Thursday, 18 August 2011

Larry Levin's Day Trading Blog: Regulatory Capture

Besides day trading techniques, as you see we can learn news or information around day trading futures from Larry Levin. This is not strange to us any more. As usual, today we will have another topic to learn about: Regulatory Capture.

If you have wondered why the banking mafia is never found guilty of any wrongdoing of any kind, you probably haven’t heard of “regulatory capture.” After all, the regulators are the ones that are employed with the duty of bringing charges against the banksters.

Regulatory capture refers to the fact that government regulators often become more concerned with protecting an industry than protecting the public that the regulation was designed to protect. Additionally, these government workers OFTEN leave their jobs, once they have “cosseted” these industries (think banksters), and take jobs with them as a payoff for looking the other way.

If you’re not familiar with this concept, please read the full article from Matt Tiabbi at Rolling Stone http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/is-the-sec-covering-up-wall-street-crimes-20110817

Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – “Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?” No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation’s worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – “18,000 … including Madoff,” as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.

Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency’s records – “including case files relating to preliminary investigations” – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term “Orwellian,” devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or “Matters Under Inquiry” – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission’s internal website. “After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation,” the site advised staffers, “you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI.”

Oh yeah, it’s “free market” alright…free to loot and steal as much as the banking mafia wants from the US Treasury with the approval of Tax-Cheatin-Timmy, Ben Bernanke, and Mary Shapiro of the SEC.

Trade well and follow the trend, not the so-called “experts.”

Behold the age of infinite moral hazard! On April 2nd, 2009 CONgress forced FASB to suspend rule 157 in favor of deceitful accounting for the TBTF banksters.

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