Are Funds At US Financial Firms Safe?
Stock-Markets / Credit Crisis 2011 Dec 11, 2011 - 04:17 PM GMTBy: Jesse
The short answer is 'maybe.' It is more of a buyer beware situation than most had thought, and still think.
It is nice to see someone in the mainstream media addressing this situation intelligently and without making an apology for what is apparently a criminal act and surely an egregious abuse of the public trust.
It is an axiom that it is not the initial crime that does the greatest and most widespread damage, although in this case it appears likely that someone in MF Global is due for jail time.
The damage is going to be to the US and British financial systems, Wall Street and the City of London, and in a large part because of the capture of political process by the monied interests.
This week the Senate led by Richard Shelby turned down the appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They have vowed to block any appointee until they can change the law that authorized the Bureau in the wake of the financial crisis in order to provide 'accountability.' For them that means the ability to control the Bureau and starve it of funds in order to protect their banking cronies on Wall Street.
Nothing is ever perfectly safe in this world. But some things are safer than others and there are steps one can take to diversify their wealth and avoid higher risks.
'A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times.'If I am correct, there are even bigger scandals to come when the tide goes out again, although there will be great efforts made to cover them up and excuse them 'for the sake of public confidence in the system.' The derivatives market is a scandal-in-process, and is likely to rock the US banking system and the Dollar to their foundations when it topples.
Lord Acton
There may be even larger losses and anxiety for the unsuspecting who have misplaced their trust in false ideologies, slogans and theories promoted by a self-serving oligarchy.
NYT
A Risk Once Unthinkable
By James B. Stewart
December 9, 2011
Are customer accounts at brokerage firms safe?
Until the collapse of MF Global, that’s a question I thought I’d never have to ask.
Brokerage firms are required by law to maintain segregated accounts holding all client assets, including stocks, bonds, mutual funds, money market funds and cash. The law was passed after the 1929 crash, in the depths of the Depression, to make sure that customer assets were there at all times, ready to be disbursed even if everyone asked for their money at once...
I had always assumed it was impossible and that strict internal controls existed at all brokerage firms so that firm officials couldn’t tap segregated customer funds even if they were willing to break the law. Thanks to MF Global, it’s now apparent that isn’t necessarily true. “If people are determined to misuse customer funds, they will misuse them,” said Ananda Radhakrishnan, the director of the division of clearing and risk at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.
That’s because the commodities and securities industry is mostly self-regulating, and self-regulation ultimately depends on the integrity of the regulated. Broker-dealers — securities firms that execute trades of stocks, bonds and other assets for customers — are overseen by the S.E.C., while futures commission merchants, which trade commodities, derivatives and futures, are regulated by the C.F.T.C. Like most large brokerage firms, MF Global was both a broker-dealer and a futures commission merchant, though its primary business was commodities futures trading...
Typically, this requires transfers from segregated accounts (other than at the customer’s request) to be approved by multiple officials, including in many cases, the firm’s chief financial officer and chief compliance officer.
“It’s not a low-level functionary,” a regulator said. “It’s someone who has real standing. Most customer assets are held at the biggest firms and they have scores of people involved in this process....”
The law also allows commodities firms like MF Global to use segregated customer funds as a source of low-cost financing for their own operations, but they are required to replace any customer assets taken from segregated accounts with supposedly ultrasafe collateral of the same value, typically United States Treasuries, municipal obligations and obligations whose payments of principal and interest are guaranteed by the government.
This week, the C.F.T.C. issued new rules restricting how client assets can be invested, which had grown under C.F.T.C. interpretations to include sovereign debt and transactions known as “in-house repos,” or repurchase agreements, in which a firm contracts with itself to use customer assets as, in effect, interest-free loans to finance its inventory of Treasury bonds. MF Global was apparently a heavy user of in-house repos, and before his firm collapsed, Mr. Corzine had argued strenuously against the C.F.T.C.’s proposal to ban them.
Making bad bets on European sovereign debt — like making bad bets on United States mortgage-backed securities — isn’t a crime, but improperly transferring segregated customer assets is a potential criminal violation of the securities laws and a relatively straightforward one at that. (The United States attorney’s office in Manhattan is in the early stages of investigating the removal of customer assets from MF Global.)
I spoke this week to several people involved in the MF Global investigation. No one has reached any firm conclusions about how the assets were transferred, but possible innocent explanations have dwindled to almost none. And James B. Kobak Jr., a lawyer for the MF Global trustee, said in court on Friday that there were “suspicious” trades made from customer accounts. If that’s the case, there may have been a deliberate and concerted effort to override MF Global’s internal controls to gain access to segregated customer assets, and if that can be proved, those responsible should be prosecuted and, if convicted, go to jail.
Unfortunately for MF Global’s customers — and future victims of similar crimes, if that’s what it turns out to be — there’s no easy remedy and it will most likely be months or even years before they recover their money. The Securities and Investor Protection Corporation explicitly warns that it’s “not uncommon for delays to take place when the troubled brokerage firm or its principals were involved in fraud.”
SIPC will replace up to $500,000 of securities and cash (but not futures contracts) missing from customer accounts at member firms. A measure of the magnitude of the problem is that since its creation in 1970, SIPC has advanced $1.6 billion to make possible the recovery of $109.3 billion in assets for an estimated 739,000 investors (through the end of 2010).
Meanwhile, the C.F.T.C.’s enforcement capabilities, like the S.E.C.’s, have been starved for lack of funding...
Read the entire article here.
By Jesse
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com
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