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from the money-money-money-moooooneeyy dept.
The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC has agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle charges it used trades involving customer cash to lower the firm's borrowing costs in violation of the SEC's Customer Protection Rule.
[...] According to the SEC's order, Morgan Stanley had its affiliate, Morgan Stanley Equity Financing Ltd., serve as a customer of its U.S. broker-dealer, a relationship that allowed the affiliate to use margin loans from the U.S. broker-dealer to finance the costs of hedging swap trades with customers. The margin loans lowered the borrowing costs incurred to hedge these swap trades and reduced the U.S. broker-dealer's customer reserve account deposit requirements by tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per day.
The SEC order finds that Morgan Stanley's affiliated transactions violated the Customer Protection Rule and that as a result of inaccurately calculating its customer reserve account requirements, it submitted inaccurate reports to the SEC. Morgan Stanley provided substantial cooperation during the SEC's investigation and has agreed to review its compliance with the Customer Protection Rule and to take remedial steps to improve its calculation processes. Morgan Stanley also significantly increased the amount of excess funds it maintains in its customer reserve account.
Source: The Securities and Exchange Commission
(Score: 1) by RS3 on Wednesday December 21 2016, @10:10PM
I meant to add: I'm glad the SEC is FINALLY doing what We the Taxpaying People are paying them to do, rather than this: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/sec-pornography-employees-spent-hours-surfing-porn-sites/story?id=10451508 [go.com]
I had other links but they're now broken...
It's interesting that this and other similar stories are coming out- at the end of Obama's presidency.
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Wednesday December 21 2016, @11:21PM
My favorite part of the story? The employee who bypassed the porn filter by using a flash drive. I assume this means he used some live-usb type deal, which means the filters were always on the desktop OS, meaning they were really always meant to be broken and bypassed. Maybe he used Tails, and was really sneaky, but tor default ports should still be blocked at the network level.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Thursday December 22 2016, @01:40AM
Well look on the bright side, at least they were just looking at regular porn instead of child porn like the pentagon was.
But lets be honest folks...this is a joke, and a bad joke at that. Think a company this size is gonna do anything that nets them "only" 7.5 million dollars? I have zero doubt that this "fine" doesn't even come to 10% of what they actually made on the scam which makes this NOT a fine but simply a kickback, just a cost of doing business that will have zero effect on whether or not they do something like this in the future.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @07:30PM
If I'm a mere employee and the company pays the fine for the illegal stuff the bosses ask me to do it's more tempting for me to go along with it. Even if the company is unable to pay the fine and goes bust, they can always start a new one and they might hire me again since I helped them make money.
But if I'm threatened with imprisonment, I'll start digging out evidence that it was the bosses orders- if I'm going down I'll take them with me or use them in my plea bargain. And even if I was stupid enough not to get the evidence, more of my colleagues would insist on it in the future, making it harder for the bosses to make them do illegal stuff.
And even if the fine is personal lots of the rich bosses can afford multi-million dollar fines. What hurts them more is going to prison. If they pay the fine, they can still travel, live a nice lifestyle. If they go to prison, they can't. It's easier for a multimillionaire to make back 7 million bucks than for him to make back 5 years of his life in prison.
The opportunity cost of prison becomes greater the richer you are. Since when you are rich there's so much you can do (whether you want to or not), but once you're stuck in prison, you can't do most of that.