New York’s test for legal insanity: "a person is not responsible for criminal conduct if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law." The mental disease or defect requires a mental diagnosis. Madoff’s years of secrecy about his actions seems inconsistent with an insanity defense.
Better, perhaps, can Madoff receive a fair trial anywhere in the English speaking world?
If you thought Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion investment scheme was audacious, get ready for his alibi. Lawyers for the accused scammer are exploring an insanity defense, we hear.
“Bernie’s family and his attorneys may argue that, somewhere along the line, he had a mental break,” says a Madoff acquaintance. “They may even say he has a multiple personality disorder.”
Madoff’s grip on reality does show signs of slipping. The 70-year-old financier, now a prisoner of his East Side penthouse, wore a weird smile when he was photographed shortly after his Dec. 12 arrest…
“He seems really out of it,” says a source, who believes Madoff’s family fears he’ll follow the example of Rene-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, the Madoff client who slit his wrists last week. “He has a very low affect. Bernie barely speaks…
He could argue that Madoff committed the fraud during manic, euphoric periods and that he never found the equilibrium to correct his crime. Or that he was so delusional that he convinced himself the investment returns were real. You might also plead that he was incapacitated by some character disorder, like a malignant narcissism stemming from an early-life trauma.
“Insanity defenses rarely work,” Ablow notes. “But if you can influence just one juror, he may stand a chance.”
No doubt people will call him crazy like a fox and recall mobster Vincent (Chin) Gigante, who tried to escape jail by mumbling and stumbling around the streets in his bathrobe.
Top criminal attorney Edward Hayes doesn’t think it will fly: “Madoff admitted to his sons that he knew it was a Ponzi scheme…"
“We hope to do to this industry what Wal-Mart did to theirs, Starbucks did to theirs, Costco did to theirs and Lowe’s-Home Depot did to their industry. And I think if we’ve done our job, five years from now you’re not going to call us a bank.”
As a supervisor at a Washington Mutual mortgage processing center, John D. Parsons was accustomed to seeing baby sitters claiming salaries worthy of college presidents, and schoolteachers with incomes rivaling stockbrokers’. He rarely questioned them. A real estate frenzy was under way and WaMu, as his bank was known, was all about saying yes.
Yet even by WaMu’s relaxed standards, one mortgage four years ago raised eyebrows. The borrower was claiming a six-figure income and an unusual profession: mariachi singer.
Mr. Parsons could not verify the singer’s income, so he had him photographed in front of his home dressed in his mariachi outfit. The photo went into a WaMu file. Approved.
“I’d lie if I said every piece of documentation was properly signed and dated,” said Mr. Parsons, speaking through wire-reinforced glass at a California prison near here, where he is serving 16 months for theft after his fourth arrest — all involving drugs.
While Mr. Parsons, whose incarceration is not related to his work for WaMu, oversaw a team screening mortgage applications, he was snorting methamphetamine daily, he said.
“In our world, it was tolerated,” said Sherri Zaback, who worked for Mr. Parsons and recalls seeing drug paraphernalia on his desk. “Everybody said, ‘He gets the job done.’ ”
At WaMu, getting the job done meant lending money to nearly anyone who asked for it — the force behind the bank’s meteoric rise and its precipitous collapse this year in the biggest bank failure in American history.
Are we now in danger of losing Milton Friedman’s legacy to the mindless adoption of a socialistic imperative?
"When Friedman’s Platonic ideas of free-market virtues are put into practice, they have too often generated a systemic orgy of competitive greed — whose remedies, ironically, entail countermeasures of nationalization,” Marshall Sahlins.
What do our readers think — has the devastating unraveling of our financial system during this past year changed any of your beliefs? - Ilene
John Cochrane was steaming as word of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s plan to buy $700 billion in troubled mortgage assets rippled across the University of Chicago in September. Cochrane had been teaching at the bastion of free-market economics for 14 years and this struck at everything that he — and the school — stood for.
“We all wandered the hallway thinking, How could this possibly make sense?” says Cochrane, 51, recalling his incredulity at Paulson’s attempt to prop up the mortgage industry and the banks that had precipitated the housing market’s boom and bust.
