On Jan. 6, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York charged stockbroker Larry S. Werbel with conspiracy, securities fraud, wire fraud, investment adviser fraud and making false statements. But regulators had been aware of Werbel’s dicey recommendations of penny stocks to clueless customers five years before that.The sordid tale is but the latest example of authorities doing too little, too late.
You can read my column for TheStreet here.
When it comes to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, you know the drill. Regulation is bad. Dirty energy is good.
And why shouldn’t it be? We are talking, of course, about Corporate America’s biggest booster.
In advance of the annual “State of American Business” speech by Thomas J. Donohue, the Godfather of corporate lobbying, I made some predictions about what the speech would include. I concede it was not exactly a challenging task. But I did have a little fun with the Chamber’s always-predictable hypocrisies. You can read my column for TheStreet.com here.
Is the person who handles your money a stock broker or an investment adviser?
It makes a difference. Investment advisers, who are registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, are held to a fiduciary standard, which means they have to put your interest ahead of theirs. If an adviser is choosing from a list of 5 similar mutual funds that might be suitable for you, he or she can’t pick the one with the biggest fees.
Brokers, who are registered with the self-regulatory organization Finra, can look at that same list of 5 suitable funds and pick the one that puts the most money in their pockets. Regulators who watch over retirement funds at the Department of Labor don’t like that brokers can get away with that, and have proposed a rule that would force them to put your interests first just like advisers do.
Wall Street has been having an institutional temper tantrum over the idea that its brokers might have to put customers’ interests first. And the industry has actually concocted an argument that putting customers’ interests first would not be in customers’ best interest. I’m serious.
You can read about it here in my latest column for TheStreet.
Last week’s $19.5 million settlement between investment bank UBS and securities regulators is just the latest example of why Mom and Pop have no business getting involved with Wall Street’s most convoluted creations.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said on Oct. 13 that UBS had given investors false or misleading information about the structured debt securities known as “Medium Term Securities Linked to the UBS V10 Currency Index with Volatility Cap.”
Products with interminable names often wind up being products that are too complicated for a math Ph.D. to understand, never mind the average investor. (Or their sometimes hapless brokers, who sometimes whine like babies that they’ve been duped by their firms when products blow up.) You can learn a lot of lessons by examining the flaws in the UBS V10. I talk about those lessons in my latest column for TheStreet, which you can read here.
State securities regulators unveiled a plan at their annual meeting last week that zeroed in on the role stockbrokers can play in sounding the alarm that a senior is at risk of being ripped off.
The securities industry and its regulators have been tripping over themselves trying to make things safer for elderly investors. But the new proposal by The North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA) may have gone too far for Wall Street’s liking.
Stockbrokers say they would like to be able to tell authorities when they suspect that an elderly client is at risk of financial exploitation. So NASAA and others have been working on laws and regulations that would allow brokers to report their suspicions without violating privacy laws. Various proposals also have allowed brokers to decline to execute a transaction for 10 days if they suspect something fishy is going on.
The NASAA proposal would make it mandatory for brokers to report their suspicions. But it’s likely that the industry won’t go for that idea, preferring instead to have the option of looking the other way when they suspect financial abuse.
You can read my story for TheStreet here.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said on Monday that it had reached a $40 million settlement with a New York-based investment adviser over charges that it had improperly used mutual fund assets to pay brokerage firms for the marketing and distribution of its funds.
The case against the investment adviser, First Eagle Investment Management, is the first brought against an asset manager under an SEC initiative that aims to protect fund shareholders from paying for marketing expenses that should come out of the firm’s own assets.
I wrote about the settlement for The New York Times DealBook. You can read the story here.
I spoke with Alison Morris of Fox 5 News in New York about my story on security lapses at the mutual fund giant The Vanguard Group. You can watch the video here.
CNBC’s SquawkBox invited me in yesterday to discuss my story about The Vanguard Group’s online security. A whistleblower has been speaking with me on the record about a complaint she filed against Vanguard with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You can read the article here.
And here’s the CNBC video: