
Credit Suisse First Boston Fined $100 Million 178
A couple of people wrote in to note that Credit Suisse First Boston, which was the underwriter for VA Linux ? ' IPO, has been fined $100 million for actions they took in that and other high-tech IPO's during the stock market boom. CSFB allocated shares of certain IPO's to customers who made kickbacks to CSFB. Here's their side of the story. There's also an additional statement by the regulators and CSFB's settlement agreement (PDF).
GASP! (Score:5, Funny)
Not Funny... (Score:2, Interesting)
In short, this is a pretty grave manner and I can only hope that the companies who were involved with this one are not tainted or hurt by their under-the-table doings. It could be a fatal blow to an already hurting technology industry.
- Dave Brennins
Re:Not Funny... (Score:5, Funny)
I have this strange urge to laugh and cry at the same time...
Re:Not Funny... (Score:1)
Re:Not Funny... (Score:1)
Look at the statistics
Sourceforge:
Hosted Projects: 32,738
Registered Users: 338,498
Savannah:
Hosted Projects: 517
Registered Users: 4,176
Now tell me which one is winning
Re:Not Funny... (Score:1)
Re:Not Funny... (Score:1)
How many projects have actually moved to Savannah? 517.
How many projects there are either frozen, dead, or running? who knows?
SourceForge is still with us, and despite complains, works pretty well...
Re:Not Funny... (Score:2)
Re:Not Funny... (Score:1, Informative)
you should know rule #1... DIVERSIFY!
Re:Not Funny... (Score:1)
I hope you're not saying that you invested your *entire* retirement savings in VA Linux. If so, then you deserve what has happened.
Re:Not Funny... (Score:1)
we can all learn a lot from a company called enron
Re:please do not moderate this up (Score:2)
Re:GASP! (Score:1)
What, no disclaimer? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not really needed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not really needed (Score:2)
Even so. On CNN, for example, every time they report on anything that's owned by AOL/TW, they make sure they say, XYZ Corp is owned by AOL/TW, parent company of CNN. You have to whiter than white in cases like this, to be completely safe, if you do anything that might affect the stock price. I'd like to think this was just an oversight on
Cry me a River (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cry me a River (Score:1)
Re:Cry me a River (Score:1)
The next week, Taco tries to unload his stock but can only get $10 for it. Now your stock is worth $10 again. What happened to the $90 you lost? It was abstract wealth as long as you held the stock.
That's how VA's capitalization evaporated. The value of the stock declined as the owners held it.
Re:Cry me a River (Score:2, Informative)
An agreement between two people requires a promisary note - very common years ago. When a pig rangler wanted to get milk from the cow herder he would exchange a promisary note - "This note is good for one pig [signed]".
The cow herder could keep the note and get a pig when he saw fit. Or he could trade the note for other goods/services.
Perhaps a man of status wouldn't trade stock, he would commit 3 squads for 3 weeks to another. The notes could be traded. In time notes were signed by the King to be worth a certain ammount. Those who didn't see value in the pieces of paper didn't involve themselves with it. Those who did see value desired the notes.
Eventually it makes sense to put numbers to your notes. Trying to exchange a note for 15 head of cattle is difficult. But 15 dollars can be broken up into it's parts.
Then Kings produced more notes. The corrupt Kings knew they couldn't cash in the value - but, back in the real world, they didn't have to. They promised more to more people and the value of a note dropped. They stopped handing out duplicate notes and the price rose. They made laws so that they were the ones who controlled this.
Simply said, money is an evolution of promisary notes. Nothing much more, nothing much less.
And believe me, I know.
Re:Cry me a River (Score:1)
Not exactly. You are free to make up your own currency. These could take the form of promises of your time in return for the services of others. Or your goats. Or your grain.
Re:Cry me a River (Score:1)
Re:Cry me a River (Score:1)
Creating "wealth" or value is NOT the same as creating cash. Look at real estate. You buy land, people want it, it "goes up" in value, but you are none the richer in your bank. They announce your next door neighbors will be a strip club, an oil refinery, a hazmat depot, or a methadone clinic, and your "wealth" will disappear in a moment.
It is all supply and demand, but I still like the term voodoo economics...
kevin
Re:Cry me a River (Score:4, Insightful)
Wealth measured in stock is purely a matter of belief and confidence. If everyone believes your stocks are worth something, then they will be willing to pay a price for them.
If circumstances change and confidence goes, then people no longer believe your stocks are worth anything and so no-one will pay any more. The upshot? Your wealth has evaporated.
Of course, a counter argument would be that, with stocks, you never had any wealth in the first place. You merely had the potential to try and convert paper figures into reality.
Cheers,
Ian
But then again (Score:3)
Let's go a step further and say you use your greenbacks to buy some property. Now, that property might be yours, but its worth depends entirely on what people are prepared to give you in exchange for it.
In my view, the wealth you can accumulate in the stock market is no more real or illusory than any other type of wealth. It's just *much* more volatile (and as such is risky to borrow against - margin calls and all that).
