Under Siege at the CFTC

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_43/b4200039780126.htm

Lobbyists: the corporate elite making sure their position is bought!

Now a lawyer at Winston & Strawn, with Goldman Sachs (GS) among his clients, Malyshev says he's more likely these days to encounter a small regiment of people lining up to get into meetings where they hope to influence the biggest rewrite of Wall Street rules since the 1930s. At times the line of lawyers, bank executives, and hedge fund managers stretches out the door of the small waiting room in the commission's black marble lobby

"The number of people that have come in requesting to be exempt from the law or to have the law delayed has literally shocked me," says Bart Chilton, a Democrat who is one of the agency's five commissioners. "A lot of folks are having problems coming to grips with the fact that they do have a new law and will have to change their business models."

Chilton says he found himself confronting the same lobbyist representing three different companies in the space of two weeks. In each meeting, the attorney argued that his client was exempt from the law or that implementation ought to be put off, says Chilton. "The volume and intensity of the lobbying is unprecedented in my experience at the agency."





The bottom line: Congress gave regulators wide discretion to regulate derivatives, causing the CFTC to be besieged by lobbyists

Morgan Stanley settles oil-trading flap

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/29/93170/in-another-wall-street-misdeed.html

Does Wall Street do anything honestly?
But then again....To big to fail doesn't have to does it.
They just pay the offence away. It's a standard practice.


In another black eye for Wall Street, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission late Thursday announced a $14 million fine against Morgan Stanley Capital Group Inc. for allegedly hiding its complex oil trades.

The settlement, in which Morgan Stanley did not admit or deny the accusations, comes as oil prices have continued their steady upwards march and have some oil analysts again saying that excessive speculation is again pushing up energy prices. One recent estimate put the cost of that to consumers and businesses at $300 billion annually.

In an announcement after U.S. markets had closed, the CFTC said that a trader from Morgan Stanley conspired on Feb. 6, 2009, with a counterpart from Swiss financial firm UBS Securities to hide from authorities a prohibited trading activity.

The CFTC said Morgan Stanley was on the other end of a deal with a client of UBS. Morgan Stanley was looking to buy more than 33,000 March-dated contracts for future delivery of oil and sell the same quantities of April contracts for oil. The two parties agreed to a deal in which they’d settle on a price after trading had finished for the day_ something called a Trade at Settlement agreement.

The problem, said regulators, is that Morgan Stanley asked its unidentified business partner, the UBS client, to not disclose the special trade until after oil trading had settled that day. The law requires immediate notification to the New York Mercantile Exchange, where oil is traded

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/29/93170/in-another-wall-street-misdeed.html#ixzz0mYeiV3n6

It's Ponzimonium In The Gold Market

http://www.rense.com/general90/ponz.htm

Is there anything that the big banks have touched that isn't corrupt any more?
Inquiring minds really do want to know our countries lives as well as our own
are on the chopping block because of their corruption.

Nothing of real value has not been tainted by their hand it would seem.


We've had a string of amazing revelations recently regarding the world's precious metals market. This is important stuff for anyone (like me) who holds gold as a means to avoid currency turmoil and counterparty risk.

This news has been actively suppressed in the mainstream media.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a U.S. government regulatory agency, held hearings in Washington D.C. in late March regarding position limits in the futures market.

People involved in the markets have known/suspected for years that they have been manipulated by certain large entities, notably JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.

Analysts like silver maven, Ted Butler, hedge fund giant, Eric Sprott, and the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee (GATA) have been collecting evidence of this manipulation for years.

These hearings were supposed to be a non-event. However, despite the media lock-down, the word is getting out.

The CFTC, like the SEC, is a conflicted agency. Some people, notably Chairman Gary Gensler and Commissioner Bart Chilton, seem to want to clean up the sleaze, fraud and corruption.

The CFTC even invited GATA's Bill Murphy and Adrian Douglas to make statements. Would you be surprised to learn that the cameras had a "technical malfunction" during Bill Murphy's statement, which magically righted itself immediately after he finished?