FTC

I see. He had better turned his attention towards the upcoming election in the United States and leave President Buhari to complete his tenure before castigating him.

This is essentially a warning to wall street money managers not to invest in Nigeria.

So sad.

That's Mr Daftus alright! There's no mistaking his modus operandi: Destroy all just to prove fake integrity whike stealing the country blind. How that makes any sense other than outright hypocrisy spiced with vindictive ignorance, I don't know.

The Wall Street Journal is Nigeria’s Problem

I still insist Nigeria solution is C.B.N (Comot Buhari Now)

Bubuhari has ewedu brain like his followers

And, as usual, die-hard supporters would defend their hero, even into the very grave...like flies following a corpse on it's final journey!

Meanwhile, body language is driving away potential FDI.

The worst part of it is that Buhari doesn't care.

Buhari...d most outdated n retarrded president of d 21st Century

diablos:
Buhari...d most outdated n retarrded president of d 21st Century

That title goes to GEJ

..............shey i told una make una no vote "ancestor" as president .....now na "local" level we dey.

lol Wall Street is even more corrupt than Nigerian politicians.




[size=18pt]After the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, more than 1,000 Wall Street bankers were jailed.
[/size]


e in the United States,” she said. “Today’s action makes clear that this Department of Justice intends to end any such corrupt practices, to root out misconduct, and to bring wrongdoers to justice.”

Lost in the hoopla surrounding the event was a depressing fact. Lynch and her predecessor, Eric Holder, appear to have turned the page on a more relevant vein of wrongdoing: the profligate and dishonest behavior of Wall Street bankers, traders, and executives in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. How we arrived at a place where Wall Street misdeeds go virtually unpunished while soccer executives in Switzerland get arrested is murky at best. But the legal window for punishing Wall Street bankers for fraudulent actions that contributed to the 2008 crash has just about closed. It seems an apt time to ask: In the biggest picture, what justice has been achieved?


Since 2009, 49 financial institutions have paid various government entities and private plaintiffs nearly $190 billion in fines and settlements, according to an analysis by the investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. That may seem like a big number, but the money has come from shareholders, not individual bankers. (Settlements were levied on corporations, not specific employees, and paid out as corporate expenses—in some cases, tax-deductible ones.) In early 2014, just weeks after Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, settled out of court with the Justice Department, the bank’s board of directors gave him a 74 percent raise, bringing his salary to $20 million.

After the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, more than 1,000 bankers were jailed.
The more meaningful number is how many Wall Street executives have gone to jail for playing a part in the crisis. That number is one. (Kareem Serageldin, a senior trader at Credit Suisse, is serving a 30-month sentence for inflating the value of mortgage bonds in his trading portfolio, allowing them to appear more valuable than they really were.) By way of contrast, following the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, more than 1,000 bankers of all stripes were jailed for their transgressions.

At an event at the National Press Club last February, Holder said the virtual absence of convictions (or even prosecutions) this time around did not result from a want of trying. “These are the kinds of cases that people come to the Justice Department to make,” he said. “The inability to make them, at least to this point, has not been as a result of a lack of effort.” Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, made a similar argument to me. The evidence, he said, does not show clear misconduct by individuals. It’s possible that Bharara is correct about that: Wall Street bankers make it their daily business to figure out ways to abide by the letter of the law while violating its spirit. And to be sure, much of the behavior that led to the crisis involved recklessness and poor judgment, not fraud. But even so, in light of various whistle-blower allegations—and the size of the settlements agreed to by the banks themselves—this explanation strains credulity. The Justice Department’s ethos regarding Wall Street, and the way the department went about its business, appear to be a large part of the story.


Any narrative of how we got to this point has to start with the so-called Holder Doctrine, a June 1999 memorandum written by the then–deputy attorney general warning of the dangers of prosecuting big banks—a variant of the “too big to fail” argument that has since become so familiar. Holder’s memo asserted that “collateral consequences” from prosecutions—including corporate instability or collapse—should be taken into account when deciding whether to prosecute a big financial institution. That sentiment was echoed as late as 2012 by Lanny Breuer, then the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, who said in a speech at the New York City Bar Association that he felt it was his duty to consider the health of the company, the industry, and the markets in deciding whether or not to file charges.

