Jan. 12: The New York Stock Exchange fines Morgan Stanley $19 million for failing to supervise two rogue brokers and deliver stock prospectuses to 141,000 clients.
Jan. 25: Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley each agree to pay $40 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that they artificially stimulated demand for certain high-tech initial public offerings in the aftermarket.
FEBRUARY
Feb. 14: The NYSE fines JPMorgan Securities $2.1 million for failing to retain e-mails arising out of the research-analyst conflict case.
Feb. 14: AIG says the New York Attorney General and the SEC have served it with subpoenas pertaining to the accounting of certain reinsurance policies.
MARCH
March 2: Citigroup reaches settlement in Global Crossing class action litigation. It settles the suit for $75 million.
March 3: Bank of America settles WorldCom suit and agrees to pay $460 million in restitution in the securities fraud class action.
March 4: Goldman Sachs, Lehman Bros., Credit Suisse First Boston and UBS agree to pay a combined $100 million to settle with former shareholders and bondholders of WorldCom. The four firms led a May 2000 bond offering by the telecom company.
March 7: AIG reveals that its chairman, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, has received a subpoena from New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
March 8: The NYSE fines Merrill Lynch $13.5 million for failing to supervise a group of brokers at its Fort Lee, N.J., branch. They allegedly engaged in improper market timing of mutual funds.
March 15: Former WorldCom CEO Bernard J. Ebbers is convicted of conspiracy and securities fraud that resulted in investor losses of $2 billion and the bankruptcy of the company.
March 21: Time Warner agrees to pay a $300 million penalty for overstating online advertising revenue and the number of its Internet subscribers, and for failing to consolidate the financial results of AOL Europe in its financial statements.
APRIL
April 12: The SEC charges the NYSE with failing to police specialists who allegedly engaged in unlawful proprietary trading on the floor. In a related move, the NYSE also charges 17 former specialists with securities fraud for trading ahead of customer orders.
April 25: Cable operator Adelphia Communications will pay $715 million and set up a victim compensation fund for the accounting fraud. Founder John J. Rigas later gets 15 years in prison and his family agrees to forfeit 95% of its holdings in the company.
April 27: The NASD fines Raymond James $750,000 for fee-based account violations. The firm is also required to pay $138,000 in restitution to customers.
MAY
May 31: Citigroup agrees to pay about $208 million to settle the SEC's accusations about improper arrangements among certain Smith Barney mutual funds, an affiliated transfer agent and an unaffiliated sub-transfer agent.
JUNE
June 2: President Bush nominates Christopher Cox to replace Donaldson as chairman. The nomination of Cox, a conservative former congressman, is seen as slowing the pace of regulatory moves.
June 10: Citigroup and JPMorgan agree to settle claims of Enron-related damages for a combined $4.2 billion.
JULY
July 13: Former WorldCom CEO Bernard J. Ebbers is sentenced by a federal judge in New York to a 25-year prison term for the $11 billion accounting fraud at WorldCom.
AUGUST
Aug. 2: The NASD orders Morgan Stanley to pay more than $6.1 million for fee-based account violations. Of that amount, $1.5 million is fines and $4.6 million is restitution for more than 3,500 customers.
Aug. 2: Toronto-based Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce agrees to pay $2.4 billion to shareholders of Enron as part of a legal settlement. It becomes the third major bank to settle claims involving the former energy-trading company.
Aug. 15: The NYSE fines Merrill Lynch $10 million for failing to deliver customer prospectuses and other supervisory and operational failures.
SEPTEMBER
Sept. 14: Northwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines both file for bankruptcy protection as the airline industry continues to suffer.
Sept. 15: An SEC judge hits Raymond James with a $6.9 million fine for failing to supervise broker Dennis Herula.
Sept. 19: Former Tyco International CEO and founder Dennis Kozlowski and ex-CFO Mark Swartz receive prison terms of eight to 25 years for looting more than $150 million from the company. Kozlowski is also ordered to pay $167 million in fines and Swartz $70 million.
OCTOBER
Oct. 10: The NASD hits eight firms with directed brokerage violations and imposes fines of more than $7.75 million. Hit with the heaviest fines were INVEST Financial Corp. ($1.52 million), Commonwealth Financial Network ($1.4 million), National Planning Corp. ($1.3 million), Mutual Service Corp. ($1.3 million) and Lincoln Financial Advisors Corp. ($950,000).
Oct. 12: Phillip Bennett, CEO of commodities trading firm Refco, is arrested and charged with a $430 million accounting fraud approximately two months after the firm went public in August.
Oct. 17: In the largest bankruptcy so far for the year, Refco files for Chapter 11 protection to reorganize $48.6 billion in liabilities. Refco's filing, in the wake of Bennett's arrest, wipes out $924 million in market value. One day later, the company is delisted by the NYSE.
CSI: Wall Street is one of the most boring shows around but, man, is it expensive to produce. If I got fined for the way I park my car the way Wall Street gets fined for its indiscretions, my car would be booted pronto.
Although Bush won't serve this time, his Democratic rival in the 2004 election served on a Massachusetts jury last month. Kerry not only served, but was elected foreman of the Suffolk Superior Court jury, which rejected a claim by two men who sued the city of Boston for injuries suffered in a car accident involving a school principal.
I wish this were funnier or more ironic, but there you go.
