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HomeCalling All Auction-Rate Securities Holders: “A Break for 8 Banks” or Did the Fed Violate Your Property Rights?
Posted by Larry Doyle on April 14th, 2011 5:48 PM |
New information would seem to implicate the Federal Reserve for violating the property rights of tens of thousands of investors holding auction-rate securities. Could this be true? Let’s navigate.
I have been writing about the nightmare known as auction-rate securities since mid-January 2009. I often pause to reflect on ARS holders whom I have ‘met’ here at Sense on Cents but whom I will never truly know. I think of how their lives have been forever changed and negatively impacted from having been entangled in this ARS web. The pain shared in so many stories is very real.
I have also often thought that somebody or some institution within our government sacrificed the welfare (cash, mental, physical, emotional) of so many tens of thousands of individual ARS holders in order to help our large financial institutions. I shared that opinion in the midst of an interview with PBS last week. (The PBS documentary addressing the ARS travesty should run this summer.)
Today we learn that the Federal Reserve intervened in the midst of an SEC investigation of the ARS scandal in mid-2008 and ‘slowed the horses.’ (more…)
How Did FINRA Know the ARS Market Was Failing Well Before 2007?
Posted by Larry Doyle on December 1st, 2010 10:24 PM |
If you knew a market were starting to fail, would you step in and purchase that asset?
If that market were failing, but simultaneously being propped up by underwriters, do you believe regulators should protect you?
If that market were failing and a regulator charged with protecting you actually dumped some of those failing assets from its own portfolio, how would you feel?
If you owned some of these securities, do you think you might be protected by the regulator? The government?
Let’s reenter the world of auction rate securities and continue to bang the drum for those investors in America who have been so badly mistreated by the financial industry, the regulators charged with protecting them, and our government.
Although I have written voluminously on the auction-rate securities market, I was never fully aware of when auctions started to fail. Until now. (more…)
