Tag: finance

Lehman Trilogy

The Lehman Judges Judge The Lehman Trilogy

The judges decamped to a wood-paneled room and sat sipping seltzer under portraits of bewhiskered officers. “For us, who have the experience of what happened after the play ended, it really isn’t a beautiful story of America. The bankruptcy worked, but should it have happened in the first place? Were we just left to clean up after the elephants? I think maybe we were.”

“I had trials for employees who had all their retirement money in Lehman stock and lost everything. And now we have a President who proudly talks about all his bankruptcies. It’s just bizarre.” She stood up and said goodbye; she had to rest up before her next Lehman hearing, on Monday morning.

Mastercard Digital ID

In December, Mastercard announced that it was working to develop an international digital identity scheme which could be used as a flexible verifier for financial transactions, government interactions, or online services. The idea of a secure, decentralized, universal ID has become a sort of holy grail in the age of rapid digital interactions and rampant identity fraud.

Free Credit Freezes

Later this month, all of the 3 major consumer credit bureaus will be required to offer free credit freezes to all Americans and their dependents. Maybe you’ve been holding off freezing your credit file because your home state currently charges a fee for placing or thawing a credit freeze, or because you believe it’s just not worth the hassle. If that accurately describes your views on the matter, this post may well change your mind.

Paul Singer

Cohn, Bush soon discovered, was the 37-year-old protégé of Paul Singer, the founder of Elliott Management and one of the most powerful, and most unyielding, investors in the world. Singer, who is 73, with a trim white beard and oval spectacles, is deeply involved in everything Elliott does. The firm has many kinds of investments, but Singer is best known as an “activist” investor, using his fund’s resources—about $35B—to buy stock in companies in which it detects weaknesses. Elliott then pressures the company to make changes to its business, with the goal of improving the stock price. Most of their investment campaigns proceed without significant conflict, but a noticeable number seem to end up mired in drama. A signature Elliott tactic is the release of a letter harshly criticizing the target company’s CEO, which is often followed by the executive’s resignation or the sale of the company. 1 of Singer’s few unsuccessful campaigns, to block a merger within Samsung, eventually led to the impeachment and imprisonment of the South Korean President after Singer’s opponents became so desperate to fend off his attack that they allegedly began bribing government officials. From the outside, it can seem as if Elliott is causing the drama, but the firm argues that it simply identifies preëxisting problems and acts as a check on the system.

First Cyberattack in 1834

The Blanc brothers traded government bonds at the exchange in the city of Bordeaux, where information about market movements took several days to arrive from Paris by mail coach. Traders who could get the information more quickly could make money by anticipating these movements. Some tried using messengers and carrier pigeons, but the Blanc brothers found a way to use the telegraph line instead. They bribed the telegraph operator in the city of Tours to introduce deliberate errors into routine government messages being sent over the network. The telegraph’s encoding system included a “backspace” symbol that instructed the transcriber to ignore the previous character. The addition of a spurious character indicating the direction of the previous day’s market movement, followed by a backspace, meant the text of the message being sent was unaffected when it was written out for delivery at the end of the line. But this extra character could be seen by another accomplice: a former telegraph operator who observed the telegraph tower outside Bordeaux with a telescope, and then passed on the news to the Blancs. The scam was only uncovered in 1836, when the crooked operator in Tours fell ill and revealed all to a friend, who he hoped would take his place. The Blanc brothers were put on trial, though they could not be convicted because there was no law against misuse of data networks. But the Blancs’ pioneering misuse of the French network qualifies as the world’s first cyber-attack.

Protecting Credit

50% of all Americans still haven’t checked their credit report since the Equifax breach last year exposed the Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses and other personal information on nearly 150M people. If you’re in that 50%, please make an effort to remedy that soon.

Bank Accounts for Everyone

The central bank would undoubtedly capture dominant market share of utility or ‘narrow banking’, but only because the public sector is the least cost provider of the service. Without any subsidies, implicit or otherwise, the central bank is the cheapest, safest provider of these services in the market. Not only would the resulting banking system have much lower costs and greater efficiency, not only would it throw off 10s of billions of $ in revenue to government, it would be a safer, more rational system playing much better to the respective strengths of public and private sectors.

$35B fraud

The SEC temporarily halted trading of Neuromama Ltd., citing “potentially manipulative transactions” in a stock that soared to $35B even though it hasn’t filed financial results in years.

How does this kind of total nonsense slip through? is it just technical incompetence (accounting was supposed to be in computer-readable formats years ago) or is it just regular bankster fraud? probably both.