I don’t think anyone was surprised to learn that major banks including JPMorgan, Citigroup, Barclays, RBS, and UBS conspired to manipulate currency prices — something that regulators have been investigating for over a year and a half. One common strategy was cooperating to time large transactions in order to manipulate daily benchmark rates at which other client transactions are executed.
U.S. Accuses Ex-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Paying to Hide ‘Misconduct’
Mr. Hastert also resigned from the board of the CME Group, the Chicago-based operator of one of the world’s largest futures and derivatives exchanges, a spokeswoman said.
Wall Street Is Using the Power of Dodd-Frank Against Itself
Rent-seeking tends to be a force against innovation and for stagnancy, in large part because its focus is on the past — on maintaining power and influence gained long ago, often at the expense of innovation. Businesses built around rent-seeking don’t try to increase the size of the pie; they just want to make sure they get a bigger slice. (If a company doesn’t seem to care about your opinion of it as a customer, there’s a good chance that it is seeking rents.)
.. The depth of the inquiry was notable because the school is generally thought of as a Wall Street-friendly training ground for future bankers. One of the most striking findings was that between 1980 and 2000, the large banks in America had significantly moved away from productivity enhancement and toward rent-seeking.
.. To fight rent-seeking, we would need banking laws made up of straightforward rules that educated laypeople could understand. They would have to eliminate our maddeningly complex regulatory infrastructure. There would be trade-offs: The financial system might not perform as efficiently, and the economy might not grow as quickly during boom times. But if done right, an overhaul of banking regulations could create a political context in which rent-seeking self-enrichment by banks is no longer the norm. We might even come to call it what it is: corruption.
House of Secrets: Who owns London’s most expensive mansion?
A recent investigation by the Financial Times found that more than a hundred billion pounds’ worth of real estate in England and Wales is owned by offshore companies. London properties account for two-thirds of that amount. Charles Moore, a former editor of the Telegraph, says that London’s property market has become “a form of legalized international money laundering.”
.. Witanhurst has always been an attractive place to park new money.
.. In recent years, more than seventy per cent of newly built properties in central London have been bought by foreign investors—often for cash.
.. I observed that there was a vogue for digging out enormous basements beneath London properties—creating so-called “iceberg houses”—and asked him if he approved.
.. Litvinenko is the rector of St. Petersburg Mining Institute, the small university where Putin acquired his Ph.D.—with a thesis later found to have been heavily plagiarized. Both Andrey Guryev and his son, Andrey Guryev, Jr., who is now the C.E.O. of PhosAgro, also received degrees there.