SEC

  • 20 Mar 2012 at 7:38 PM

Investment Manager Stands Up for Truth and the American Way

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There’s this thing called the JOBS Act that would basically make it easier for small or smallish companies to raise money by giving investors unaudited financials or not having internal controls or just lying to them on the Internet, which is my racket. I’ve enjoyed reading people really ripping into it*, like Simon Johnson, whose take seems to be canonical, or Yves Smith, whose take is good too but I prefer “Just Open Bucket Shops Act**” to her “Jumpstart Obama’s Bucket Shops Act” if we need a sarcastic acronym and, yeah, I suppose we do.

I mostly agree with the ripping, because, like I’ve said before, either the SEC registration process is necessary to protect investors, in which case it’s especially necessary for smaller newer companies, or it’s not, in which case it’s no more necessary for large companies than for small ones. So fine. But the JOBS Act crowdbuzzwording mania is definitely timely, what with Kickstarter being a thing and the Facebook IPO being the hugest thing in the history of things and also something where people apparently talked about offering shares of Facebook on Facebook because synergies. Anyway it seems likely to me that the widespread desire to loosen securities laws is not driven solely by the desire of businesses to raise capital – since, among other things, as Yves Smith says, crowdmuppeting is a super dumb way to raise capital, and actually come to think of it so are IPOs, kind of – but also by the desire of people who are not quite private equity magnates to get their hot little hands on some shares in their favorite social doodad.

As it stands now, not only can the non-rich not buy shares in Facebook unless they (a) are “accredited investors” ($1mm assets or $200k in income) and willing to get sort of ripped off or (b) just, like, wait a few weeks, but non-accredited investors are also not allowed to even hear about exciting investing opportunities from private companies looking to sell securities. Because it’s illegal to sell unregistered securities***, even if you only sell them to rich people, if you’ve made a “general solicitation” – that is, basically, if you’ve talked about them in pleasing ways to non-rich people. This is why Bridgewater doesn’t advertise on TV, and why no matter how much you want them you can’t get Whitney Tilson’s market insights unless you are an accredited investor on his mailing list, or a Dealbreaker reader, or a human. Read more »

  • 16 Mar 2012 at 5:05 PM

Now Here Are Some Guys Who Knew How To Rip Off A Client

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One aspect of good salesmanship is that you have to offer an attractive proposition not merely to the abstract entity that is your nominal client – El Paso, Italy, Greece – but also to the specific human being who is your contact at that client. Telling a corporate treasurer who is five years from retirement that a trade will have a significantly positive NPV due to huge cash flows in years 11-15 is not always as effective a sales technique as buying him a nice steak and an evening of unclothed entertainment. I suspect, though, that the latter strategy is more highly correlated with whatever you’re selling ending up on the front page/op-ed page/sec.gov.

Anyway, I definitely admire these guys for this particular con*:

The SEC alleges that Argyll Investments LLC’s purported stock-collateralized loan business is merely a fraud perpetrated by James T. Miceli and Douglas A. McClain, Jr. to acquire publicly traded stock from corporate officers and directors at a discounted price from market value, separately sell the shares for full market value in order to fund the loan, and use the remaining proceeds from the sale of the collateral for their own personal benefit. Miceli, McClain, and Argyll typically lied to borrowers by explicitly telling them that their collateral would not be sold unless a default occurred. However, since Argyll had no independent source of funds other than the borrowers’ collateral, Argyll often sold the collateral prior to closing the loan and then used the proceeds to fund it.

Got it? Argyll gave corporate executives margin loans at 50-70% loan-to-value based on the market price of their stock (based on the volume weighted average price over five days leading up to the closing of the loan). They took the stock as “collateral.” They then trousered the stock and sold it for, y’know, 100% of the market value, with 50-70% of that funding the loan and the remaining 30-50% funding miscellaneous expenses that presumably included unclothed entertainment for themselves. The loans had three-year terms and were not prepayable for 12-18 months, so the expected life of the scam was at least 12 months (but see below). Read more »

  • 15 Mar 2012 at 7:27 PM

Appellate Court Willing to Entertain the Possibility that Citi Was Not Committing Fraud

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I’ve had some fun these last few days proposing counterintuitive theories for why Citi might not suck as much as you probably think it does and it’s nice to see others joining in the pastime, even if this sounds a little far-fetched:

The district court’s logic appears to overlook the possibilities (i) that Citigroup might well not consent to settle on a basis that requires it to admit liability, (ii) that the S.E.C. might fail to win a judgment at trial, and (iii) that Citigroup perhaps did not mislead investors.

