BarroMetrics Views: The New York Investigation
Pressed for time tonight. Below is a story excerpted from I read on the Trading Report. I have quoted part of the story for the full story go to: “The Unblievably Rampant Corruption on Wall Street”
*Bloomberg is reporting that a massive network of big banks and financial institutions have been involved in blatant bid-rigging fraud that cost taxpayers across the U.S. billions of dollars. The U.S. Justice Department is charging that financial advisers to municipalities colluded with Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Lehman Brothers, Wachovia and 11 other banks in a conspiracy to rig bids on municipal financial instruments. Apparently what was going on was that it was decided in advance who would win the auctions of guaranteed investment contracts, which public entities purchase with the proceeds from municipal bond sales, and then other intentionally losing bids were submitted in order to make the process look competitive. The U.S. Justice Department claims that this fraud has been industry-wide and has been going on for years. In fact, at least four financial professionals have already pleaded guilty in this case.
*An industry insider has come forward with “smoking gun” evidence that some of the biggest banks have been openly and blatantly manipulating the price of gold and silver. For a time it looked like the federal government was just going to ignore all of this fraud, but after substantial public uproar some action is indeed being taken. In fact, it has been reported that federal agents have launched parallel criminal and civil probes of JPMorgan Chase and its trading activity in the precious metals markets.
*New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo is investigating whether eight major Wall Street banks purposely misled the big credit ratings agencies so that they would give their mortgage-backed securities AAA ratings that they did not deserve.*There has been a ton of legal action surrounding mortgage-backed securities lately. For example, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are now investigating Morgan Stanley as part of a probe into whether Wall Street firms deliberately misled investors regarding the sale of mortgage-related securities.
*Goldman Sachs is getting most of the press about fraud in the mortgage-backed securities market these days. Of course Goldman is strenuously denying that it “bet against its clients” when it changed its position in the housing market in 2007. But we all know the truth at this point. The truth is that Goldman Sachs clearly bet against its clients and was involved in a whole lot of things that were even worse than that. Many did not think the U.S. government would dare go after Goldman, but that is what we are starting to see. U.S. federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into whether Goldman Sachs or its employees committed securities fraud in connection with its trading of mortgage-backed securities, and it will be very interesting to see if anything comes of that investigation.
*But not everyone is being held accountable for their actions. The guy who helped bring down AIG is going to get off scott-free and is going to be able to keep the millions in profits that he made in the process.
If any of the claims can be proven, you can expect more pressure on US Stocks.
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