People are told their rights when they're arrested. Consumers getting collection letters are entitled to the same courtesy.

Gary Weiss

Categorized in : People Letters Rights Courtesy

The media and marketing deluge has spawned a new type of Wall Street loser: the armchair momentum player. These are novice investors who engage in short-term stock buying and selling based on media reports or an expert's enthusiasm.

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MF Global used to be known as Man Financial, and it had a reasonably good reputation. It did a humdrum business placing commodities trades for fund managers as well as farmers, grain dealers and others whose livelihoods depend on the vagaries of commodity prices.

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Oil futures were originally created to give heating oil dealers, gas retailers, aviation companies and other businesses a method of hedging against adverse price changes. Instead, they've become just another Wall Street plaything.

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One problem with the focus on speculation is that it tends to promote the growth of the great intellectual cancer of our times: conspiracy theories.

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Newt Gingrich is a boastful kind of guy. But when it comes to Wall Street, the former House speaker is surprisingly modest.

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I'm not an ultra-libertarian who thinks there shouldn't be insider-trading laws at all.

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I found that options traders - the Amex was mainly an options exchange - routinely conspired to keep as wide as possible the spreads between the prices investors paid and the prices floor traders paid for the same securities.

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The heart of the 2008 financial crisis was a coterie of reckless financial executives, working for too-big-to-fail financial companies, who were handsomely compensated for taking risks that almost ruined the economy when they failed.

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If you think Wall Street has a short memory, you're dead wrong. No, the folks who work on Wall Street, regulate Wall Street - and, above all, invest in its wares, notably its hedge funds - don't have a bad memory. They don't have any memory at all.

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Excessive hype, bankruptcy, cash burning like autumn leaves - such is the stuff of short-selling.

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Some hedge fund managers have made big bucks trading oil futures - George Soros is one.

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With such enormous bucks devoted to trading in oil and other commodities, the distortions that they cause have been exacerbated.

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No other facet of American business is more corrupt, more intoxicated with illegality, more weakly regulated, and has a greater impact on poor and working people than debt collectors; not credit card companies or subprime mortgages, not even payday lenders.

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Beefs against debt collectors are consistently among the top complaints received by both the FTC and state attorneys general.

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Debt collectors should be required to disclose the applicable statute of limitations in the body of their collection letters, in bold type. While it's not illegal to dun a consumer for an old debt, it is illegal to sue for one.

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Insider trading by hedge funds has a long and distinguished history, dating to the days when people didn't know that there was such a thing as a hedge fund.

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Ordinarily, the feds piggyback on the S.E.C. in complicated financial cases, but history proves that breath-holding on that score is a dangerous endeavor.

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I've met Dick Syron. I like the guy. He's a man's man kind of character, a real charmer, the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with, as well as being an economist of considerable repute.

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When it comes to making laws that protect the public from the financial services industry, Congress has done a progressively worse job since the Pecora Commission hearings of the early 1930s, which led to Congress taking bold steps to regulate banking and securities firms in 1933 and 1934.

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For Randy Neugebauer, the Texas Republican who chairs the investigations subcommittee, the top sources of funding for his 2012 reelection campaign are from the insurance, banking, finance, securities and real estate industries.

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