Commentaries
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Finra messed up, what a shock
The report by Finra on its failure to detect the alleged Ponzi scheme at Allen Stanford’s offshore bank is no shock.
Finra makes the SEC look like an agressive regulator. And this should give anyone reason to pause when you consider that Mary Schaprio, the current Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, most recently headed-up Finra.
Schaprio tells us her mission is to beef-up the SEC’s enforcement procedures in the wake of its own failings on Stanford and more significantly its botched investigation–or non-investigation–of Bernard Madoff. Why didn’t she first do this when she was at Finra?
The report outling Finra’s missteps notes regulators failed to follow-up on claims made by former Stanford brokers that the CDs the firm’s offshore bank in Antigua was selling were either bogus or “too good to be true.” Going as far back as 2004, a number of brokers raised this claim in arbitration disputes they had with Stanford.
Mary Schapiro is no money manager
Let’s hope Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro is a better regulator than a money manager.
That’s because The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the last place Schapiro ran, lost $696 million last year. Almost all of FINRA’s red ink stemmed from losses on investments, including ownership stakes in hedge funds and private equity firms, stocks and bonds.
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The Wall