In the aftermath of the crash, the Justice Department did not refrain from prosecutions altogether. In 2009, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York tried two Bear Stearns hedge-fund managers—Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin—who had effectively run their $1.6 billion fund into the ground in the spring of 2007, an event that many believe was the canary in the coal mine of the financial crisis. But a jury acquitted the two men in November 2009. Added to the general fear that the economy was extraordinarily fragile, the unexpected acquittal seemed to put a deep freeze on Wall Street prosecutions for close to three years.

A serious national investigation of the practices of Wall Street’s pre-crash mortgage-banking activities did not begin in earnest until mid-2012—at least five years after the worst of the bad behavior had occurred—following President Obama’s call to action in the State of the Union address that January and the issuance of subpoenas to Wall Street’s biggest banks. The five-year statute of limitations for ordinary criminal fraud charges had passed while the Justice Department dithered, but civil prosecution of banks and individual bankers, which has a 10-year statute of limitations under a particular banking law, was still a possibility. Holder gave his various U.S. attorneys around the country responsibility for investigating.


A team led by Benjamin Wagner, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, investigated alleged wrongdoing at JPMorgan Chase, for instance. In many ways, Wagner’s investigation was typical of the Justice Department’s approach: hoover up hundreds of thousands of pages of e-mails and documents, interview current and former employees about their business practices, and use the findings as a cudgel to extract a financial settlement. Wagner and his team drafted—but did not file—a complaint against the firm in September 2013 that reportedly detailed how JPMorgan Chase itself (not merely Bear Stearns or Washington Mutual, two banks that it bought at the height of the crisis) knowingly packaged shoddy mortgages into securities that did not meet its credit standards and then sold them off to investors. As part of its investigation, Wagner’s team had deposed Alayne Fleischmann, a JPMorgan Chase banker turned whistle-blower, who’d told the team about what was going on. She had also detailed how, before the crash, her warnings about continuing to package up the bad mortgages into securities and sell them off as investments had gone unheeded by her superiors. After sharing her concerns with her boss in a 13-page letter, Fleischmann had been marginalized and then fired. (Disclosure: JPMorgan Chase also fired me, as a managing director, in 2004, and I am in litigation with the bank resulting from a soured investment I made in 1999.)

In November 2013, as part of a deal that kept Wagner’s complaint from becoming public—and the specifics of Fleischmann’s revelations from being widely disseminated—JPMorgan Chase agreed to a $13 billion settlement with various federal and state agencies, then the largest of its kind. Holder heralded the settlement as an important moment of accountability for Wall Street. But extracting large settlements paid with shareholders’ money is not the same as bringing alleged wrongdoers to justice. Instead of presenting a detailed picture of JPMorgan Chase’s misdeeds—as would have happened had Wagner’s complaint been filed and the matter adjudicated in court—the government and the bank negotiated an anodyne 11‑page “Statement of Facts” that glossed over many of the details of the behavior Fleischmann was trying to stop, and did not name any JPMorgan Chase bankers.


The Justice Department reached agreements with other Wall Street banks, among them Citigroup and Bank of America, using a similar playbook: Threaten public disclosure of behavior that looks criminal and then, in exchange for keeping it sealed, extract a huge financial settlement. No one individual, or group of individuals, is held accountable. No predawn raids of Park Avenue apartments are made. No one gets arrested. No one gets publicly shamed.

In february, shortly before Lynch succeeded him, Holder gave federal attorneys and their staffs a deadline: they had 90 days to bring any new prosecutions against individual bankers, traders, or executives on Wall Street before probes against them would be closed. That deadline came and went in May. Lynch, since her elevation, has been largely silent about Wall Street misconduct leading up to the crash; certainly she’s said nothing, in a major public forum, that’s comparable to the zeal and determination she expressed in her statement about bringing fifa executives to justice. But in fairness, it’s not clear how much she could do anyway: the peak of bad behavior on Wall Street seemed to occur in 2005 and 2006, about 10 years ago, meaning the statute of limitations is just about up. And new cases take time to make.

