This is the sort of thing that should be forcing the Rick Santelli Brooks Brothers mob to get their silk boxers twisted in a knot:
In a letter sent to the commission last Thursday, Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, asked Mary L. Schapiro, the chairwoman of the S.E.C., whether it had followed up on allegations that were brought to its attention last spring involving a unit at Lehman Brothers. Employees in the unit, known as the Product Management Group, appear to have tipped off clients and traders about the content of the firm’s research reports before they were released, a former Lehman analyst said.
The letter does not disclose who might have received the tips, if they were made.
The insider trading allegations, and more than 4,000 e-mail messages relating to them, were presented to Linda Thomsen, the former director of enforcement at the S.E.C. last April by Ted Parmigiani, a former analyst at Lehman who followed the semiconductor industry. According to Mr. Grassley’s letter, Mr. Parmigiani spoke with high-level enforcement officials several times both on the phone and in person. An in-person meeting on April 30, 2008, lasted for six hours, the letter said.
Mr. Parmigiani, who was dismissed by the firm in June 2005 for what it said were performance issues, declined to comment.
Our noble captains of industry, our leaders of the free market, the guys who Haley Barbour thinks are the ones who should lead us back to glory and who are so delicate that the threat of a minor increase in taxes years down the road means that you should screw unemployed people today, these saints have been screwing the American people and the average investor every single step of the game. Clearly this is something that can be fixed by more deregulation and deference to the holy practice of business.
sgwhiteinfla
Speaking of Rick Santelli, guess who said our economy was healthy just last September, right before Lehmen Bros went belly up and the market crashed?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRDyMG7d2sY
No wonder he voted for John McCain.
Mako
I don’t think I am the only one who is damn tired of watching you racist pukes bad mouth Halle Berry. Pretty sure we are not going to put up with it anymore. We are coming to your town and sittting in. Bitch.
4tehlulz
I, for one, look forward to the white power collar revolution; it will make it easier to know who to string up on the nearest lamppost.
Napoleon
In other news rank and file Republicans now suddenly concerned about the deficit.
PaulW
And my conservative father is trying to use the Bible (the part about Joseph and the Lean and Fat Years) to explain to me why Keynesianism is equivalent to slavery. Even though I thought the moral of the story was "don’t mock your brother’s cool colorful coat" or "hey, maybe if our economic leaders planned ahead for lean years during the fat years, we wouldn’t be screwed now". Of course, coward like I am, I just chewed my dinner and tried not to start an argument during family time.
John Cole
@Mako: What on earth are you talking about?
lilly Von Schtupp
Off topic: I’d like to stick up for Brooks Brothers. My husband has a couple of suits from them. They are close to 20 years old now and we’ve only replaced the pants. They have worn extremely well.
I bet Santelli isn’t wearing Brooks Brothers. No, probably something foreign and way more pricey.
slate
Mako was making a funny. Halle Berry=Haley Barbour.
Napoleon
@John Cole:
I think that was a joke, like he misunderstood the link to a story about Haley Barbour as being about Halle Berry
@lilly Von Schtupp:
Here here, they are some of my best suits and have been worth every cent in the long run.
sgwhiteinfla
PaulW
Next time point your father to the New Testament where the man and his wife held back from giving their share for the good of the community and both of them had to "give up the ghost".
http://kingjbible.com/acts/5.htm
That usually kills the whole "socialism is bad biblicly" conversation.
Napoleon
I love it how when push comes to shove and the Republicans like Haley Barbour and also Bobby Jindel need to pick an expenditure that they don’t want to make, its one that sticks it to the people who need it the most.
But I guess that is Christian Conservatism at work.
NonyNony
@PaulW:
Um whut?
That’s… that’s just fucked up. Wow.
I can’t even begin to comprehend how that argument would start…
4tehlulz
@PaulW: You know, of all the parts of the OT, that would not be the one to use against Keynsianism. After all, the pharoah listened to his
COURT JEWadvisor and built up a surplus in good times and deficit spent in lean times, keeping society in one piece during a famine.BDeevDad
Why should I trust someone’s economic theories when I cannot trust his basic understanding of science and the scientific method (see basic wingnut on evolution).
Ash Can
@Napoleon: What’s more, I doubt that these grandstanding assholes are bright enough to fully comprehend it, but they’re asking for considerable trouble with this righteous schtick. To begin with, they’re setting themselves up for a full-scale rift with their respective state legislatures, assuming those legislatures take advantage of the Clyburn provision in the stimulus bill and override the governors regarding acceptance and spending of stimulus funds. Furthermore, the regular folks who end up benefiting from the spending likely won’t be making any mistakes as to who are the good guys and bad guys with regard to procuring the funds. Even if these governors pull a Congressional GOP and try to grab credit further down the road for securing these funds, the local politicians will be more than happy to call them on it, and remind their respective communities that the guvs are full of shit.
Napoleon
@Ash Can:
I totally agree, and I am actually glad they are saying and doing what they are doing. Its always been clear what the Republicans stand for and believe in, but they have always disguised it. Now they can not.
Dennis-SGMM
What’s with the current crop of GOP rising stars? I understand that you have to be batshit crazy to stand out in today’s batshit crazy GOP but these people (Jindal, Palin, Barbour, etc.) seem to be going out of their way to top each other. A few more months of this and Rush Limbaugh is going to look like a moderate.
linda
i guess i missed mr santelli’s earlier rant upon news that general electric’s finance arm has gobbled up billions in taxpayer bailout funds.
Mako
@John Cole:
Halle Berry. You don’t know her? What are you gaye?
