Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

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choff
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by choff »

Interesting article at zerohedge about cap and trade, how it stands to be a trillion dollar market, three times bigger than the underlying energy market. The upshot I see for fusion research would be, Wall St. would lose it all if somebody comes out with a low cost fusion reactor.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-0 ... global-war

Of course, they need to crush off the climate change deniers as well.
CHoff

hanelyp
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by hanelyp »

Some of us find the "D" word related to our position on "climate change" highly offensive.

The whole of cap & tax is a scam, a means of transferring money to favored industries and people.
The daylight is uncomfortably bright for eyes so long in the dark.

Tom Ligon
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by Tom Ligon »

This one falls under the heading of "Why Isn't Wall Street in an Insane Asylum?"

Today on the stock market stinks, although considerably less than it did this morning. The primary drag on it is yet more problems in the oil market, a continuation of yesterday's news about the Saudis not taking action. So, with oil stocks sucking everything down, I looked at the two in my meager portfolio.

One of them, HFC, is way down from what I paid for it some years back. If I just call it Ewing Oil, that's a pretty good description of the company. It has been selling for about 60% of what I paid for it.

And in the news this morning, the news was that they missed their earnings per share forecast by $0.38 per share. I've seen stocks drop 70% in an hour after a report like that.

So, of course, it is up 10% on the day and climbing.

My head would explode if I were not already used to irrational stock behavior.

As for why I even own oil stocks, well, EMC2 is not selling shares yet, and we need to burn oil until they have a net power reactor on the market.

Diogenes
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by Diogenes »

Tom Ligon wrote: My head would explode if I were not already used to irrational stock behavior.



The Stock market is now heavily a "bot" market. It has become a contest between complex computer algorithms which generally have the result of making it move like a Global Climate computer model, and with the same degree of accuracy.


I got out years ago, and I simply don't trust the D@mned thing anymore.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

choff
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by choff »

Saw one report that only Halliburton and one other company have the global market on oil exploration, so only a select few actually know how much oil there is in the world and where. Doesn't help that a command economy replaced the market economy since at least 2008, makes price rigging common place.
CHoff

Tom Ligon
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by Tom Ligon »

Well, I managed to beat the 'bots today.

There's this little company that sells services to power companies that my broker talked me into a few years ago. The 'bots figured I was a sucker, so when the company's earnings missed estimates by $0.17 per share, they piled on and before we could blink they dropped the price 67%. You could hear their little 'bot laughter. I was stuck.

But I outsmarted them. I doubled down, because there was actually nothing wrong with the company, except for a mis-applied sales metric that caused the marketing guys to chase a new market and disregard the base business. Easily fixed. I guessed that the stock was a bargain at the new depressed price.

A couple of years later puts us at last night after the market closed, when out of the blue a major power company announced that they'd bought the little service company for a bit more per share than my original purchase. And, of course, first thing this morning the 'bots had the price back up above where it was for my first purchase. 87% gain instantly. So I rode the 'bots and came out ahead.

I wish I could get that lucky all the time.

ladajo
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by ladajo »

I believe that little guy buys are a decent strategy if you have the patience and time to park the funds.
If you are sure they are solid, odds are they will get bought up down the road.
It does however require due diligence. I, like you Tom, have done well on a couple of those.
The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)

hanelyp
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by hanelyp »

Diogenes wrote:The Stock market is now heavily a "bot" market. It has become a contest between complex computer algorithms which generally have the result of making it move like a Global Climate computer model, and with the same degree of accuracy.


I got out years ago, and I simply don't trust the D@mned thing anymore.
The stock market would be a lot more rational the last 8 years if not for zero interest rate policies (ZIRP) driving investors out of bonds, and quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve buying up stocks. There should have been a major market correction (aka "crash") 8 years ago. In the desperate attempt to prevent the correction multi-megaton grade debt and market bubble bombs have been assembled and primed. The last 2 months may be the early stages of the bubble bomb detonating.

And now the loons are flirting with negative interest rates in their futile effort to keep the game going.
The daylight is uncomfortably bright for eyes so long in the dark.

paperburn1
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by paperburn1 »

yep that worked well for Europe
I am not a nuclear physicist, but play one on the internet.

Diogenes
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by Diogenes »

hanelyp wrote: The stock market would be a lot more rational the last 8 years if not for zero interest rate policies (ZIRP) driving investors out of bonds, and quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve buying up stocks. There should have been a major market correction (aka "crash") 8 years ago. In the desperate attempt to prevent the correction multi-megaton grade debt and market bubble bombs have been assembled and primed. The last 2 months may be the early stages of the bubble bomb detonating.