That piece of rank conjecture is from the Second Circuit’s opinion on an appeal* of Judge Rakoff’s rejection of the settlement between the SEC and Citi over some mortgage-backed securities. Here’s DealBook: Read more »

  • 03 Feb 2012 at 6:44 PM

If The SEC Really Wanted To Get Tough On Securities Fraud It Would Have Added Some Minor Inconveniences To Its Multi-Hundred-Million-Dollar Fines

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It’s clear that I am a terrible person because I continue to be unable to get all that excited about banks that commit fraud. And the big thing today is that the SEC doesn’t put banks out of business just for committing fraud, which I think is rather sporting of them but lots of people disagree.

Here’s the issue:

By granting exemptions to laws and regulations that act as a deterrent to securities fraud, the S.E.C. has let financial giants like JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America continue to have advantages reserved for the most dependable companies, making it easier for them to raise money from investors, for example, and to avoid liability from lawsuits if their financial forecasts turn out to be wrong.

An analysis by The New York Times of S.E.C. investigations over the last decade found nearly 350 instances where the agency has given big Wall Street institutions and other financial companies a pass on those or other sanctions. Those instances also include waivers permitting firms to underwrite certain stock and bond sales and manage mutual fund portfolios.

JPMorganChase, for example, has settled six fraud cases in the last 13 years, including one with a $228 million settlement last summer, but it has obtained at least 22 waivers, in part by arguing that it has “a strong record of compliance with securities laws.”

Ha ha ha strong record of compliance with a fraud case every two years or so! What a sham! Except that JPMorgan actually does have a strong record of compliance, and is generally viewed as being pretty conservative and law-abiding.

This stuff stirs emotions because it’s hard to think about who is being punished here. Corporations are people, my friend (still), but in the way Mitt Romney meant it, not in the way everyone pretended to take it. Like: JPMorgan employs a lot of people, and some of them are maniacs and crooks and liars and most of them aren’t and that’s true of … the SEC, for instance, and The New York Times,* and anyone else who wants to give them shit for their fraudulosity. But JPMorgan isn’t an individual human, not any more anyway. So saying “JPMorgan is crooks” is sort of nonsensical. Read more »

  • 30 Jan 2012 at 8:36 PM

Going Public? Groupon CEO Has Some Wisdom To Impart

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Mr. Mason, who sometimes posts online videos of himself in his underwear doing yoga or dancing, sat down for a recent interview in his Chicago office to discuss challenges facing the company and his ability to handle them. WSJ: The SEC also took issue with a memo you wrote to employees during the quiet period that was leaked to the press. Mr. Mason: I wrote the memo because 23-year-olds were coming into my office and asking how they should respond to their parents when they ask if Groupon is about to go bankrupt. The risks of not communicating to my employees were greater than the risks of doing otherwise. If I knew it was going to leak, I would have been less bizarre, and I wouldn’t have made a joke about my now-wife. She was upset. (He joked that his then-girlfriend asked him why he never said anything nice about her.) [WSJ]

  • 17 Jan 2012 at 3:51 PM

SEC Inspector General David Kotz Is Gonna Take Off Now

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The insurrection worked! Everyone just take the rest of the day off and catch up with your favorite porn sites, okay?
Read more »

  • 10 Jan 2012 at 1:18 PM

The SEC Wants Banks To Tell You Where They’re Hiding Their Terrible European Exposure

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You can’t argue too much with the SEC’s gentle suggestion that maybe banks should tell people, in a consistent format, what’s up with their European debt exposure. It seems to be a thing that is on investors’ minds, so why not have the SEC try to put their minds at ease:

“Our staff has been working with banks to improve their disclosure about sovereign-debt exposure for several months,” SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said in a written statement released Monday. “Even so, I understand this is an area of focus and uncertainty that could really benefit from further transparency and consistency, particularly as we head into annual reporting season. I think the staff’s guidance should help achieve that goal.”

Yep. The release is here and contains a good list of things you might want to know, including things like “The effects of credit default protection purchased separately by counterparty and country,” “The fair value and notional value of the purchased credit protection,” and “The types of counterparties that the credit protection was purchased from and an indication of the counterparty’s credit quality.” It’s not exactly a standardized form for disclosure that will allow everyone to do detailed comparison among the banks and/or sleep well at night, but it should at least shame people into giving reasonably detailed substantive information so that when your bank blows up you at least won’t be surprised at which European country did it. That seems good. It even seems like what the SEC is supposed to do.