During a lunch held on a balcony with a view of Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, Cochrane, son-in-law of Chicago efficient-market theorist Eugene Fama, and some colleagues made their stand.
They wrote a petition attacking Paulson’s proposal, sent it to economists nationwide and collected 230 signatures. Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama waved the document as he scorned the rescue. When Congress rejected it on Sept. 29, Cochrane fired off congratulatory e-mails.
The victory was short-lived. Lawmakers approved the plan four days later, swayed by what Cochrane calls a pinata of pork-barrel amendments.
“We should have a recession,” Cochrane said in November, speaking to students and investors in a conference room that looks out on Lake Michigan. “People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do.”
Unusual Role
At the University of Chicago, once ascendant free-market acolytes are finding themselves in an unusual role: They’re battling a wave of government intervention more…
Economic pain that has been hitting the financial economy and the brick and mortar retailers is hitting Silicon Valley as well. Many chip companies are short of cash and layoffs are increasing. Let’s kick off the review with Hynix Gets 800 Billion Won Aid Package From Creditors.
Hynix Semiconductor Inc., the world’s second-largest maker of computer memory chips, gained 800 billion won ($590 million) of financial support from creditors to stay in business as falling prices threaten a record loss at the company.
Controlling shareholders will provide 500 billion won in fresh loans and extend the maturity of Hynix’s debt until the end of 2009, main creditor Korea Exchange Bank said today. Ichon, Korea-based Hynix will also sell 300 billion won of new stock on the market that creditors will buy if unsold, Korea Exchange said.
Hynix’s creditors have pumped in fresh funds in hopes of recouping the remainder of their $4.6 billion bailout of the chipmaker this decade by selling their stake when the industry recovers.
"With additional funding and a recovery in the second half of next year, the possibility of a liquidity crisis at Hynix is pretty low compared to smaller rivals," Kim Young Chan, an analyst at HMC Investment Securities Co., wrote in a report yesterday. Kim, who has a "buy" rating on Hynix, projects the chipmaker will return to profit in the third quarter of 2009.
The company held about $1 billion in cash as of Sept. 30, Daiwa Institute of Research Ltd. estimated this month. Still, Hynix had net debt of $5.5 billion at the end of September, the most among the eight biggest computer-memory makers, Daiwa said.
Prices of the benchmark dynamic random access memory chip have fallen 59 percent this year to below the cost of production. The DRAM glut will probably persist throughout next year, UBS AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co. predict.
Anyone predicting a recovery in the second half of the year is not thinking too clearly. Extending more loans is throwing good money after…
Here’s another piece by Tim Iacono at The Mess That Greenspan Made citing Peter Schiff (who predicted this credit crisis). Tim and Peter seem to agree that there is no easy way out of a broken economy, while government fixes will only do so much.
That second to last page in the first section of the Wall Street Journal continues to offer up commentary that you just don’t see elsewhere in the mainstream media.
Over the last month or so, as it has become increasingly clear that our monetary system may be at the root of many of our current problems, there were at least three calls for a new monetary order, all of which involved gold in some way. See the following references from back in November:
(Hmm… maybe I should be more demanding when crafting the titles to these posts – it seems to have had the desired effect.)
Today, Peter Schiff weighs in with some quite sensible arguments regarding the recent mania in economic stimulus programs around the world, figuring that maybe the free market would be better off deciding who wins and loses rather than governments.
As recession fears cause the nation to embrace greater state control of the economy and unimaginable federal deficits, one searches in vain for debate worthy of the moment. Where there should be an historic clash of ideas, there is only blind resignation and an amorphous queasiness that we are simply sweeping the slouching beast under the rug.
With faith in the free markets now taking a back seat to fear and expediency, nearly the entire political spectrum agrees that the federal government must spend whatever amount is necessary to stabilize the housing market, bail out financial firms, liquefy the credit markets, create jobs and make the recession as shallow and brief as possible. The few who maintain free-market views have been largely marginalized.
It is rather remarkable that the only discussion you…
In today’s commentary at Bloomberg, Michael Sesit consults with the "Bond King" on what many call the biggest and baddest bubble of them all – U.S. debt.
