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    D.M. Levine

    D.M. Levine

    Contributor

  • Commodities Trader 'Ecstatic' At Drought-Driven Corn Prices

    Since the beginning of June, the index he owns -- the Rogers International Commodities Index for Agriculture, or RICIA, has jumped 18 percent. Agricultural commodities prices are so low that farmers can’t make a good living, Rogers argued. “Are [farmers] going to work for nothing?

  • Crisis in Commodities

    Now, after the collapse of Peregrine Financial Group, commodities markets may be on the brink of their own emergency, which could reach consumers at the gas pump or the grocery store. The high-profile failure of two commodities brokerage firms in less than a year led to a crisis of confidence among traders of commodity futures -- agreements to buy and sell basic goods like corn, wheat and oil. If this market stops functioning properly, experts warn, consumer prices could fluctuate wildly.

  • Beyond His Tax Returns, What About Romney's Massive IRA?

    As Mitt Romney’s refusal to release further tax returns becomes a central issue in the presidential race, a related question first raised in January  remains stubbornly unanswered: How did Romney build such a massive individual retirement account? The size of the GOP presidential candidate's IRA is "very unusual," said Rebecca Wilkins, senior counsel for federal tax policy at the nonprofit advocacy group Citizens for Tax Justice.

  • Former PFG Employee 'Was Waiting For Something Like That To Happen'

    When Leon Bressert first heard that his former employer, Peregrine Financial Group, had collapsed amid fraud allegations, he was not surprised. Bressert, who worked at the Iowa-based commodities brokerage in IT and business development from 1998 to 2001, said that even back then, he had his doubts about the way PFG did business. The spending habits were weird,” said Bressert, who eventually joined rival commodities broker REFCO, which suffered its own financial scandal and closed its doors in 2005.

  • 'I Thought This Could Never Happen Again'

    When commodities brokerage firm MF Global collapsed last October, losing $1.6 billion in customer funds in the process, Christopher Dickerson was sure he'd dodged a bullet. Just one month before the collapse, Dickerson had taken the bulk of his money out of his MF Global account. "I was thankful to the Lord I'd pulled my money out," said Dickerson, who works at a coal mining company in West Virginia.

  • Guess Who Just Got Snagged In The Libor Scandal?

    As president of the New York Federal Reserve before and during the financial crisis, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner met repeatedly with Barclays officials, according to documents released by the bank and the New York Fed. The meetings raise questions about just how much Geithner, now the U.S. Treasury secretary, knew about the alleged manipulation of Libor, a critical interest rate that affects borrowing costs throughout the economy -- questions he'll have to answer at a Senate hearing later this month.

  • SEC Approves New NYSE 'Dark Pool' Trading Platform

    On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved  a new trading program at the New York Stock Exchange intended to compete with so-called dark pools, private stock trading venues operated by banks like Goldman Sachs and Citi Group as well as smaller companies. Dark pools are increasingly emerging as competitors to traditional stock exchanges but are generally closed off to the average investor. Details of the trades executed in dark pools are also often hidden from the public, unlike those on an exchange where the trading is done in the open.

  • Barclays Scandal Likely to Spread

    As the Libor manipulation scandal at British banking giant Barclays continues to escalate with the launch of a criminal probe, U.S. traders, former regulators and finance executives say other firms likely engaged in such behavior -- and that inquiries could even lead to jail time. On Friday, U.K. regulators announced that Britain's Serious Fraud Office is launching a criminal investigation into bank manipulation of the key global interest rate known as Libor. The announcement comes on the heels of Barclays' agreeing in late June to pay $450 million, admitting misconduct in connection with U.S. and U.K. regulators' charges that it had manipulated Libor to its own benefit.

  • New Bank Scandal Feeds Suspicions 'The Game Is Rigged'

    The ballooning interest rate manipulation scandal at Barclays, coupled with stock market instability, is likely to fuel fresh doubts about the integrity of the stock market, insiders said. “Every time people begin to gain a little confidence, something else comes up,” said Randy Frederick, managing director of active trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab. “If it’s not Europe, it’s [troubled] IPOs, or JPMorgan or Barclays.

  • Brokers: Sell Short!

    Some stock brokers seem to be feeling pessimistic about the market. Short selling is a technique traders use to profit when assets, such as stocks, lose value. Some brokers have recently been recommending short sales of prominent blue chip stocks like Nike, RIM and Chipotle, among others.

  • Lost Faith

    Americans are losing faith in the stock market, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Schapiro told Congress on Thursday. Investors have a "concern about the integrity of the marketplace," and U.S. markets are currently threatened with "an unwillingness [on the part of investors] to ever engage in the markets again," Schapiro told a House Oversight subcommittee, during a hearing on the SEC's implementation of the JOBS Act. People are unsure "whether they're getting accurate and honest information from [companies looking to list on exchanges]," she said, and unsure "whether the market structure itself is tilted against the individial investor and in favor the institutional investor." Schapiro added, "Those are all things we worry about all the time.

