7 Ways The Investment Banking Industry Is Built On Fraud, Lying, And Stealing

The asymmetry of information in research, mergers and acquisitions, trading volumes and patterns, buy-side and sell-side orders provides investment banks with vast resources of information that they leech to drive profitability. This should be vexing everyone in the country right now and yet we don’t even see. Banks blowing their own smoke were behind the curve and they represent the very core of our systemic economic problems. The deception continues. Although this article focuses on hedge funds it is more relevant to investment banks. Via disinfo.com:

1. Insider Trading. If the Feds could tape every hedge fund we’d get an earful of how hedge funds use “expert networks” to transfer bits of illegal information that provide hedge fund managers with knowledge of events that are sure to move markets and make them a bundle.

2. Ponzi Schemes. Madoff isn’t the only one. Hedge funds and Ponzi schemes are made for each other since the funds are designed to evade so many disclosure regulations. It’s virtually a sure thing that every new year will reveal another Ponzi scheme through which a hedge fund steals money from investors and then uses new investor money to pay returns to the old investors.

3. Tax Evasion. No surprise here. Wherever you find billionaire financiers, you’ll find schemes to move money around the globe to dodge taxes. Fortunately, Rudolf M. Elmer, a Swiss banker, has blown the whistle on an international web of rich investors, banks and hedge funds that evade taxes by illegally shifting money to low-tax jurisdictions. There’s something particularly slimy about hedge fund tax dodging, given that they only pay a 15 percent federal tax rate no matter how much they make.

4. Front-running trades. With their high-speed trading systems and algorithms that sense ever so slight market moves, the biggest hedge funds and banks are able to trade just a fraction of a second before the rest of us do. The SEC is also worried that brokers leak information about large trades by institutional investors to hedge funds so that favored hedge funds can pull off the trade just a split second sooner, thereby earning a quick, easy, and illegal profit.

5. Late Trading. When Eliot Spitzer was New York Attorney General (and earned the handle, “Sheriff of Wall Street”), he uncovered hedge funds maneuvering around trading rules like a Ferrari speeding around the hapless shmoes stuck in midtown traffic. In violation of all rules, hedge funds were allowed by mutual fund managers to jump in and out of mutual funds many more times than normal investors, enabling them to score high returns at the expense of regular mutual fund customers. They even got away with booking trades hours after the market closed for the day—a real perk, since market-moving announcements often are made right after closing.

6. Accounting Irregularities. Boring stuff, but the stuff of big money. Hedge funds and banks cook the books to avoid showing losses and to artificially inflate profits. Hedge funds are also deeply involved in helping other companies—like Enron and WorldCom—bend their books. According to a study by Bing Liang at the University of Massachusetts, as of 2004, 35 percent of all hedge funds cited no dates for their last audit. Hmmm.

7. Setting up bets that can’t fail. I just can’t get enough of how banks and hedge funds collude to rig securities so that they are designed to fail. The best part is that in order to win their negative bets, they have to market the securities to chumps as if they were pure gold. This ploy always seems to involve a big investment bank and a hedge fund. You have Goldman Sach’s dancing with Paulson and Company, and then there’s JP Morgan Chase doing a two-step with Megatar.

This is not a sick joke

Why has Dominique Strauss-Kahn been released on bail? John McConnell, Assistant district attorney  has already stated: “The proof against him is substantial and continues to grow every day.”  He has been alleged to have committed such crimes as attempted rape, sexual abuse and criminal sexual acts. Given the circumstances he should have not been given the latitude and flexibility to have been released on bail.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn should be remanded in full police custody, given the rights of a trial without question, but given the already established incriminating evidence bail should have been refused. Prosecutors are already making preparations to present their case and the public will not withstand an unnecessary delay to proceedings being started. We had altogether similar antics with Made-off.

What is also important here is that a full investigation is now undertaken at the IMF and its internal practices.  If he is prepared to transgress to such heinous crimes anything of a lesser nature, by extension,  he would have had the propensity to commit. We need to rest his moral compass. This is not an investigation of sexual assault, it’s a wider matter of the head of one of the world’s most powerful organisations (the IMF) and he’s blurry behaviour. The regulators have an opportunity to redeem themselves and to really delve into the IMF and other organisations to unlock the circles of corruption, fraud and favouritism which are more likable to third world dictatorships.