Fraudulent La. Bond Offering to Improve a City Sewer System

One of the consequences of the collapse of various portions of the financial markets in the Great Recession of 2007-2009 was the passage of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, better known as the Dodd-Frank Act.» Read More

Stress Test Protocols and Minimum Fund Requirements

The Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (“FICC”), a subsidiary of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (“DTCC”) created in 2003, as discussed in my June 8, 2021 blog “Fixing FICC: Agency Proposes Rule Changes to Encourage More Repo Closing,” provides a critical piece of the “plumbing” of the U.S.» Read More

The notion of a Consolidated Audit Trail (“CAT”) arose in the early days of the 21^st century, which in 2005  led to the creation of the National Market System when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) adopted regulation NMS as laid out in my Sept.» Read More

Malta: geography, history, and pirates.

The island country of Malta, three islands that together constitute the Malta archipelago, is in the middle (almost the exact middle) of the Mediterranean Sea, halfway between Italy and Libya and almost equidistant between Gibraltar and Lebanon.» Read More

Gregory Blotnick (“Blotnick”), age 35, is a resident of Palm Beach, Florida. He was the founder, sole owner, managing partner, and only employee of Brattle Street Capital, LLC, a New York limited liability company (“BSC”) headquartered in New York, NY. BSC is the unregistered investment adviser to a private investment fund, BSC Opportunistic Equity, LP, a Delaware limited partnership (the “Fund”), founded by Blotnick in June 2019, and headquartered in New York, NY.» Read More

One of the consequences of the last 13+ years of Quantitative Easing has been an indefatigable search for better investment returns. Although the recent rediscovery of inflation by the Federal Open Market Committee of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has resulted in significant increases in the federal fund rate (the 10-year Treasury Note now yields over 3.2 %), investors have been quite adventuresome in “placing their bets.”» Read More

Ronald D. Paul, now 66, was described in the December 12, 2019, issue of the Washington Business Journal as a “long time Washington real estate developer” who was a founder of Eagle Bank (“Bank”), a Maryland-chartered commercial bank, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland.» Read More

Deccan Value Investors L.P. (“Deccan”) is a Connecticut limited partnership, operating as an investment adviser registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) since 2011. Deccan, according to the SEC’s Aug. 3, 2022, Order Instituting Administrative and Cease-and-Desist Proceedings (“Order”), “pursued a long-term, concentrated, low-turnover, research-oriented, fundamental investment strategy, investing all its dozen or so client accounts in a dozen or so companies.”» Read More

In William Shakespeare’s great play “Romeo and Juliet,” Act 2, Scene 2, Juliet famously asks:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

But sometimes, as Gertrude Stein and then Ernest Hemingway opined in a commentary on Juliet’s pronouncement: “A rose, is a rose, is an onion.”» Read More

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) has become increasingly concerned about the sale of complex investment products to retail investors, especially as investors seek enhanced returns in a period (from the Great Recession in 2008 until the Spring of 2022) when the recurring commitment of Quantitative Easing policies by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (“FRB”) and the interest-rate strictures by the FRB’s Open Market Committee (“FOMC”) had driven down yields on debt investments to just above 0%.» Read More