  • Lawsuit Claims CME Group Favors High-Frequency Trading Machines Over Humans

    A small band of humans is fighting what it warns is the rise of the machines in financial markets. A group of two dozen brokers and traders has sued CME Group, the owner of major commodities exchanges in New York and Chicago, arguing that a new rule that took effect on Monday would benefit high-frequency traders, favoring machines over people and putting hundreds of jobs at risk at futures and options exchange the Chicago Board of Trade. “A lot of people are going to lose their jobs,” said George Sang, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the suit.

  • Traders Probed For Buying And Selling To Selves

    U.S. regulators are reportedly probing whether high-frequency trading firms have been conducting transactions with themselves in a potentially illegal practice known as "wash trading" that may distort market prices. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are looking into whether high-frequency traders have been buying and selling contracts to themselves, according to Bloomberg, which cited two people with knowledge of the matter. Wash trading is a particular risk for high-frequency traders, which use computer algorithms to quickly trade stocks, bonds and derivatives contracts, because these firms often have multiple trading algorithms working at once, Bloomberg noted.

  • Are There Too Many Stock Exchanges?

    As stock market officials sound the alarm about rattled investor confidence in the wake of the botched Facebook initial public offering last month, some traders and other market experts say there's a basic problem contributing to the crisis: too many exchanges. "There's increasing competition over a smaller and smaller market," said David Weild, former vice chairman of Nasdaq and now chairman of Capital Markets Advisory Partners, an investment advisory firm. "You just don't have the stock trading volumes to support" them all, he said.

  • Market Regulator: We're Failing To Catch The 'Cheetahs'

    Regulators are trying to catch up with the "cheetahs." That's the nickname bestowed upon high-frequency traders by Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency trying to oversee the ultra-fast, computerized buying and selling of securities and derivatives. "We don't even know who is out there, and as a pedestrian first step, they simply ought to be registered so we at least know who they are," said Chilton on Wednesday at a daylong CFTC advisory committee meeting designed to lay the most preliminary groundwork for the CFTC to eventually monitor, and perhaps regulate, high-frequency trading. The Washington meeting came just over two years after a freak stock market crash on May 6, 2010, caused the Dow Jones Industrial average to lose 1,000 points in a matter of minutes (and recover its losses shortly thereafter).

  • Inside Traders May Not Heed Gupta Message

    The conviction of Rajat Gupta on insider trading charges is a real score for government prosecutors -- maybe the biggest such conviction in history. It will also probably barely deter other people from insider trading. "I think for the next few days people will talk about Gupta, and for the next few days they will be more thoughtful about their actions," said Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business.

  • Jury Convicts Ex-Goldman Director Of Insider Trading

    Jurors in a Manhattan federal court Friday found former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta guilty of conspiracy and securities fraud, only two days after closing arguments ended in the closely watched insider trading case. Gupta, 63, was found guilty of passing on nonpublic information from Goldman Sachs board meetings to now-jailed hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, but the jury didn't convict him on two charges, including an allegation that Gupta had also leaked information about discussions of the Procter & Gamble board, on which he also served.

  • Insider Trading Defense Questions Goldman CEO's Credibility

    Prosecutors and defense lawyers offered starkly differing profiles Wednesday of Rajat K. Gupta during closing arguments in the former Goldman Sachs board member's insider trading trial. "Rajat Gupta abused his position as a company insider," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Tarlowe in an impassioned summation as he stood before the federal court Wednesday morning. Gupta's alleged leaks of secret Goldman information to his hedge fund friend helped feed an insider trading operation to "cheat average investors,” the prosecutor said.

  • Defense Rests In Rajat Gupta's Insider-Trading Trial

    The defense rested its case on Tuesday, the final day of testimony in the insider-trading trial of former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat K. Gupta. With the prosecution having rested its case on Friday, Judge Jed Rakoff gave jurors the rest of the day off, in part so that prosecutors and the Gupta defense team could prepare their closing arguments, scheduled to begin on Wednesday morning. Rajat Gupta is on trial in federal court in downtown Manhattan on charges that, on a number of occasions, he passed along key inside information gleaned from Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble board meetings to Galleon Management founder Raj Rajaratnam, who then illegally used that information in trades.

  • Goldman CEO Blankfein Tells Jurors Some Wall Street Secrets Spill

    One question at the heart of the Rajat K. Gupta insider trading trial is whether information the former Goldman Sachs board member allegedly disclosed to hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam was secret. As Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein spent a third day on the witness stand in federal court in Manhattan on Friday, Gupta's lawyers sought to raise doubts about whether the allegedly leaked information was already public. Gupta, also former chief of consulting firm McKinsey & Co, is accused of telling the now-jailed Rajaratnam about a June 2008 Goldman board meeting in in St. Petersberg, Russia. Blankfein testified earlier that the board discussed purchasing either a bank or the insurance giant AIG -- major information to a Goldman Sachs investor -- and Blankfein said it was strictly confidential.