{"id":240,"date":"2003-04-28T21:07:29","date_gmt":"2003-04-29T01:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blogtest\/2003\/04\/28\/wall-street-gets-fined\/"},"modified":"2018-10-27T11:15:06","modified_gmt":"2018-10-27T15:15:06","slug":"wall-street-gets-fined","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2003\/04\/28\/wall-street-gets-fined\/","title":{"rendered":"Wall Street gets fined"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a258'><\/a><\/p>\n<p><P>The Wall Street firms will pay $1.4 billion for their sins of the 1990s, under <A href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2003\/04\/28\/business\/28CND-WALL.html\">a settlement reached yesterday<\/A>.&nbsp; It seems that they instructed their analysts to recommend buying the stocks that their investment bankers were taking public (for a&nbsp;fixed 7 percent share of the proceeds that seems to have been as unaffected by competition as the 6 percent collected by realtors).&nbsp; This happy marriage resulted in an explosion of profits for Wall Street throughout the 1990s.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>How discouraged from defrauding investors are they going to be in the future?&nbsp; According to the New York Times, Citigroup paid $400 million or 0.2 percent of their organization&#8217;s value (about $200 billion according to<A href=\"http:\/\/biz.yahoo.com\/p\/c\/c.html\"> finance.yahoo.com<\/A>).&nbsp; Merrill Lynch paid $100 million or about 0.25 percent of <A href=\"http:\/\/finance.yahoo.com\/q?s=MER&amp;d=t\">its market capitalization<\/A>.<\/P><br \/>\n<P>Let&#8217;s figure out what this would be like for the average American family, whose <A href=\"http:\/\/www.isr.umich.edu\/src\/psid\/TrendsIndynamics1999-2001.pdf\">median wealth was $63,000 in 2001<\/A> (before the economy collapsed).&nbsp; 0.2 percent of $63,000 would correspond to one of the family members being fined $126, less than one-third the cost of the <A href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2002\/05\/22\/news\/q_speed_cost\/\">average speeding ticket<\/A> (including insurance hikes) in the U.S.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Wall Street firms will pay $1.4 billion for their sins of the 1990s, under a settlement reached yesterday.&nbsp; It seems that they instructed their analysts to recommend [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fromtheoldserver","category-investing"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Wall Street gets fined - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2003\/04\/28\/wall-street-gets-fined\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wall Street gets fined - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Wall Street firms will pay $1.4 billion for their sins of the 1990s, under a settlement reached yesterday.&nbsp; 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