If you have plenty of money, you can spend millions in legal fees to get your millions back. If you're a firefighter or a teacher at the mercy of your State run pension, you're shit out of luck. Your money is gone.
Individuals receive surprisingly large arbitration award.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Citigroup has been ordered to pay $54.1 million to two wealthy investors (a venture capital investor and a retired patent attorney) for losses they sustained on risky municipal bond funds that lost 77% of their value in the financial crisis. “The award by an industry arbitration panel is the largest ever levied against a major Wall Street brokerage in favor of individual investors . . . .” (Larger awards have been made to corporate investors.) The award included $17 million in punitive damages and $3 million in legal fees. Citigroup’s municipal bond funds are the subject of an SEC probe into whether the bank misled investors by failing to disclose the funds’ risks. The investors were neighbors, and the former Smith Barney broker testified on behalf of his former clients. Arbitration is mandatory in most Wall Street customer agreements, and this result appears to substantially exceed any previous award to individuals is such an investment advice dispute. It is good to see a case in which a FIRA arbitration worked out so well for the investors!
Monday, May 16, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Sicilian Mafia Born Out of Serfdom
"There was, after all, something irresistible in solving money problems simply by printing money..." page 114 of The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder, and The Birth of the American Mafia by Mike Dash.
Out of Money & Options
The Sicilian Mafia was born out of serfdom because the Barons who ran the estates paid the Serfs almost nothing, sharing little of the prosperity the Serfs had produced from their land. Page 41 of Mike Dash's book reprints a police officer's letter from Sicily from 1860 illustrating the injustice:
"it hurts to see some of the scenes you come across when you live here like I do. One hot day in July...I was on a long march with my men. We stopped for a rest by a farmyard where they were dividing the grain harvest. I went in to ask for some water. The measuring had just finished, and the peasant had been left with no more than a small mound. Everything else had gone to his boss. The peasant stood with his hands and chin planted on the long handle of a shovel. At first, as if stunned, he stared at his share. Then he looked at his wife and four or five small children, thinking that after a year of sweat and hardship all he had left to feed his family with was that heap of grain. He seemed like a man set in stone. Except that tear was gliding silently down from each eye."
I read in the paper a quote saying something to the effect of Americans don't want shared sacrifice (to solve our debt problems), they want shared prosperity. In the example above, I think the field hand would have been satisfied with enough grain to get his family through the winter. Is that shared prosperity? Sort of, but it's not like the field hand was asking for a $400,000 yacht or a $2 billion tax break. He was asking for the means to support his family. I think that's what we're all striving for today - enough to take care of the ones you love if you've worked & earned the right to have it.
Out of Money & Options
The Sicilian Mafia was born out of serfdom because the Barons who ran the estates paid the Serfs almost nothing, sharing little of the prosperity the Serfs had produced from their land. Page 41 of Mike Dash's book reprints a police officer's letter from Sicily from 1860 illustrating the injustice:
"it hurts to see some of the scenes you come across when you live here like I do. One hot day in July...I was on a long march with my men. We stopped for a rest by a farmyard where they were dividing the grain harvest. I went in to ask for some water. The measuring had just finished, and the peasant had been left with no more than a small mound. Everything else had gone to his boss. The peasant stood with his hands and chin planted on the long handle of a shovel. At first, as if stunned, he stared at his share. Then he looked at his wife and four or five small children, thinking that after a year of sweat and hardship all he had left to feed his family with was that heap of grain. He seemed like a man set in stone. Except that tear was gliding silently down from each eye."
I read in the paper a quote saying something to the effect of Americans don't want shared sacrifice (to solve our debt problems), they want shared prosperity. In the example above, I think the field hand would have been satisfied with enough grain to get his family through the winter. Is that shared prosperity? Sort of, but it's not like the field hand was asking for a $400,000 yacht or a $2 billion tax break. He was asking for the means to support his family. I think that's what we're all striving for today - enough to take care of the ones you love if you've worked & earned the right to have it.
How Europe sees America
A reporter by the name of Holger Zschapitz wrote in Germany's Welt am Sonntag, "Europeans are aghast at America's reckless spending and refusal to raise taxes. Yet what we see as a moral failing is really the consequence of a very different historical experience. Europeans have bitter memories of the hyperinflation that followed both world wars, so we have made monetary stability the primary goal of our central bank. Americans, by contrast, were traumatized by the Great Depression, so to avoid unemployment they pursue 'growth at any cost,' which means running up ever greater debts. Fortunately, the U.S. also has a strong tradition of 'inventiveness and entrepreneurship.' So far, it has always been able to grow its way out of debt. Let's hope it hasn't lost that 'spirit of innovation.' "
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Deaf Republicans
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