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Moore Capital Fined $25 Million By CFTC For Platinum And Palladium Price Manipulation
The FT reports that "the CFTC fined Moore Capital, the hedge fund led by Louis Bacon, $25m to settle allegations that it attempted to manipulate platinum and palladium prices from November 2007 through to May 2008." If the suit was settled at this near-record fine, one wonders just how bad it would have been had the CFTC allowed this to go to trial. In other news, the PM markets are perfectly unmanipulated and the LBMA has never done anything illegal.
More from the FT:
The regulator said a Moore portfolio manager engaged in a practice known as “banging the close” in the New York platinum and palladium futures market. The technique involves entering orders in a manner designed to inflate the closing price. The hedge fund was charged with supervisory failures.
Moore said the alleged manipulation involved a trader who left the hedge fund in late 2008. “We are committed to high standards of integrity in our business practices,” the company said in a statement.
Morgan Stanley, was also fined, this time not for PM manipulation unlike before, but for that of oil:
Morgan Stanley, Wall Street’s second largest commodities dealer, agreed to pay a $14m penalty to settle claims that a trader at the bank in February 2009 hid a large trade on the New York Mercantile Exchange crude oil market. Swiss bank UBS was a broker on the transaction and was fined $200,000.
Morgan Stanley and UBS entered into a large trade, buying 33,110 contracts of West Texas Intermediate crude for delivery in March 2009 and selling the same amount simultaneously for April 2009. Each contract equals 1,000 barrels.
The Morgan Stanley trader and a UBS broker agreed not to report the trade until the market closed, breaking exchange rules that require trades to be reported within five minutes of execution, according to the CFTC.
As the saying goes, if you look around the table, and you can't figure out who is using illegal manipulative mechanisms to push the market higher or lower, you are an idiot: the answer is all of them.
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Another rogue trader defense.
I wish the US would start hanging these crooks instead of just fining them.
They don't fine people who rob banks.
Hardly more than a slap on the wrist compared to what they probably made on the trades. Why not a fine and a suspension?
Pocket change.
Any news on the Optiver case yet? Wondering what fine they'll have to swallow. Their Algo with the brillant name (The Hammer) should be good for 30 Mio.
Covering some shorts, Jamie?
http://www.kitco.com/charts/popup/au24hr3day.html
If PMs are essentially a bet on fiat devaluation, I am curious as to what is the longest time period a fiat has held up with out devaluing. Anyone?
Disintermediation, bitches!!!!!!!!!!!
"Moore said the alleged manipulation involved a trader who left the hedge fund in late 2008."
The (alleged) lone gunman..........................who then escaped out the back door, presumably with his or her bonus.
"The technique involves entering orders in a manner designed to inflate the closing price."
So they took a leaf out of the US Government's operating book - so what?
+1
+11.
This is just a variant of the government sponsored SPY manipulation that has been happening for days on end since March 2009.
How genuine.
They'll make it up in management fees. Slap on the wrist, back to business.
interesting read from Gata this morning
http://gata.org/node/8591
Taibbi hasn't responded to GATA directly but his latest essay for Rolling Stone, "The Feds vs. Goldman Sachs," published in the magazine's May 13 issue, which was posted on the Internet this week --
http://tinyurl.com/3xgpo6m
-- contains a paragraph suggesting that he has at least noted what he has heard from this quarter. Taibbi writes:
"There is more fraud out there, and everyone knows it: front-running, manipulation of the commodities markets, trading ahead of interest-rate moves, hidden losses, Enron-esque accounting, Ponzi schemes in the precious-metals markets, you name it. We gave these people nearly a trillion bailout dollars, and no one knows what service they actually provide beyond fraud, gross self-indulgence and the occasional transparently insincere public apology."
"Manipulation of the commodities markets" and "Ponzi schemes in the precious-metals markets," eh? Well, it's a start. Let's hope Taibbi follows up. But regardless of whether he does, GATA is aware of three major newspapers that have begun making serious inquiries about the gold and silver price suppression scheme. Whoever gets to it first will have the financial story of the century, revealing the secret knowledge of the financial universe.
Newspapers...serious inquiries? It is 2010 for crying out loud! You obviously don't know any current "journalists" personally. Fletch is dead.
Here is what a serious inquiry sounds like:
I love Taibbi's writing style, hopefully he will address it in a separate article.
I'm not sure what are the newpapers referred to, maybe it is foreign news sources. I could see Bloomberg looking into it (since they sued the fed for disclosure) and started a monthly magazine recently.
One thing I have noticed, since the CFTC hearings, silver has been steadly moving.
Ah. The rigors of the PM markets. Or riggers.......
And that is one big reason why they must keep the game going. The majority of the Western countries are insolvent and it was done via manipulating the markets to make a handful of individuals on the planet rich. The lone trader or the lone accountant did it, yea right. You mean to tell me that a rich CEO like whoever put that much trust in someone that they will allow them to make massive billion dollar deals without his signature or go ahead no way. If thats the case then I want to be a trader to for a big investment house so I can manipulate and hide big deals to make my fortune and then scuttle away a year before it implodes. They can't have their cake and eat it too, You can't say that these people and CEO's are brilliant and then on the flip side when something happens, I didn't know or how could anyone know or I'm human it could have happened to anybody. The people in the West and especially in the US are going to get a shock so profound, that they will truly know that they where suckers and chumps.
what's Soros been doing for years ?????