To Bill Gross, co-chief investment officer of Newport Beach, California-based Pacific Investment Management Co., the answer is yes. “Treasuries have some bubble characteristics, certainly the Treasury bill does,” Gross said earlier this month. “A Treasury bill at zero percent is overvalued. Who could argue with that in terms of the return relative to the risk? There is no return.”…
The bursting of a bubble in the U.S. government bond market would be a perilous event.
First, it would cause large losses for millions of investors, especially U.S. retirees who regard Treasury securities as the ultimate safe investment.
Second, it might threaten Treasuries’ status as the global “risk-free asset” and would damage the international stature of the U.S. Foreigners, who own about half of all Treasuries, might stop funding the country’s growing trade and budget deficits without an increase in U.S. interest rates.
Finally, a busted Treasury-market bubble could undermine the dollar’s global reserve-currency status, which in turn would spell higher U.S. interest rates, undercutting economic growth.
As difficult as these conditions are, however, the Obama administration also inherits an economy with great potential for the medium and long terms. Investments in an array of areas — including energy, education, infrastructure and health care — offer the potential of extraordinarily high social returns…
In this crisis, doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much. Any sound economic strategy in the current context must be directed at both creating the jobs … and doing the work that our economy requires. … Our president-elect … is crafting a broad proposal, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, to support the jobs and incomes essential for recovery while also making a down payment on our nation’s long-term financial health.
A key pillar of the Obama plan is job creation. In the face of deteriorating economic forecasts, Obama has revised his goal upward, to 3 million. …. The Obama plan represents not new public works but, rather, investments that will work for the American public. Investments to build the classrooms, laboratories and libraries our children need to meet 21st-century educational challenges. Investments to help reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil by spurring renewable energy initiatives… Investments to put millions of Americans back to work rebuilding our roads, bridges and public transit systems. Investments to modernize our health-care system, which is … key to driving down costs across the board. …
We must focus not on ideology but on drawing the best ideas from all quarters. That is why, for example, in key sectors such as energy, Obama is pushing for both public investments and the removal of barriers to private investment. It is also why his plan relies on both government spending and tax cuts to raise incomes and promote recovery. …
There will be no earmarks. Investments will be chosen … based on what yields the highest rate of return for the economy and monitored closely not just by officials but also by the public…
There’s much discussion occurring regarding the triangle formation occurring in the major US Equity Indexes. Let’s focus for a moment on the DIA (Dow Jones ETF) and see this triangle in action.
DIA Daily chart:
The structure is still the same – price is in a confirmed downtrend with price making lower lows and lower highs, and the orientation of the key daily moving averages is in the most bearish position possible (20 beneath the 50 which is beneath the 200).
There are two interesting divergences playing out and perhaps resolving: First is the positive momentum divergence that set-in on the November price lows which preceded the current ‘rally,’ while the second divergence is the non-confirmation from volume into the recent rally – albeit we are experiencing “holiday volume” which throws off volume analytics for the time being.
The 50 day EMA continues to supply price resistance, while price meanders through its flat 20 day EMA. Moving averages have less significance generally when they are ‘flat,’ or the market is in a consolidation phase (as is evidenced by the current price contraction which resembles a triangle formation).
It would be significant if price could break above the $90 level or beneath support at the $80 level.
Let’s pull the perspective back and add in a key possible Elliott Wave count.
DIA Weekly Chart (with selected Elliott Waves):
I’ve simplified this chart because I want you to focus closely on the triangle pattern that has formed on the chart – it’s much more evident in the weekly chart than the daily.
Whatever you want to call this move, it is clear that it is a consolidation pattern that can also be known as a “corrective” or ‘counter-trend’ structure.
Going back to the price structure, price remains in a persistent downtrend which is confirmed by the structure of the key weekly moving averages (again, now in the ‘most bearish orientation’ possible).
This Elliott Wave count assumes that we are still in the larger scale Wave 3 down which has been horrendously destructive to investors, and that fractal Wave 5 is perhaps yet
Jacob Zamansky argues that the SEC’s chronic failure to act in the Madoff case is a call for new regulation promoting transparency, full disclosure and an end to conflicts of interest.
