Subscribe to this blog's feedGotham's finest go into action:
Commodity-market regulators are investigating whether energy-market players are injecting false data into the marketplace to influence perceptions about crude-oil supply and demand...Among the periods the agency is examining, these people say, is a rapid shift in the structure of oil markets in July 2007. Price relationships flipped in a way that was extremely profitable for traders who may have had close knowledge of continuing and rapid drain-off in oil inventories. Oil for near-term delivery had been selling at a discount to oil to be delivered months and years into the future. Suddenly, oil for immediate delivery became much more expensive when a glut of oil at a key hub at Cushing, Okla. rapidly drained.
Interestingly, they dismissed speculation as a factor back in July.
And the SEC is also getting busy:
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has accused two Credit Suisse brokers of duping their customers into buying more than $1 billion of subprime-backed auction rate securities (ARS).Julian Tzolov and Eric Butler told their customers the ARS were backed by student loans, which carry a government guarantee. In fact, they were based on much riskier underlying assets such as subprime mortgages and collateralised debt obligations, the SEC said. Such a deception would have paid off for the brokers, as student loan ARS deals carry only relatively small commissions compared with the riskier subprime ARS.
Comedy fraud moment coming up:
The SEC quoted emails from the two brokers to their customers in which the names of the securities had apparently been altered: for example, a security issued by Greenpoint Credit, backed by mobile home loans, was described as being issued by "Greenpoint Student Assistance", and securities issued by Calamos Strategic Total Return Fund and Glacier Funding CDO were in turn described as "Calamos Student Loan Authority" and "Glacier Education Loan" notes.
Much more in the original complaint here.
