Congress and the SEC need to stand firm in supporting the common-sense principle that all those providing financial advice to municipalities must put the best interests of taxpayers first.
AFR sent a letter to the hill opposing HR 797. This legislation represents a major weakening of new protections created by the Dodd-Frank Act to prevent predatory behavior in Wall Street financial dealings with municipalities. These protections are critical to protecting taxpayers and citizens from exploitation.
SEC faulted on proposed capital, margin, and segregation requirements for Security-Based Swap Dealers (“SBSDs”), and capital requirements for Broker Dealers.
View or download PDF. “Former employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) routinely help corporations try to influence SEC rulemaking, counter the agency’s investigations of suspected wrongdoing, soften the blow of SEC enforcement actions, block shareholder proposals, and win exemptions from federal law.”
Litigation Daily’s Susan Beck nudges the probable next SEC chair to take on the rating agencies and their built-in conflict of interest.
“Wall Street special interests have opposed tough rules every step of the way. We need leadership at the SEC that will resist that pressure and move swiftly forward [to] protect the markets and investors.”
Two and a half years after passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, two-thirds of its mandated rules have yet to be issued, and more than a hundred of its deadlines have been missed, writes Mark Gongloff of the Huffington Post. “Meanwhile, no banker has yet gone
Fund backed by physical copper “effectively creates a corner on the market,” AFR’s Marcus Stanley tells The New Republic.
As speculative interest increases, this vital industrial commodity will be withdrawn from the market, and prices for real-economy businesses and consumers will increase.
“What alarms me most,” says MIT’s John Parsons, “is the narrow scope of the questions that the Staff posed, even had they bothered to do a thorough analysis of those questions.”