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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum
GLD 366.09-0.1%Nov 6 4:00 PM EST

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To: Haim R. Branisteanu who wrote (124793)11/17/2016 2:28:55 AM
From: Elroy Jetson  Read Replies (2) of 217553
 
Legal systems, for better or worse, tend to make a distinction between the duty due to customers in sophisticated vs naive venues - and I suspect you were involved in something "sophisiticated.

As a consequence there's a lot of areas which are not regulated and in those areas no one can assist you as nothing illegal has occurred, even though it might be morally repugnant. Certainly you have no standing complaining how a bank determines capital tier, unless you're the shareholder of a failed bank and this is a fraud lawsuit. Likewise, you can pass on tips about money laundering - which may already be part of a larger investigation - but you're very unlikely to see your sing;e complaint leading to swift prosecution. There's way too much crime going on.

As a foreign customer of Citibank Australia I've been offered all sorts of "peculiar" products which you'd really have to be stupid to take on. Products which are clearly the opposite side of a derivative the bank doesn't want to hold themselves. One example is a product which paid 7.5% interest so long as Australian mortgage rates remained above 4.5% and below 9% - if rates fell below 4.5% or above 9% the product paid nothing for that period of time - and you were locked into the contract for ten years.

If something went wrong with with one of these toxic products Australian regulators would be almost certain not able to help me, nor would regulator in America as I was dealing with a foreign bank, even though it was a subsidiary of an American bank.

A more common ares where you can be hurt is simply by buying or selling certain bonds where the the market is thin and not as transparent as the stock market, so broker dealers tend to offer their clients prices which are grossly not in their favor - the spreads are often shocking. Horrible but all legal.

The only reason to bring this type of experience to a legislator is in the hope they will be able to later introduce a law to make certain behavior clearly illegal.

The justice department allocate their resource to the greatest benefit, so they tend not to like being used to criminally prosecute a case affecting few people in support of their civil lawsuit.

Some other common examples of differential consumer protection:

Stock brokers are allowed to offer far more risky products to people with high net worth under the sometimes dubious assumption that they are more sophisticated, or at a minimum they're more capable of withstanding the compete loss of that portion of their capital.

The residential real estate market has extensive consumer protections, while there are few protections in the commercial market because the people who participate in that market are assumed to have a higher level of sophistication.
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