You'd think from all the noise that self-appointed religiously oppressed Republicans make that Christmas doesn't exist in secular Blue State cities like Chicago. Not so. Let's take a look at selections from the December calendar at the Chicago Cultural Center, a municipal institution that is funded with my approval by my secular humanist, atheistic, exorbitant property taxes:
Protégé Philharmonic Sunday, December 11, 3pm Preston Bradley Hall The Protégé Philharmonic present a Christmas Holiday Concert with classical orchestra, popular Christmas selections and a Christmas carol sing-a-long.
The Rose Ensemble: Celebremos el Nińo: A Mexican Baroque Christmas Thursday, December 15, 6:30pm Preston Bradley Hall Join this engaging group of singers for an evening of joyful Mexican music - a celebration featuring over two centuries of festive Christmas dances, ballads and villancicos. Accompanied by viola da gamba, vihuela da mano and several percussion instruments (including African drums), solos and choruses burst forth in this holiday program that's anything but predictable.
Ohm series: Holiday Xmix Party Thursday, December 15, 7pm Randolph Cafe This digital holiday celebration features local DJs and laptop artists performing original remixes of classic holiday tunes. Snowbot (aka Brobot) gives a special live performance leading audience members brave enough to join the robotic karaoke sing-along to digital versions of seasonal songs. The evening also showcases the release of Christmas Remixed 2 from Six Degrees Records, which features top-notch producers, DJs, turntablists and remix artists in a second vibrant collection of joyfully twisted takes on holiday tunes.
500 Clown (sings) Christmas Carol(s) November 16, 2005 - January 7, 2006 Storefront Theater Thursdays - Saturdays at 7:30pm, Sundays at 3pm Additional Christmas performances: December 19 - 21 at 7:30pm No shows on November 24, December 24, 25, 31 and January 1 Tickets: $15, $10 for students and seniors with valid ID This raucous Christmas celebration features three clowns as Dickensian rock stars, performing A Christmas Carol-based songs by John Fournier. Think Dickens plus a live band plus 500 Clown's signature blend of circus arts, improvisation, and action-based performance. We'll have even the tiniest Tim dancing in the aisles. For tickets, visit www.storefronttheater.org or call 312-742-TIXS.
But please note: "The Chicago Cultural Center will be closed in observance of Christmas Day."
Liberals aren't scared of Christianity, but Republican Christians are scared to death of pluralism. They are social agoraphobics who can't bear the sight of anyone who doesn't look and behave exactly like them — narrow-minded, fearful, greedy, and provincially Caucasian at heart.
The younger brother of the president of the United States, seeking to establish himself independently of his more successful sibling, visits a small country in the company of a ne'er do well business partner. Their arrival sends law enforcement, government officials and local reporters into a tizzy, but the First Sibling emerges unfazed and news of his trip goes unnoticed back at home.
But this is no script.
In September, Neil Bush, brother of President George W. Bush, visited Latvia with Boris Berezovsky, a fugitive Russian tycoon who made millions in the violent scramble for control of Russian government assets after the fall of communism. Their mission, according to the Baltic Times, was educational -- promoting teaching software created by Bush's Texas-based firm, Ignite Learning.
The visit to the former Soviet republic earned lots of media attention in Eastern Europe and provoked an international incident. "Much controversy surrounded the meeting, since Berezovsky is wanted for arrest in Russia, and the scandalous Russian businessman, who now lives in London, met with a relative of the U.S. president," said the Baltic Times in its report.
Chalabi, Abramoff, Cunningham, Safavian... the list of known criminals with whom the Bush administration associates (or is related to) just keeps metastasizing.
...Cheney has given 23 speeches to think tanks and trade organizations and 16 at academic institutions since 2001 -- apparently all at taxpayers' expense.
"[I]t appears that his office labels them 'official travel,' " the [Center for Public Integrity] said. "As a result . . . the public is kept largely unaware of where he and his staff are traveling, with whom they are meeting and how much it costs, even though tax dollars are covering the bill."
"Largely unaware" is an almost complimentary way to describe the borderline catatonic American public.
Faced with growing numbers of retirees, pension plans are pouring billions into hedge funds, the secretive and lightly regulated investment partnerships that once managed money only for wealthy investors.
The plans and other large institutions are expected to invest as much as $300 billion in hedge funds by 2008, up from just $5 billion a decade ago, according to a study by the Bank of New York and Casey, Quirk & Associates, a consulting firm. Pension funds account for roughly 40 percent of all institutional money.
[...]
Pension officials who have been shaken by market downturns and persistent deficits are attracted by hedge funds' promise of richer, or more consistent, returns. But the trend has caused some consultants and academics to voice cautions. They question whether hedge funds, with risks that are hard to measure, are appropriate for pension funds, whose sole purpose, by law, is to pay out predetermined benefits to retired workers.
Those benefits are considered so crucial that they are guaranteed: corporate pension failures are covered by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation [PBGC], a federal agency, while pension failures by state and local governments are covered by taxpayers. Given that the benefits are paid out on a set schedule, critics wonder whether it makes sense to rely on investments whose returns are hard to predict, managed by private partnerships that disclose little about their operations and charge some of the highest fees on Wall Street.
"It's very inappropriate when the company is offering a pension plan that is guaranteed by the federal government," said Zvi Bodie, a professor of finance and economics at Boston University who is enthusiastic about hedge funds in other contexts.
The investment industry is based on credibility and trust. Considering the spectacular failures of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 and the Republican fraudsters behind Bayou Funds this year, why should American taxpayers offer multibillion dollar guarantees to cover the misdeeds of crony capitalists with a seriously tainted track record?
