On May 27, 2010, the United States Attorney General’s Office announced the arrest of Kenneth [I.] Starr (pdf), a financial adviser to the stars, allegedly for conducting a purported Ponzi scheme with his clients’ money. According to an excerpt from a New York Times article about Kenneth Starr’s arrest – “But when they arrested him [...]
financial regulation
The MacGyver Of Finance
Harry Markopolos should be every American investor’s hero, I know that he’s one of mine. Mr. Markopolos, one of few Wall Street executives with a conscience, tried unsuccessfully for almost a decade to alert the SEC that Bernie Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. The SEC’s refusal to investigate Madoff during that whole period is [...]
Money Market Fund Reform
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) just adopted new rules to their oversight of money market funds — revisions that include increasing credit quality, improving liquidity, shortening maturity limits, and requiring the disclosure of a fund’s actual “mark-to-market” net asset value, known as a “shadow NAV,” on a delayed basis. This SEC action grows out [...]
SIGTARP Transparencies
SIGTARP is the acronym used to easily identify the office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. SIGTARP was created by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA), and is headed by Neil M. Barofsky, the Special Inspector General appointed by President George Bush, and confirmed by the Senate, just [...]
Good News On The Regulatory Front
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has been given the go ahead from the SEC to make it’s BrokerCheck service records of final regulatory actions against brokers permanently available to the public. Previously, a broker’s record generally becomes unavailable to the public two years after he or she leaves the securities industry and is therefore [...]
Financial Regulation Reform
Funny how all of these things happened “unintentionally of course” around the same time in the last three months, huh? On April 16th, SEC charges Goldman Sachs with fraud in structuring and marketing of CDO tied to subprime mortgages. Within a few days of this indictment, the BP explosion and resulting Gulf oil leak occurs. [...]