The alleged Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Bernie Madoff should be the death-knell for the SEC. The SEC ignored numerous red flags waved by investors going back ten years. It was a not-so-well-kept secret across Wall Street that Mr. Madoff’s reported returns were fictitious and in 2001, Barron’s published a story entitled, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; Bernie Madoff is so secretive, he even asks investors to keep mum.”
The signs were there. Period. And the SEC decided to lazily ignore the problem and is continuing to claim jurisdictional road blocks. It argued that Mr. Madoff didn’t register as an investment advisor, but that is not true. He was registered in 2006 and the SEC was required to examinie his operation then, and every five years thereafter.
In light of its recent performance, to make excuses at this point this is nothing less than insulting to investors.
Our financial regulatory system has failed. Therefore, steps must be taken to correct the problem now. If the United States wishes to remain the financial capital of the world, we must take a leadership role immediately.
Many factors such as securitization, leverage, asset bubbles, conflicts and outright fraud contributed to the economy’s downfall. But in general, I believe that it is self-regulation and inadequate oversight that provided the essential glue for the confluence of issues that have led to the economy’s collapse. One needs to not look any further than the fact that Bernie Madoff himself presided over the NASDAQ, which at the time served as one of the key financial regulators overseeing him and those of his ilk. Moreover, he was able to perpetrate his alleged schemes knowing the SEC was asleep at the wheel.
Nearly at every turn there are examples of Wall Street’s influence over regulation:
For example, in 2002 Wall Street successfully lobbied the SEC to adopt directives that would be “equivalent” to proposed European Union (E.U.) regulation that would have put the big five U.S. investment banks under the umbrella of E.U. regulatory authority. In response, the SEC, perhaps unwittingly, created as
As far back as 2001 questions were being raised about Madoff’s funds and alleged performance but apparently not by the SEC. The questions made it to Barrons. Here’s the article. H/T to Michael Covel.
BARRONS, Monday, May 7, 2001
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Bernie Madoff is so secretive, he even asks investors to keep mum
By ERIN E. ARVEDLUND
Bernie Madoff might as well hang that sign on his secretive hedge-fund empire. Even adoring investors can’t explain his enviably steady gains.
Two years ago, at a hedge-fund conference in New York, attendees were asked to name some of their favorite and most-respected hedge-fund managers. Neither George Soros nor Julian Robertson merited a single mention. But one manager received lavish praise: Bernard Madoff.
Folks on Wall Street know Bernie Madoff well. His brokerage firm, Madoff Securities, helped kick-start the Nasdaq Stock Market in the early 1970s and is now one of the top three market makers in Nasdaq stocks. Madoff Securities is also the third-largest firm matching buyers and sellers of New York Stock Exchange-listed securities. Charles Schwab, Fidelity Investments and a slew of discount brokerages all send trades through Madoff.
Some folks on Wall Street think there’s more to how Madoff (above) generates his enviable stream of investment returns than meets the eye. Madoff calls these claims “ridiculous.” But what few on the Street know is that Bernie Madoff also manages $6 billion-to-$7 billion for wealthy individuals. That’s enough to rank Madoff’s operation among the world’s three largest hedge funds, according to a May 2001 report in MAR Hedge, a trade publication.
What’s more, these private accounts, have produced compound average annual returns of 15% for more than a decade. Remarkably, some of the larger, billion-dollar Madoff-run funds have never had a down year.
When Barron’s asked Madoff Friday how he accomplishes this, he said, “It’s a proprietary strategy. I can’t go into it in great detail.”
Nor were the firms that market Madoff’s funds forthcoming when contacted earlier. “It’s a private fund. And so our inclination has been not to discuss its returns,” says Jeffrey Tucker, partner and co-founder of Fairfield Greenwich, a New York City-based hedge-fund marketer. “Why Barron’s would have any interest in this fund I don’t know.” One of Fairfield Greenwich’s…
Excerpted from Jacob Steen's Chronicle blog at Tradingfloor.com,
The mystique of the Bermuda Triangle has caught the imagination and interest of generations. In much the same way it has also caught my attention and I feel that now there is a Bermuda Triangle of economics - a space where everything tends to disappear without radar contact, a black hole in which rationality and science is replaced by hope, superstition and nonsense pundits like myself pretending to understand the real drivers of the economy.