The Journal, ever fair, finds a token objector, sort of: Read more »

  • 16 Dec 2011 at 5:42 PM

Maybe The SEC Decided To Throw A Trial So It Can Go Back To Settling Everything

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I try to be honest when telling you that a court complaint or SEC filing or research paper is a fun read, just in case you might go read it, though of course there’s no accounting for tastes and I may enjoy many things that you don’t.* And that’s okay. In any case I doubt anyone will find the SEC’s fraud complaints against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac filed today all that fun to read. “Very, very boring” would be more like it. The only bits that I enjoyed were the names of some of the loan programs, including Freddie’s “Touch More Loans” and the Fannie/Countrywide joint effort “Fast and Easy” which, boy, different times.

But there are some fascinating things about the case. A small one: I was kidding when I said “complaints against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” They’re complaints against former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd, former Freddie CEO Richard Syron, and a handful of their executives. The SEC signed weird neither-admit nonprosecution agreements with Fannie and Freddie themselves, in which the GSEs agree to help the SEC make its case against their former bosses.

This all seems like very good PR. You are learning, SEC. The neither-admit-nor-deny thing might be awkies, but slapping a big fine on the taxpayer-funded GSEs wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense. And the people who are upset that the SEC are not going after big names connected to the financial crisis have to be happy about the fact that the SEC here is going after the CEOs of big entities that in most people’s minds are intimately connected to the cause of the financial crisis. Suing them is not quite as good as throwing them in jail, but the SEC can’t do that, and this is a start anyway.

The bad news is that the SEC’s case sounds just absolutely terrible. Here it is: Read more »

  • 01 Dec 2011 at 6:40 PM

SEC Putting Its Commodore 64s To Good Use

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You may remember that a while back the SEC decided to modernize its computer capabilities by deleting all the porn* and replacing it with algorithms that could catch other algorithms, sort of like Tron. Apparently that worked:

On Thursday, a new “analytics” division tasked with mining hedge fund data announced actions against six individuals and three hedge fund firms for alleged fraud.

“We’re using risk analytics and unconventional methods to help achieve the holy grail of securities law enforcement – earlier detection and prevention,” said Robert Khuzami, Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. “This approach, especially in the absence of a tip or complaint, minimizes both the number of victims and the amount of loss while increasing the chance of recovering funds and charging the perpetrators.”

Here’s how the SEC describes its, er, data mining** division: Read more »

  • 16 Nov 2011 at 3:10 PM

The SEC Learns Some Economics

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The SEC tends to come in for a lot of good-natured joshing around here, and elsewhere, for amusing foibles like spending their days surfing porn, ignoring multibillion dollar Ponzi schemes when they’re told about them directly, and complaining bitterly when anyone suggests that their priorities might be misplaced. Also on some people’s complaint list is that the SEC tends to be heavy on lawyers and light on forensic accountants, economists, traders, quants, and just generally anyone who might have a glancing familiarity with things financial.

But credit where it’s due: the SEC has gotten a bit better at using market mechanisms to find the next big, or little, or whatever fraud. This week has seen a spate of stories about how the SEC, and the Feds generally, are using new and existing whistleblower programs to encourage people to come to them first if they have negative information to peddle. The headliner is Grant Wilson, who new-best-friend-of-the-SEC Harry Markopolos recruited to expose some currency trading unpleasantness at his former employer BoNY Mellon, but others seem to be in the SEC’s pipeline.

More intriguingly, though, the SEC is doing a great job at shutting down its competition. Read more »

  • 08 Nov 2011 at 6:49 PM

Maybe This Time Citi Actually Will Stop Violating Securities Laws, But Don’t Hold Your Breath

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Let’s say there are two models of how to run a financial system: make it transparent and give participants the tools they need to evaluate counterparties, or leave it opaque and trust regulators to keep things safe. There are good arguments for both sides – perfect transparency would be a competitive nightmare, and wouldn’t help those too stupid to use it; perfect opacity concentrates a whole lot of risk in the hands of regulators with doubtful incentives and skills – and so we have sort of a mix, for good or ill.

This might make you ill:

When Citigroup agreed last month to pay $285 million to settle civil charges that it had defrauded customers during the housing bubble, the Securities and Exchange Commission wrested a typical pledge from the company: Citigroup would never violate one of the main antifraud provisions of the nation’s securities laws.

To an outsider, the vow may seem unusual. Citigroup, after all, was merely promising not to do something that the law already forbids. But that is the way the commission usually does business. It also was not the first time the firm was making that promise.

Citigroup’s main brokerage subsidiary, its predecessors or its parent company agreed not to violate the very same antifraud statute in July 2010. And in May 2006. Also as far as back as March 2005 and April 2000.

The incredulity continues throughout, and the article includes a handy infographic where you can see how many times each bank pulled the “I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I’ll be good!” move in the past.
Read more »