongress.htm#MutualFunds 

Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry refers to the Mutual Fund Industry as "Organized Crime."
"John Kerry’s 19 Year Record On Investor Issues," American Shareholders' Association ---  http://www.americanshareholders.com/news/asakerryreport03-22-04.pdf  

Three Bank of America Corp. brokerage units agreed to pay $375 million to settle market timing charges, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said Wednesday. The SEC charged that Banc of America Capital Management LLC, BACAP Distributors LLC, and Banc of America Securities LLC entered into "improper and undisclosed agreements" that let favored large investors engage in rapid short-term, market timing and late trading in Nations Funds mutual funds.  Separately, Bank of America's Fleet mutual fund unit agreed to pay $140 million to settle market timing charges, while five former executives were individually charged with market timing violations, the SEC said.
"Bank of America to Settle Mutual Fund Charges," The New York Times, February 9, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/09/business/09WIRE-BOFA.html 

Washington's insurance commissioner is seeking millions of dollars from accounting firm Ernst & Young for its alleged neglect in overseeing finances at Metropolitan Mortgage & Securities.  
Washington State Sues E&Y Over Met Mortgage Woes," AccounitngWeb, October 19m 2004 --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=99940 

One thing your can count on:  When you invst, a lot of the people you trust are going to cheat.  Billions of investor dollars whirl through the system.  It's all too easy for insiders to stick their hands into that current and grab.  We're not talking about a bad apple here and there.  Cheating runs through Wall Street's very seams --- even in the sainted mutual funds.
Jane Bryant Quinn. "Mutual Funds' Greed Machine, Newsweek, November 24, 2003, Page 45

"I believe this (mutual fund rip-off) is the worst scandal we've seen in 50 years, and I can't say I saw it coming," said Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission for nearly eight years under the Clinton administration. "I probably worried about funds less than insider trading, accounting issues and fair disclosure to investors" by public companies.
Stephen Labaton (see below)

One Person's Claim Can Dramatically Increase a Firm's Employee Health Insurance
Such are the challenges for smaller businesses in Kansas and the many other states where laws permit insurers to raise health premiums substantially for small employers when one worker incurs significant medical bills. And it is why, as state legislatures, Congress and presidential candidates of all stripes debate the growing problem of Americans without health insurance, the struggles of small businesses — which employ about 40 percent of the nation’s work force — are likely to become a central issue. Small-business employees are one of the fastest-growing segments of the nation’s 44 million uninsured; they now represent at least 20 percent of the total, according to federal census data. And even modest-size employers like Varney’s that say they remain committed to providing benefits find themselves wondering how long they can continue.
"Small Businesses’ Premiums Soar After Illness," The New York Times, May 6, 2007 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/05/business/05insure.html

Mutual Funds Watchdog Site
Featured (Positively) in USA Today on July 3, 2006, Page 3B --- http://www.fundalarm.com/

FundAlarm is a free, non-commercial Website. Our view of the mutual fund industry is slightly off-center. We help you decide when it's time to sell a fund, instead of when it's time to buy. The mutual fund industry is full of broken promises, arrogance, greed, hypocrisy -- the list goes on. We try to shine a light in the darker corners, and poke holes in balloons that could use some poking.

Former top executive of American International Group Inc. plundered an AIG retirement program of billions of dollars

"AIG lawyer tells jury that Greenberg plundered retirement program after being forced out," by Madlen Read,  Newser, June 15, 2009 --- Click Here 

The former top executive of American International Group Inc. plundered an AIG retirement program of billions of dollars because he was angry at being forced out of the company, a lawyer for AIG told jurors Monday at the start of a civil trial.

Attorney Theodore Wells told the jury in Manhattan that former AIG Chief Executive Officer Maurice "Hank" Greenberg improperly took $4.3 billion in stock from the company in 2005, after he was ousted by the company amid investigations of accounting irregularities.

"Hank Greenberg was mad. He was angry," Wells said in U.S. District Court of the emotional state of the man who, over a 35-year-career, built AIG from a small company into the world's largest insurance company.

Wells said that Greenberg, within weeks of being forced out in mid-2005, gave the go-ahead for tens of millions of shares to be sold from a trust fund. The fund was set up to provide incentive bonuses to a select group of AIG management and highly compensated employees that they would receive upon their retirement.

Greenberg, 84, has contended through his lawyers that he had the right to sell the shares because they were owned by Starr International, a privately held company he controlled.

Starr International was named after Cornelius Vander Starr, who created a worldwide network of insurance companies in the early 1900s.

AIG maintains that Starr and Greenberg, his protege and successor, decided in the late 1960s to organize the various companies under one holding company, AIG.

Starr International remained a private company and its shareholders decided in 1970 that the amount that its shares of AIG were worth above book value of about $110 million should be used to compensate AIG employees, AIG has said.