A sampling from today’s Wall Street Journal of investigations of financial firms over the subprime downturn:
- Brooklyn US Attorney’s office: criminal investigation of Bear Stearns and UBS
- Manhattan US Attorney’s office: requested information on Merrill
- SEC: three dozen probes, including formal ones of Merrill, UBS, others of Bear, Morgan Stanley; review of CitiGroup
- FBI: investigating 14 companies, from mortgage originators to Wall Street, for accounting fraud and insider trading
- NY Attorney General: subpoenaed Bear; Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Merrill and Lehman
- Massachusetts Secretary of State: suing Merrill over mortgage-backed securities sold to Springfield, Mass; probe of Bear Stearns
FBI: investigating… how about insider trading in the Federal Reserve gang! Today I located references to 4 different Feddies making pronouncements this week about inflation, recession, faltering economy. They hit the wires Feb. 5, 6, 7, 8. Plosser, Lacker, Fisher and Yellen. (Yellen got in a trip to Hawaii and a dinner engagement Thurs. night. Different news services gave different spins.)
Interesting that “socially responsible investment” firms could not detect this:
Ten Largest Holdings Domini Social Equity Fund as of 9/30/2007
COMPANY % OF PORTFOLIO
JP Morgan Chase 3.63%
IBM 3.61%
Verizon 3.51%
Johnson & Johnson 3.37%
Microsoft 3.27%
Hewlett-Packard 3.20%
Goldman Sachs 2.61%
AT&T 2.58%
Bank of America 2.54%
Travelers (Citi) 2.16%
TOTAL 30.48%
I wonder what they mean by “Social Equity”? That they invest in companies that destroy it? I wonder if they will figure out that these IT companies are misusing people’s personal information before, or after, there are law suits filed?
Thank God for REAL advocates for financial justice like Catherine Austin Fitts! I can only conclude that no one else is really doing their due diligence.