Holder, meanwhile, along with his old colleague Lanny Breuer, has returned to the white-shoe law firm that he left in order to join the Justice Department—Covington & Burling, which counts among its clients Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo. (The firm reportedly kept his office for him.) The sums Holder exacted from Wall Street banks earned him plenty of praise in the media. But without holding real people on Wall Street accountable for their wrongdoing in the years leading up to the financial crisis, the message that their behavior was unacceptable goes undelivered. Instead a very different message is being sent: for financiers, justice is just a check someone else has to write.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wall-streets-bankers-stayed-out-of-jail/399368/

Wall St is America's problem


[size=18pt]Theft of Your Money on Wall Street: Another GAO Report Won’t Help[/size]

It was considered big news last week that House members Maxine Waters of the Financial Services Committee and Al Green of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations have requested that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) launch an investigation of “regulatory capture” on Wall Street.

That news broke on Friday, one day after Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled the head of a Wall Street self-regulatory agency in a Senate hearing on a new study showing that stockbrokers with serial records of misconduct are allowed to remain in the industry. Warren also cited another recent study showing that even when investors prevail in arbitrations against bad brokers, they may never get paid. According to the study, over $60 million in fines owed to investors have not been paid since 2013.

The individual that Senator Warren was grilling is Richard Ketchum, head of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a self-regulatory body financed by Wall Street that oversees brokerage firms and has a division that runs a private justice system known as mandatory arbitration that hears all claims against bad brokers. FINRA was previously known as the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) but its reputation became so damaged as a self-regulator that it changed its name to FINRA. (Like that was really going to help.)

What the public doesn’t know is that for over 30 years, the GAO has been investigating these identical problems on Wall Street and making recommendations for cleaning up the mess. After 30 years, it should be abundantly clear that reading GAO reports and shaking one’s head isn’t getting the job done. Serious, radical reform of Wall Street is necessary and that means eliminating crony regulators and the entire self-regulatory system.

As far back as 1978, the GAO published the results of an investigation into the Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight of the self-regulatory actions of the NASD. The report found flaws in the NASD’s examinations of brokerage firms and that the SEC had “not dealt aggressively enough with inspection oversight problems.”

Again in 1994, the GAO looked into unscrupulous broker activity on Wall Street. The study found that there was the perception that the SEC and NASD were “lenient” in disciplinary actions and that some brokers that had been barred from keeping a license to make securities transactions were entering other sectors of the financial services industry.

By July 17, 1996, this egregiously flawed system of oversight led to the U.S. Justice Department charging the largest firms on Wall Street with price fixing on the electronic stock market known as Nasdaq, while the self-regulator, the NASD, was aware of the problems but simply ignored them. The Justice Department findings made it clear that the price fixing had been taking place for more than a decade. (The more recent cartel activity of rigging Libor and rigging foreign currency markets by Wall Street banks is simply an extension of what was transpiring in 1996.)

The outrage was so widespread in 1996 that the trade magazine, Registered Representative, ran a cover story titled “How the NASD Was Corrupted.” The magazine cover included this assessment:

“The SEC’s investigation of the NASD uncovered a self-regulatory system corrupted by the influence of powerful market making firms. Top NASD officials knew about problems and chose to look the other way. NASD staff went along. Even the SEC had plenty of clues that something was amiss.”

By 2003, Wall Street was reeling from news coverage of how regulators had allowed Wall Street stock research to become corrupted in order for the banks to get investment banking deals. The PBS program, Frontline, aired a program on May 8, 2003 titled “The Wall Street Fix.” Correspondent Hedrick Smith tells viewers: “It’s a story of pervasive corruption here on Wall Street, how brokers and analysts shaped and hyped the telecom boom, pocketed enormous profits and then took millions of ordinary investors on a catastrophic ride, $2 trillion in losses on WorldCom and other telecom stocks.”

A year earlier, BusinessWeek had asked this simple question on its cover: “Wall Street: How Corrupt Is It?” with a snake curled around the street sign suggesting the answer.

As for the regulators and Congress tolerating investors being victimized twice – first by the unscrupulous broker and then when their arbitration award is not paid – (should the investor be so lucky to have his or her case heard before non conflicted arbitrators), the GAO has been investigating unpaid awards for almost two decades with nothing to show for it.

