All Posts Tagged With: "sec"

Making Whistle-Blowing Pay

The federal bureaucracies are hard at work churning out rules to implement the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” act. In May the Securities and Exchange Commission announced rules for its new whistleblower program, which rewards individuals who provide the agency with “high-quality tips that lead to successful enforcement acts.” The minimum amount of recovered funds that can [...]

21Sep2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 2 comments | Continued

Making Whistle-Blowing Pay

The Securities and Exchange Commission has announced rules for its new corporate whistleblower program. The mind boggles at the incentives they establish.

21Jun2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 6 comments | Continued

Inside Insider Trading

Insider trading is something we hear a lot about these days. To most people, the practice smells of foul play, and federal law restricts it. But the inside story of insider trading is something very different, as we shall see. The alleged ill effects on shareholders in particular and on the economy in general are [...]

22Dec2010 | Warren C. Gibson | 23 comments | Continued

Financial Regulation Snake Oil

Recent turmoil set off by the threat of Greek insolvency shows how fast markets change. Fear about the inability of European governments to pay their debts caused the 2010 turbulence. By contrast, the 2008–2009 havoc was rooted in the collapse of property values. The next crisis will be about something else, possibly another government’s debt. [...]

25Aug2010 | Chidem Kurdas | 1 comment | Continued

The Government Turns on Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs took a beating during the spring.  The SEC and a Senate committee were investigating whether it behaved improperly when it participated in a bet against the shaky mortgages fueling the housing boom and allegedly failed to disclose this to buyers of its “synthetic collateralized debt obligations.” The allegation of wrongdoing is an empirical [...]

29Jun2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression

Richard Posner’s latest book belongs to the fast-expanding cottage industry of financial crisis books. A federal judge with a grounding in economics, Posner would seem to be an ideal person to tackle this complicated subject. Alas, he provides neither fresh material nor an interesting perspective. Posner describes well-known events—the failure of investment banks Bear Stearns [...]

5Jan2010 | Chidem Kurdas | 1 comment | Continued

Stealth Expansion of Government Power

The government of the United States spent the year debating major new undertakings, ranging from health care to climate change to energy development to tax reform. Yet a far more fundamental shift, in the form of a rapid and pervasive expansion of government power over the private sector of the economy, has been going on [...]

23Oct2009 | Murray Weidenbaum | 1 comment | Continued

Regulation Will Stop Future Madoffs? It Just Ain’t So!

Bernard Madoff is a boon to financial regulation advocates. A well-known Wall Street figure, he confessed to defrauding his clients of $50 billion, an amazing number. It is now established conventional wisdom, blared across the media, that this and other financial disasters would likely not have happened had there been proper government supervision. With deregulation [...]

24Apr2009 | Chidem Kurdas | 8 comments | Continued

Punishing the Innocent: The Sarbanes-Oxley Act

Barbara Hunter is a freelance writer. She recently retired after more than 25 years in the field of information technology, primarily at high-technology companies and law firms. If any person or any group had set itself the task of creating a law whose purpose was to destroy the American free-enterprise system, it could not have [...]

1Mar2007 | Barbara R. Hunter | 5 comments | Continued

The State’s Quest for Total Information Awareness

David Brown is a freelance writer and editor. This is the second of two parts. Efforts to transform the United States into a surveillance regime on a totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian model are currently underway. In addition to attempts to beef up and make uniform the state driver’s licenses-thereby blending them into either a de facto [...]

1May2003 | David M. Brown | 4 comments | Continued

An Egregious Union Scandal

The scandals involving serious misbehavior at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Global Crossing, and Tyco have resulted in appropriate public outrage at the dishonesty and malfeasance in those corporations. At the same time they have resulted in inappropriate bashing of all corporations by labor unions and other anti-market interest groups, which have called for much greater government supervision

1May2003 | Charles W. Baird | 0 comments | Continued

Perspective

Free Martha! Martha Stewart is certainly an attractive target for an ambitious Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcer. She’s the “domestic diva” people love to hate. But under any rational notion of the rule of law, she should not be in the government’s crosshairs. At this writing, the SEC had informed Ms. Stewart that it [...]

1Jan2003 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Payback: The Conspiracy to Destroy Michael Milken and His Financial Revolution

Daniel Fischel is eminently qualified to write a book on the attack on Michael Milken and the changes he wrought in the financial world in the 1980s. Fischel is a professor of law at the University of Chicago and also an expert in finance and the securities markets. He writes fearlessly, taking politicians, journalists, judges, [...]

1Mar1996 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | Continued

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