As summer draws to a close and the Wall Street titans enjoy the last of their lazy long weekends in the Hamptons, summering next door to the army of lawyers that keep them out of jail, it’s a curious time to be reading about a major new lawsuit that has the potential to shake Wall Streeters right down to their Gucci loafers. The charges include conspiracy to restrain trade in violation of the Sherman Act and unjust enrichment in a $1.7 trillion market.
Since the Senate hearings of the early 1930s, which examined the Wall Street practices and conspiracies that led to the 1929-1932 stock market collapse and Great Depression, there have been rumblings that Wall Street’s system for lending stock for traders to short is a viper’s nest of ripoffs. Now two major law firms, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Cohen Milstein are suing six of the largest Wall Street banks, alleging that they illegally colluded in this market. The defendants are the usual suspects: JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, UBS and their stock lending units. (The only surprise here is that Citigroup is not named.)...Wall Street On Parade
Wall Street Banks Sued Again for Conspiring to Control a Market
Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Someone a few years back mentioned that what the banks do, abetted by extensive government privilege, is enable the so-called creditworthy to sell fiat short.
ReplyDeleteYet it's deficit spending by the monetary sovereign that get's the blame for the resulting loss in purchasing power!
So I advise MMT advocates to seriously embrace deprivileging the banks if they wish to MAXIMIZE the ability of the monetary sovereign to net create fiat for a given amount of price inflation - aside from it's THE RIGHT THING TO DO ANYWAY!