Same shit, different year:
A U.S. judge has ordered that millions of dollars in leftover money from the landmark 2003 Wall Street stock analysts’ settlement go to the coffers of the U.S. government, because regulators and the banks have not found an adequate way to distribute it to investors.
An just what was that settlement:
It seems like yesterday that the stock research scandal threatened to destroy much of Wall Street. Six years ago, we discovered that research analysts at some of the big brokerages weren’t being completely forthright with their stock recommendations. If only our current financial crisis was so easy to solve.
Fallout from the Wall Street stock-research scandal resulted in firms having to pay more than $450 million to fund independent market research. Six years later, some $70 million remains of the original fund. But that money will soon dry up as a judge has ordered that the remaining funds be turned over to the Treasury Department.
How quaint. It is almost as if these guys have been corrupt for years and no one has cared. Some of the names sound familiar:
Prompted in part by abuses revealed by then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, 10 Wall Street titans including Citigroup Inc (C.N), Goldman Sachs (GS.N) and Bear Stearns, now
part of JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N), agreed to the settlement.Two former star analysts — Henry Blodget, formerly of Merrill Lynch, and Jack Grubman, formerly of Citigroup’s Salomon Smith Barney — also were part of the settlement.
Eliot Spitzer has been disgraced, the big firms are all on the dole, and the last I saw of Henry Blodget, he was fighting the good fight for Chrysler bondholders in the comments at Clusterstock. It seems he was appalled that there might have been some strong-arming going on in the negotiations.
Funny that.
chrome agnomen
spitzer’s hooker turned out to be the most expensive in history with the possible exception of helen of troy.
ItAintEazy
Tried to think of something clever to say but, all I can think of is “Spitzer is the one who’s punished? Over a hooker?!!”
The Grand Panjandrum
It just can’t be a big time Wall Street scandal unless Merrill Lynch is involved.
Lest we forget wasn’t our old buddy Roger Stone involved in bringing Sptizer down? I wonder what he’s got on the players this time? I guess during this scandal they made sure to stack the deck BEFORE the scandal broke. They had Paulson, and now they have Geithner pretty well in their pocket as insiders so they don’t have to worry about any real consequences this time.
Johnny B. Guud
I never understood how Blodget or his
followersreaders can just forget about the fiasco that he was entrenched in during the tech bubble.Here was a guy who was eventually charged by the SEC for fraud and barred from the industry for life—-we’re talking Michael Milken territory here. Blodget epitomized the pump ‘n’ dump hubris of the late 1990s—the thievery and the greed.
And he has a loyal following on a Wall Street blog.
Words fail.
Alien radio
Spitzer was targeted because he was getting too close, the outing of the hooker story stunk of starchamber payback. There’s still more fraud to be dug up
I suggest a reward of hookers and blow to whoever gets to the rest of it.
Comrade Dread
Ahem… “No one could have predicted this.”
Now let this be a lesson to the rest of you. If you’re going to go after Wall St., keep it in your pants.
D-Chance.
Fallout from the Wall Street stock-research scandal resulted in firms having to pay more than $450 million to fund independent market research. Six years later, some $70 million remains of the original fund.
Figure attorneys walked away with anywhere from a third to over half of that… minus the $70 mil left over. That means the plaintiffs got maybe a third of the judgment. How convenient that regulators and banks “couldn’t find an adequate way” to give away the remaining funds. I guess looking up a name and phone number, or writing a check, is just too technological in the 21st century? No one stepped forward and offered themselves as a candidate for recipient of said funds?
Typical of most class-action suits. The lawyers get millions (in the cases against tobacco, billions) of dollars; the actual plaintiffs get pennies and coupons.
D-Chance.
[OT] Hey, we can fight to preserve tens of millions of dollars in salaries and perks for embattled executives;
but, we can’t afford that 70 cent increase for our employees…
Yutsano
Had to read that article you put up D-Chance and then followed the link from the fat pig Rove saying how bad Obama’s health care reform would be. Ugh.