The SEC is investigating whether Merrill Lynch (MER) and Charles Schwab Corp. (SCHW) did not recognize signs that that some of their customers might have been laundering money because they didn’t do enough to find out who these clients were. Some of the purported money laundering has been linked to…
Credit Suisse (C) will pay $2.6 billion to the federal government and financial regulators in New York after pleading guilty to charges that it illegally helped thousands of American clients avoid paying taxes to the Internal Revenue Service. The U.S. Department of Justice said that for decades through 2009 the…
Goldman Sachs (GS) Group Inc. said it is under scrutiny in probes related to high-frequency trading and whether its hiring practices comply US antibribery laws. This is the first time the firm has publicly disclosed both investigations. The information was made available via Goldman’s quarterly filing with the SEC. In…
Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC (MS) will pay a $5 million fine for supervisory failures involving its advisors soliciting shares in 83 IPOs to retail investors. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority says that the firm lacked the proper training and procedures to make sure that salespersons knew the difference between…
The Federal Reserve says that for now Bank of America (BAC) has to suspend its plans to give money back to shareholders because it did not correctly report capital ratios on recent stress tests. The mistake was a result of an “incorrect adjustment” connected to bad debts that the bank…
According to InvestmentNews, some of the largest asset managers in the world are complaining that draft proposals for identifying financial institutions besides insurers and banks that may be too big to fail would employ an erroneous analysis of the investment industry. Fidelity Investment, Pacific Investment Management Co.(PIMCO), BlackRock Inc. (BLK),…
Joe Price, the ex-chief finance officer of Bank of America Corp. (BAC) has consented to pay $7.5 million to settle allegations by the state of New York that the bank and its ex-executives misled investors over losses that were happening at Merrill Lynch even as shareholders were getting ready to…
In a victory for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, its Board of Governors has determined that Charles Schwab & Co. (SCHW) violated the self-regulatory organization’s rules when it added waiver language to agreements that prohibited customers from becoming part of any class action cases against the financial firm. Schwab has…
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York says that Barclays Plc (BARC) shareholders can go ahead with their securities lawsuit claiming that the British bank caused them to suffer financial losses over manipulation of Libor. The ruling reverses a lower court’s decision. The London Interbank Offered Rate…
Bloomberg is reporting that U.S. prosecutors want Bank of America Corp. (BAC) to settle state and federal investigations into the lender’s sale of home loan-backed bonds leading up to the 2008 financial crisis by paying over $13 billion. The bank is one of at least eight financial institutions that the…