Conservatively Liberal
Crony Capitalism at its best! The system is designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and I have to admit that it is working exactly as intended. Our rich are obscenely rich now and the poor have only grown larger and poorer as a result of it. Free trade! No worker unions! Low worker wages! Insider trading! Corporate coffer raiding! Golden parachutes! Outlandish CEO pay! Politicians for sale to the highest bidder! Our system has it all, you only need lots of money and the right connections in the industry to make it pay off.
We are one fucked up country and it ain’t gonna get any better anytime soon.
Dennis-SGMM
@Conservatively Liberal:
Stop knocking the US of A. I for one am still proud to live in a country where you can hit town with a few million in your pocket and make something of yourself.
Colonel Danite
Lily and Naploeon are right. Middle managers like me wear Brooks Bros. suits. These douchebag Wall St. CEOs and senior execs don’t buy their suits at BB.
R. Porrofatto
Insider trading has been the secret cash cow on growth hormones on Wall St. for decades — in the increasingly deregulated 80’s and 90’s it reaped enormous gains for even low-level employees with their ears open, and with the almost total abdication of oversight in this century it’s now as much a part of the culture as a porterhouse at the Palm. You had to be a complete moron if you worked on Wall St. in almost any capacity during the last 15 years and didn’t make millions just tracking the graffiti in the men’s room.
Comrade Darkness
Clearly this is something that can be fixed by more
deregulationfeathers and boiling hot tar [in] deference to the holy practice ofbusinesspissed-off mob mentality.Comrade Darkness
That and illegal naked shorting by the big investment banks.
I loved it when they were the first to cry uncle about covered shorts. What a bunch of cheating pansies.
Rex
The free market has already spoken on this one. After all, where is Lehman today?
Comrade Dread
To which I offer that always relevant quote from Dick Cheney:
"So?"
Unless their name is Ron Paul and they’ve spent the better part of the last few decades harping about the deficit even during Republican presidencies, they have zero credibility in my book.
Conservatively Liberal
@Dennis-SGMM:
lol! Hey brother, can you spare a few million?
/rattles coins in cup
jenniebee
If the Free Market inevitably rejects Free Market Capitalism as a concept that is prone to rampant corruption, the decay of supporting infrastructure, the decline of the middle class, foreign adventures that create opportunities for looting the public treasury, and finally a disastrous collapse, does that validate or invalidate the concept of the Free Market?
Ash Can
@R. Porrofatto: I used to work at a financial firm at which I and the other people working there were privy to insider information on a daily basis. Said firm also had a CEO and other top officers who refused to allow their personal reputations to sink on an inside trading bust (they had founded the firm themselves and built it from the ground up), as well as a compliance department that took its job very seriously. If any of us had done what you had said we would have felt the LaSalle Street pavement hit our asses with force, besides having to pay back any gains we had made on our trading. If there had been any inside trading of any consequence, I’m sure I would have heard the scuttlebutt from my pals in both management and compliance. So to assume that every financial firm is crooked is neither fair nor accurate. And, in fact, those of us who worked at relatively clean operations would like all the more to whale on the crooks until they’re just grease spots on the rug, since they make everyone in the business look bad.
R. Porrofatto
No doubt there were/are honest shops around who out of cold fear if not actual ethics refrained from real insider trading (in your case it probably also helped that the founders still ran the place). But as I and colleagues learned from Wall St. folks we’ve worked with (as outsiders from another industry—I don’t work on Wall St.) some employees didn’t act so much on the kind of obvious strategic information which would get them busted, but on "small-i" insider knowledge gleaned in the course of everyday business that indisputably influenced their own trading decisions, and gave them a decided edge over investors outside of these inner circles. I don’t even know if anyone’s ever tried to statistically measure the specific benefits of insider positions beyond vast increases in personal wealth, and given the lax oversight of recent times I doubt if anyone will, but if our experience and stories like the above are indicative, it wouldn’t be unlikely that the portfolios of people privy to such information are on average universally more profitable than the investments of those who aren’t.
Fulcanelli
@jenniebee: Reject it? Hell no, they’ll double down and sing it’s praises it even more if recent history is any indicator.
Chuck Butcher
Regarding Barbour’s tax increase due to UE, anybody decide to find out just exactly what the fuck he’s talking about? It isn’t real hard to find out the Mississippi UE tax rate is 2.7% of wage. According to MS the rate can vary from 0.7% to 5.2% anyhow, so what the fuck is he talking about? Rates go up when high UE rates are experienced and 25% increase is considered large so you’d be talking about 3.2% total at that.
Jayzus that’s likely to break business… Nobody asks the goddam questions.
Chuck Butcher
http://mdes.ms.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/kcxml/04_Sj9SPykssy0xPLMnMz0vMAfIjzeMN4p299aNyUtMTkyv1Q_P0w3ITKzJzM6tSU_Qj9KPMgPKWLiCdIJajfiRUwNcjPzdVP0g_WN9bP0C_ICerysfE0REAVIQS4Q!!/delta/base64xml/L0lJSk03dWlDU1lKSi9vQXd3QUFBWWdBQ0VJUWhDRUVJaEZLQSEvNEZHZ2RZbktKMEZSb1hmckNHODAvN18wX0NLLzQ3?PC_7_0_CK_MESCLink=%2fHome%2fEmployerServices%2fTaxRates#null
The link is toooooo long to make work…
Chuck Butcher
MS UE follow their links, Wage Reporting to UE rates. FMR (f*** me running)
thrashbluegrass
@Ash Can:
No, they probably know exaclty what they’re doing; they can, due to the clyburn provision, grandstand to their presidential primary voters while not facing the music at home for the money not coming into their states.
It’s a cynical (but probably correct) position.