The Bermuda Triangle in real life runs from Bermuda to Puerto Rico to Miami. The economic one runs from high stock mark...
Timing the market and picking stocks doesn't work for most people, according to Gerard Minack, an investment strategist departing Morgan Stanley with a final farewell note full of advice.
Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
The $OEXA200R Monthly (the percentage of S&P 100 stocks above their 200 DMA) is a technical indicator available on StockCharts.com used to find the "sweet spot" time period in the market when you have the best chance of making money. See Is This the Best Stock Market Indicator Ever? for a discussion of this technical tool.
The charts below are current through the week's close.
U.S. equity futures traded slightly lower in early pre-market trade following mixed economic data out of the eurozone. The moves follow basically flat trading on Wall Street from Monday after futures rallied into the open following weaker than expected Chinese data.
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In other news around the markets:
The German ZEW Economic Sentiment Index rose to 36.4 in May from 36.3 in April but missed expectations of a gain to 38.3. The current conditions index was also weak and over 77 percent of respondents said they do not expect another rate cut in the next six months.
To learn more, sign up for David's free newsletter and receive the free report from All About Trends - "How To Outperform 90% Of Wall Street With Just $500 A Week." Tell David PSW sent you. - Ilene...
It seems that every Tuesday in 2013 since January 8 has been positive on the Dow. And this past Tuesday was no exception. Now that sounds like a trend to put money on -- buy the SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF (DIA) at the close each Monday and close out the position late on Tuesday.
The Dow and S&P 500 both hit new all-time highs once again on Wednesday, while the Nasdaq hit its highest level since November 2000. The “risk on” allocation of new investment capital into cyclicals continues, although Wednesday saw leadership from defensive sectors Consumer Staples, Utilities, and Telecom, along with Financials. Nevertheless, ConvergEx reports that the average correlation of the ten S&P business sectors to the overall index averaged 82% last month. While that is below the 86% averag...
BMY - Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. – Shares in drug maker, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., are ripping higher today, up 6.5% at $44.94, the highest level in more than a decade, ahead of the release of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2013 Annual Meeting abstracts tonight. The ASCO Annual Meeting begins on May 31st in Chicago. Options on BMY are far more active than usual today, with overall volume topping 64,000 contracts by 12:25 p.m. ET, versus average daily volume of around 11,400 c...
We are starting to see some very extreme readings on our monthly and weekly index charts since there has been no correction this year. I posted below first the monthly chart of the S&P 500 going back 15 years showing bollinger bands – rarely do we get above the upper one, and never have we been this far above. Then below that I posted (with 4 charts of 4 years each) the weekly data and you can see we are at a rare time we are above the weekly bollinger band as well. This non stop rally is getting very historical.
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Stock market posts another record setting week, but the big news came after Friday’s close.
Courtesy of NASA
The stock market put on another record setting show with the Dow Jones Industrial Average (NYSEARCA:DIA) closing at a record high 15,118 and the S&P 500 (NYSEARCA:SPY) closing at 1633.70, another all time closing high.
For the week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (NYSEARCA:DIA) gained 1%, the S&P 500 (NYSEARCA:SPY) climbed 1.2%, the Nasdaq Composite (NYSEARCA:...
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Well, well, well....it is good to know that there are others in the scientific arena who believed that YMI Bioscience's data (cough - Gilead) is a better drug than Incyte's Jakafi. Now, the definitive data are still unknown, but there was enough evidence from a Phase 2 trial to take a small risk for a huge reward. So, let's forget about Apple (AAPL), and do nothing but biotechs from now until Congress passes universal health care coverage for prescriptions....and drive the prices down so that research and development is no longer feasible to conduct in the US. Even Seattle Genetics (SGEN) has been on a tear as of late...
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Tim and Peter seem to agree that there is no easy way out of a broken economy, while government fixes will only do so much.
For example, in 2002 Wall Street successfully lobbied the SEC to adopt directives that would be “equivalent” to proposed European Union (E.U.) regulation that would have put the big five U.S. investment banks under the umbrella of E.U. regulatory authority. In response, the SEC, perhaps unwittingly, created as
German
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Japanese
Korean
Russian
Chinese
Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
(