It’s hard to raise capital. The regulatory restrictions imposed by securities laws make it harder to do so. As any bright-eyed entrepreneur with a dream project will tell you, the lawyers and the securities laws make it very expensive and time consuming to raise capital for a small project. The central goal of the Securities … Read more »
Category: Compliance Programs
Was Full Tilt Poker a Ponzi Scheme?
The United States Government forced online poker sites to the fringes of the financial system. The U.S. government has long argued that online poker gambling is illegal under the Wire Act, a 1961 law that explicitly prohibits sports betting conducted over electronic communication. In 2006, Congress made it illegal for financial institutions to process funds … Read more »
Miscommunication
Are you speaking the same language as the rest of your firm? Do they understand your questions? Do they understand your answers? Miscommunication is at the root of many problems. Many compliance policies are written by lawyers, for lawyers. That may work fine once there is an investigation or a problem. But they do little … Read more »
The Slow Rulemaking on Swaps and Derivatives
One of the strange splits in US financial regulation is that many swap and derivatives are regulated by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission instead of the Securities and Exchange Commission. I think of the CFTC, I think of Trading Places and with the SEC I think of Wall Street. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has … Read more »
Earthquakes, Hurricanes, and Disaster Recovery
Monday’s East Coast earthquake was far from a disaster. I just thought I had too much coffee, until I heard others in the hallway say “Do you feel that?” Then I realized the shaking was not just because I was over-caffeinated. Even though significant earthquakes are rare on the East Coast, hurricanes are not. Irene, … Read more »
Massachusetts and Expert Network Services
At least one of the hedge funds being investigated for its use of expert networks in based in Massachusetts. In an unusual instance of the state regulators acting before Securities and Exchange Commission, the Massachusetts securities regulators are proposing a new regulation to address the use of expert network services. They are proposing a new … Read more »
Report on Mutual Fund Advertising
Section 918 of Dodd-Frank Act required a study on mutual fund advertising. The Government Accountability Office delivered that report before the 18 month deadline to the designated Congressional committees. The Report’s objectives were “to examine (1) what is known about the impact of mutual fund advertisements on investors, (2) the extent to which performance information … Read more »
Risk Retention and Funding Private Equity Deals
There is no doubt that securitization helped fuel the residential housing bubble that lead to the Great Panic of 2008. Lenders found ready buyers for their loan portfolios, could sell them, then lend the money out again to create new loan portfolios to resell. One of the issues is that the lenders became purely loan … Read more »
Compliance Lessons from the Tour de France
I would guess that most of you reading this story do not share my love of the Tour de France. It can be a confusing mix of skinny guys, tarted up with sponsors like a NASCAR racer, with hard to pronounce names, following tactics unusual outside of cycling. But I since I became a fan … Read more »
Compliance Bits and Pieces for July 22
These are some recent compliance-related stories that caught my attention. The Gold Boom, Then and Now by Jacob Goldstein in Planet Money [o]n Jan. 21, 1980, gold hit what is still its all-time high in inflation-adjusted dollars. To match that high in today’s dollars, gold prices would have to rise by another 50 percent, to … Read more »