I guess that this is a start on dealing with the excesses of the largely unregulated world of derivatives and hedge funds.
Any bets on how long such a registry would take to show suspicious patterns of trades that indicate large amounts of likely insider trading?
My guess is 6-12 weeks.
When you have unregulated unreported trading, insider trading becomes a big part of it.
No doubt the verdict will be amended on repeal, but the fact that the jury dismissed their bullsh^% claims of “excited delirium” is a good start.
Using a Taser is less lethal than a gun, but it should still be treated as deadly force, and Taser International’s attempts to flog a non-existent medical condition to avoid liability is revolting.
A letter has reached the South African newspapers from Morgan Tsvangirai pleading with Thabo Mbeki to do something, and his office claims to have “never received the letter”.
Simply disgraceful.
The courts in Zimbabwe actually seem to be doing their jobs though, ordering the release of a jailed opposition MP, and reversing the police ban on rallies, though this may not help much with ZANU-PF thugs using violence to disrupt the rallies.
It’s no wonder that Human Rights Watch is calling for intervention.
William Thornton IV, a black man, skidded through a stop sign on a rainy night, and struck an SUV, killing its two occupants. He remained at the scene, and there were no drugs or alcohol in him. He had no criminal record.
Despite this, Judge Ric Howard sentenced him to 30 years in jail, after he followed his public defender’s advice, and pled guilty and threw himself on the mercy of the court.
Thankfully, a high powered law firm noticed, but had he been white, would he have served any time at all.
The House 2009 Defense Authorization Bill has a section that allows for punitive actions to be taken against “a foreign-owned company that is engaged with the People’s Republic of China in the development, manufacture or launch of certain satellites” (Paid Subscription Required).
This is about Thales Alenia Space, which has communications satellites that use no US content, and they are cleaning up by using the dirt cheap Chinese Long March boosters to launch satellites that have no ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) components.
It appears that something got Duncan Hunter’s (R-CA) nose out of joint about this, but given the restrictions on what are commercial technology present in the ITAR regulations, it was inevitable that this would happen.
I wonder if the WTO will end up getting involved in this.
The inestimable Barry Ritholtz notes that the Hedonically-Adjusted, Well-Spun, Nominal Misery Index, the sum of unemployment and inflation, is really 6 pounds of fertilizer in a 5 pound bag, and that if we used the same standards, because both numbers have been massaged into irrelevancy, and that if you used the metrics in place in 1980 or so, we would be at about the same number:
That’s right, we would be looking at 12% inflation and 9% unemployment under some measures.
This would be a sensible regulation. A seller financed down payment is really no down payment at all, and as Federal Housing Administration Commissioner Brian Montgomery noted, these loans are 3x more likely to go into foreclosure.
Yet another fruit of our misbegotten colonial adventure, military cooperation between NATO ally Turkey and Iran.
It boggles my mind that this is allowed:
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission may recommend this week that Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings be prohibited from advising investment banks on how to earn top rankings for asset- backed securities, according to people familiar with the matter.
This just buggers the mind. These companies were advising investment banks on how to game themselves.
This is not the only change proposed, the SEC is going more generally for transparency in rating:
SEC staff may also propose at a June 11 meeting in Washington that the companies disclose all the data that goes into a rating so competitors can grade bonds even if they weren’t compensated by the underwriter, said the people, who declined to be identified because the rules aren’t final. Moody’s, S&P and Fitch help design securities backed by a stream of payments, making it impossible for them to be impartial raters, a May 2007 academic study by Joseph Mason and Joshua Rosner concluded.
This is Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan’s Randroid utopia of an unregulated market, inside players conspiring to defraud the average investor.
This time, it’s welders and pipe fitters from South Asia, who were misled, and had to pay outrageous fees, to get H2B visas to work in the US:
The Indian workers say they were deceived by Signal International and labor recruiters when they paid as much as $20,000 for visas they believed would allow them to work and live permanently with their families in the United States. In fact, the H-2B visas are for short-term contracts.
They are now on a hunger strike.
I would note that this problem is not a bug in guest worker programs. It’s a feature.
The goal of guest worker programs is to create an underclass of cheap and easily exploited labor.
yes, Virginia, the drug companies do have a policy of secret payoffs to researchers.
A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according to information given Congressional investigators.
At some point, we need to start throwing both the people who took, and the people who made, the payments in jail.
“Red” Ken Livingston, former mayor of London, may have as his greatest legacy the successful implementation of congestion charges in central London, which local authorities in Manchester are now looking to duplicate.
Bloomberg tried to implement it in New York, probably the best city in the US to do so, but the state lege shut it down.
The operation manual that the Pentagon gave interrogators directed them to, “destroy their written notes in case of being summoned to testify regarding alleged ill-treatment of detainees”, seehere, here, and here.
In an affidavit signed by [Omar Khadr Defense Attorney] Kuebler, the manual is quoted as saying, “The mission has legal and political issues that may lead to interrogators being called to testify, keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimize certain legal issues.”
This flies in the face of every tenet of modern law and jurisprudence.
Ignoring the fact that Khadr was a 15 year old child at the time of the event, and should therefore be treated for trauma as a child soldier, the idea that the operations manual calls for destruction of evidence on the theory that it might prove inconvenient is outrageous.
The person who wrote this manual should be jailed, not just fired.
McClellan has agreed to testify before congress regarding the Plame Affair.
If only it had happened a year ago.
Waxman has the goods on Bush, and his draft report shows many more contacts than the Whitehouse has admitted.
The House Oversight Committee’s draft report is here.
In addition to demonstrations regarding reinstating the Pakistani supreme court judges, now you have constitutional amendments to curtail his power and a bill of impeachment being drawn up.
I do not think that he is long to Pakistan.
More Salmonella has grocers yanking tomatoes off the shelf.
Any questions?
Best wishes to the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts.
I have one thing to say, thank you Howard Dean.
I’m encouraged.
Looks like the Talibaptists may have screwed up, bit time:
Should voters approve the measure, Cruz said, offering another potential outcome, it could inadvertently affect traditional marriages. That’s because the amendment would undo only part of the court’s decision — allowing gay couples to marry — but not the rest, which says that same-sex couples cannot be recognized differently than opposite-sex couples, he said.
“If you’ve got those two rules — that you can’t let them marry, but you can’t give different options to gay and straight couples — then one possible outcome, if the amendment were to pass, is that no one could get married in California,” Cruz said.
Oopsie.