In a report titled “Securities Arbitration: Actions Needed to Address Problem of Unpaid Awards,” the GAO found that 49 percent of the arbitration awards to investors were not paid at all in 1998 and 12 percent were only partially paid. GAO said it “estimated that the amount of unpaid awards was about $129 million, or 80 percent of the $161 million awarded to investors during 1998.”

And here we are, 18 years later, with Senator Warren asking the head of NASD’s successor, FINRA, what he plans to do about $60 million in unpaid awards to investors dating back to 2013.

FINRA also likes to brag about how much it has done to help investors by setting up BrokerCheck, where investors can check to see if their stockbroker has a disciplinary history. But the problems here are myriad. We put in a broker’s name whom we know was licensed and employed at Smith Barney as a retail broker over a long period. The broker doesn’t even exist in the database. Nor does he exist in the Investment Advisor lookup. He just doesn’t exist. Brokers with five, six and even seven arbitration claims against them are still employed at the same firm. But you wouldn’t know that from the BrokerCheck system which shows serial employer name changes when it is actually the same firm. So the uninitiated at the GAO or SEC might assume that the broker is being fired for misconduct and moving to a new firm when he is actually sitting in the same seat for three decades without any serious disciplinary measures being taken because he is producing large commissions for his firm.

Another problem is that FINRA’s arbitrators allow Wall Street firms to agree to settle arbitrations and have the matter expunged from the broker’s record. Reuters reported in 2013 that “Brokers succeeded 96.9 percent of the time between mid-2009 and the end of 2011 in expunging details about cases brought by investors against their firms that were later settled, according to the Public Investors Arbitration Bar Association, a trade group for lawyers representing investors.”

In one instance, according to the Reuters article, one broker “requested expungement 40 times – and was granted relief by arbitration panels for 35 of the requests.”

Congress has known for decades that self-regulation doesn’t work. And installing Wall Street’s former lawyers or Wall Street executives at the SEC doesn’t work either. Tolerating the systemic conflicts of interest at the New York Fed, the sole regulator of Wall Street bank holding companies, has been catastrophic to the U.S. economy. Congress fully understands what’s causing regulatory capture; it just doesn’t have the guts to do anything about it but kick the can down the road to the GAO.

As far as electing another U.S. President whose campaign has been financed by Wall Street and expecting a different outcome, let’s hope and pray most Americans are smarter than that.

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/03/theft-of-your-money-on-wall-street-another-gao-report-wont-help/

Some ignorant Nigerians will soon come and praise corrupt wall street.

naijaguy77:
This is essentially a warning to wall street money managers not to invest in Nigeria.

So sad.

You are smart. They are simply sending a red flag to intending investors. So bad

Karm16:
lol Wall Street is even more corrupt than Nigerian politicians.

You should have known the difference between The Wall Street Journal newspaper owned by Rupert Mudoch and the (in)famous Wall Street associated with financial services and corruption.

BekeeBuAgbara:
You should have known the difference between The Wall Street Journal newspaper owned by Rupert Mudoch and the (in)famous Wall Street associated with financial services.

They're both corrupt.

When the goodness of a ruler can be detected by the only his supporters , then, the ruler is doomed for destruction. Around the sane world, Buhari is regarded as a failure, yet zombie supporters are still clapping for him.

That was pretty scatty from wsj

Karm16:


They're both corrupt.

What's the relevance to this article? Red herring much.

This same empty-headed rabid Republican of Dutch origins trying to rubber stamp what his fellow Dutch man, AND FRIEND, ( paid hack, Goran Sluiter, that was hired by the Jonathan Administration during the last elections) previously said. Nobody pays these loonies any mind. His words cannot be more powerful than Obama's (and other world leaders') endorsement of the Buhari administration.

in zobies voice, its an ipod

Mr. Hoekstra was the former chairman of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee from 2004 to 2007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Hoekstra

Weapons of mass destruction (WMD)

On June 22, 2006, Hoekstra made headlines by announcing at a press conference in the Capitol that weapons of mass destruction had been located in Iraq in the form of 500 chemical weapons.[9]

A number of other media outlets disputed the claims made by Hoekstra and Rick Santorum regarding the existence of weapons of mass destruction, reporting that the claims were disputed by both Pentagon officials, the Duelfer Report, and the intelligence community.[10][11][12]

