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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (85563)	1/4/2012 7:47:58 AM
From: Haim R. Branisteanu	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217941

Wall Street’s Big Swingers Get the Biggest Breaks: Susan Antilla bloomberg.com Paying fines and walking away from liability, though, isn’t the only break that the accused have been catching. It has become routine that, on the heels of a settlement with the SEC, big banks and other defendants request and receive waivers from punishments designed to kick in as a result of their settlement orders. My personal favorites are the series of agreements between the SEC and the investment firms it accused of rigging prices of municipal bonds. Five firms have agreed to pay $743 million in bid-rigging cases since December 2010 -- all reaping the benefits of those “neither admit nor deny” clauses along the way, of course. “Our complaint against UBS reads like a ‘how-to’ primer for bid-rigging and securities fraud,” said Elaine C. Greenberg, chief of the SEC’s Municipal Securities and Public Pensions Unit. “They used secret arrangements and multiple roles to win business and defraud municipalities through the repeated use of illegal courtesy bids, last looks for favored bidders, and money to bidding agents disguised as swap payments.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty bad to me. Fraud.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (85563)	1/4/2012 8:25:59 AM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217941

The trenchant testicle-testing question is this, IMO: in a deleveraging cycle, one btw you and I have never seen, can or will the CBs print enough to reverse it? My answer fwiw is "no." But they will try. And therein lies the rub, the reason for the on/off stuff, the fits and starts, as the markets smell stimulus and react to the upside, then deleveraging becomes the theme, rinse wash repeat. Japan is the precedent. The task is to figure out a way to deal with it profitably while at the same time keeping a weather eye on macro political imponderables, I.e., Euroland and the Mideast. My thinking is a mix of gold, cash, energy and creme de la creme equities. Weirdly enough, when considered globally, this is how my family circle (those with any moolah, anyway) are positioned, with some doing part of it and others something else. I am the Au and can guy.