And now the loons are flirting with negative interest rates in their futile effort to keep the game going.

Yup. Agree on all accounts. This is what trying to sustain the unsustainable looks like at the tail end of the Ponzi scheme caused by the positive feedback loop that was started back in 1964.


I think it was only able to keep going because of so much innovation and labor/capital saving technologies that have been developed since then. (More food and stuff from less effort and raw materials)



That and the creation of a lot of new technologies.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

Diogenes
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by Diogenes »

Bitcoin firm CEO found dead after ‘suicide’

Image

Radtke’s death brings the number of questionable financial-sector deaths this year to eight.




http://nypost.com/2014/03/05/bitcoin-fi ... d-suicide/
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

rjaypeters
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by rjaypeters »

Why the S.E.C. Didn’t Hit Goldman Sachs Harder
By Jesse Eisinger

"n the late summer of 2009, lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission were preparing to bring charges in what they expected would be their first big crackdown coming out of the financial crisis. The investigators had been looking into Goldman Sachs’s mortgage-securities business, and were preparing to take on the bank over a complex deal, known as Abacus, that it had arranged with a hedge fund. They believed that Goldman had committed securities violations in developing Abacus, and were ready to charge the firm.

James Kidney, a longtime S.E.C. lawyer, was assigned to take the completed investigation and bring the case to trial. Right away, something seemed amiss. He thought that the staff had assembled enough evidence to support charging individuals. At the very least, he felt, the agency should continue to investigate more senior executives at Goldman and John Paulson & Company, the hedge fund run by John Paulson that made about a billion dollars from the Abacus deal. In his view, the S.E.C. staff was worried about the effect the case would have on Wall Street executives, a fear that deepened when he read an e-mail from Reid Muoio, the head of the S.E.C.’s team looking into complex mortgage securities. Muoio, who had worked at the agency for years, told colleagues that he had seen the “devasting [sic] impact our little ol’ civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing.” This attitude agitated Kidney, and he felt that it held his agency back from pursuing the people who made the decisions that led to the financial collapse..."

http://www.newyorker.com/business/curre ... ntent=link
"Aqaba! By Land!" T. E. Lawrence

R. Peters

Diogenes
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by Diogenes »

Vice Chairman Of Lotte Hangs Himself Hours Before Criminal Probe


Image
The past several years have seen a surprising spike in professional suicides, mostly confined to the banking sector in general and Deutsche Bank in particular. Overnight this tragic group expanded into multinational corporation sector, after one the top executives at South Korea's multinational conglomerate Lotte Group was found dead on Friday, in what is a suspected suicide, hours before he was to be questioned by prosecutors conducting a criminal probe into the country's fifth-largest conglomerate.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-2 ... inal-probe
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

rjaypeters
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by rjaypeters »

Not directly related to the Great Recession, but...

"Prosecuting Wells Fargo Executives Won’t Solve Anything - I know. I helped prosecute the executives at the center of Enron."
By Samuel W. Buell

"It was revealed last week that Wells Fargo, the second-largest bank in the country, has been caught in a craven money grab at the expense of its smallest retail customers in a scandal that recalls abuses of the 2008 financial crisis in terms of sheer audacity..."

"The real reason that criminal law has not delivered us from our corporate troubles is that it does not have the capacity to do so. The true barrier is the definition of white-collar crimes themselves, not the people whose job it is to prosecute them. Furthermore, there is no plausible fix to those laws that would transform them into a magic tool for corporate control..."

"The problem is the large corporation, not the people inside it—who turn over and over across scandal after scandal. It is time to put aside fixation with prosecutions as the cure-all for America’s corporate ills. The brilliant American innovation of the large, modern public company has had a major role in bringing our nation historically unprecedented wealth. But these corporations are plainly out of the control of those tasked with managing and regulating them. The corporate institution itself—its scale and the rules for how it operates—is what needs a hard and deep new look.

The immediate imperative is not a splashy police roundup but a fundamental rethinking of the scale of large American businesses and the day-to-day legal responsibilities of corporate managers. This should be a sustained conversation that leads to serious reforms such as those championed by Theodore Roosevelt in the 1900s and Franklin Roosevelt 1930s, following our first troubled encounters with the American corporate behemoth. Those reforms were powerful and effective, but these very different times call for new ideas. Getting that conversation started is the only way to get past the repeating cycle of the American corporate scandal."

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... thing.html
"Aqaba! By Land!" T. E. Lawrence

R. Peters

hanelyp
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Re: Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Post by hanelyp »

When a corporation commits a criminal act, the real persons who directed and carried out the action need to be personally liable.
The daylight is uncomfortably bright for eyes so long in the dark.

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