On November 3, 2006, The New York Times reported that a website created at the request of Hoekstra and Senator Pat Roberts was found to contain detailed information that could potentially be helpful to those seeking to produce nuclear weapons. The website was shut down on November 2 following questioning by The New York Times.[13]

As of September 17, 2007, some news outlets reported that the Congressional committee Hoekstra had overseen had created "erroneous" and "misleading" reports about Iran's nuclear capabilities. "Among the committee's assertions is that Iran is producing weapons-grade uranium at its facility in the town of Natanz. The IAEA called that "incorrect", noting that weapons-grade uranium is enriched to a level of 90 percent or more. Iran has enriched uranium to 3.5 percent under IAEA monitoring." [14][15]

Hoekstra was a founding member of the Congressional House Tea Party Caucus in 2010.[18][19]

the man's history says plenty. tea party,imperalist expansionism

it should be noted that this is just a letter from a politician

Mr. Buhari notes that building trust is a priority for Nigeria. But an anticorruption drive that is selective and focused on senior members of the opposition party creates deep political divisions. Meanwhile, members of Mr. Buhari’s own cabinet, accused of large-scale corruption, walk free. Seventy percent of the national treasury is spent on the salaries and benefits of government officials, who make upwards of $2 million a year.

this same joker would be shouting dictatorship if buhari went full 1984 on our senators. they are the last bastion of government profligacybut until buhari gets rid of saraki there's not much that can be done about them.

Instead, the Nigerian government has diverted much-needed military resources to the Niger Delta, where rising militancy has reduced Nigeria’s oil production to less than half the country’s capacity, and half the amount required to service the national budget. Much of these tensions arise from Mr. Buhari’s decision to cut amnesty payments to militants and an excessively hard-line approach in a socially and politically sensitive environment.

this is the same sort of empty headed ignorance that characterizes the republicans. no in depth analysis of an issue. the world is still paying for the same faulty analytical process that led to the invasion of iraq. i wonder if this joker would negotiate with terrorists on his own soil. the hypocrisy is galling.

All these foreign media that takes panadol for other nations headache. Most of third world countries economic woes were caused by their wrong panacea.
They believe Nigeria systems are corrupt, Nigerian now is fighting corruption they are saying it's selective and it's to destroy opposition, those that are refunding illegal wealth are innocent?

naijaguy77:


http://www.wsj.com/articles/buhari-is-nigerias-problem-not-its-solution-1466109183?

[size=15pt] "What the elders see while sitting the young ones standing on their toes won't see." [/size]

Lol

globatop:
All these foreign media that takes panadol for other nations headache. Most of third world countries economic woes were caused by their wrong panacea.
They believe Nigeria systems are corrupt, Nigerian now is fighting corruption they are saying it's selective and it's to destroy opposition, those that are refunding illegal wealth are innocent?

When they praise PMB, you are happy that PMB is internationally recognized. When they castigate him, you tell them to mind their business. If you know what GLOBALIZATION means, you would not post this childish comment.

When I make comments about buhari people usually think it is out of hatred but the truth is buhari will ruin the economy and cause serious ethnic tension in the nation simply because he isn't physically and mentally capable to be in that post now. We said it but ppl keep calling us wailers.

Karm16:


They're both corrupt.

Okay are you saying the newspaper (a private business) is corrupt?

Well, how does that have anything to do with the things highlighted in the article?

The writer did not even say that president Buhari is corrupt. He just pointed out things that the federal government is doing under him. Things that are in the public domain and no one is even trying to hide. Everyone knows there's militancy in the south, the economy took a hit in the past months and investors have been leaving.

These are things that NTA, AIT and Channels report everyda.

My attention has been drawn to the fact that GMB hired 13 SANs and 10 lawyers to defend his inability to show the world his WAEC Certificate. That is not good for this democracy…

They said the Military board under GEJ hid GMB's WAEC certificate Today, GMB is President. So who is still hiding Buhari's certificate...

We are not wailing for GMB to show us his certificate (you can't give what you don't have) But to let the world know the scam that he is.

We need to let future generations know that Once upon a time, A Nigerian President was scammed into office without a basic WAEC Certificate

Posterity and future generations need to know That a President was asked to show his WAEC Certificate but he rather went to bring 13 SANs.