Re:But then again (Score:2)
Re:But then again (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, there's really no good example of a commodity or security that's really a bullet-proof shelter.
for example, US farmers got raped back in the 80's as food prices failed to keep up with inflation, and the income they were counting on to pay off 10-year loans on $100,000 tractors - wasn't reliable, and they lost their farms. Granted, it was a stupid decision to take risks like that, but when you look at the pattern of the large numbers of farmers who were getting foreclosed on, it looks like something fishy was going on with the loan underwriting. That's really beside the point.
Food prices fall when there's an oversupply, which can be caused by poor planning, good weather, or unintended side effects of tax laws or changing political climates (with regard to economic sanctions, etc).
What are more reliable commodities? Precious metals are generally good. Oil used to be good, but that's because the prices were propped up by a monopolistic cartel. The Russians are fucking their asses right now. Yay Russia!
Land is almost ALWAYS a good deal - but there are factors that can sneak up on you and screw you. The value will drop out of land if there's a recession and people suddenly can't afford to pay $1 million for an 800 sq ft house anymore (San Jose, CA).
The thing that absolutely SHITS me, is - I'm relatively on the side of "free markets" and such. But when you deregulate some crucial infrastructure commodity like energy, and for whatever reason, the value of a commodity like natural gas spikes, then it's a happy good time for the commodity traders who can take advantage of it. It's a SHITTY BAD time for the poor consumers, who one month, were paying $30 to run their lights and TV, and the next month, are being billed $100, and they're suffering rolling blackouts. For some reason, I don't think it's a good idea to let the invisible hand jerk us off ALL the time. For me, it was a simple matter of realigning some of my bills for the extra cash I needed for my electric bill. For a low-income family, it meant choosing between electricity or food. What really sucks is the thousands of office buildings that were running air conditioning full blast, leaving computers and lights on at night, and the poor low-income families couldn't afford to power their refrigerator to keep their food from spoiling. These arguments seem to miss the ears of the "free market" champions.
Re:But then again (Score:1)
Not wealth distribution.
Therefore, it's perfectly fine according to the tenets of the free-market that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, as long as the total amount of wealth increases.
A purely free-market capitalistic society would be anarchistic, since there would be no need for taxes for socially beneficial services (roads, plumbing etc.) Just let the rich build their own, and the poor walk. (OTOH, one might say this has already happened in the US, as the mighty corporations have purchased the government and so the govt's actions are really those of the corporation).
You want fair treatment for the rich and poor ? Try socialism. Move to Europe. (Of course that's got its own problems, but one can't have everything
Re:But then again (Score:1)
Excuse-me, the industry was reregulated, not deregulated.
http://www.cato.org/electricity/electricity.html [cato.org]
Stephan
Re:But then again (Score:2)
Re:Cry me a River (Score:2)
Wealth measured in "anything" is purely a matter of belief and confidence. The only difference is that individual stocks are typically more unstable, though stocks in general are not.
Re:Cry me a River (Score:1)
Re:Cry me a River (Score:1)
so, when the company goes out of business and all they have to sell is two year old hardware (we know how that depreciates), and software that can be really specific to the task at hand.
Re:Cry me a River (Score:3, Informative)
When confidence dries up in enterprises that borrow money, risk is perceived to increase and people that hold assets are less likely to lend it out, decreasing liquidity. Less liquidity means less money available for investment, which is the primary negative effect on the economy as a whole when things like Enron and this IPO thingy happen.
A government can try to increase liquidity through a number of means, reducing risk by buying off bad loans so troubled banks will be more likely to lend money, issuing more currency, and buying back government bonds are a few of the tools available to governments. Many people think Japan's only way out of its current recession is to bail out its banks, many of which have a bunch of bad loans on the books and are very adverse to new loans, thus preventing GDP growth since new businesses and business expansion is driven through bank loans (as well as stock.)
Re:Cry me a River (Score:3, Informative)
If you were a former bank manager in Austin, and you didn't know how these things worked, then either you worked at a blood bank, or I should move my money somewhere else.
It all has to do with the fact that we, as a society, are willing to assign wealth to unrealized assets (unsold stocks, options, bonds, etc..). And when the value of the unrealized assets drops, we perceive a decrease in the wealth of the individual that holds them.
For example, I would guess that our good friend Bill Gates probably has somewhere in the 20 - 30 million dollar range of true assets (this would include his houses, trust funds, cars, wife's jewelry, greenbacks in his wallet, gigantic money vault in which he swims, etc..) However, we peg him at $74.645400 billion because he holds somewhere in the area of 141 million shares of Microsoft (plus holdings in other areas). So when the stock price of Microsoft tanks tommorrow morning on news of the AOL suit (from $66 down to about $60), then we would say that Gatesy-boy had "wealth evaporation" of $846 million dollars. However, he still has his houses, cars and wife's jewelry - so his assets have not changed, just his potential.
Because it didn't exist in the first place (Score:2)
So in other words, people believed that the service that they were providing was valuable, but it turns out no one wanted it. The wealth they thought they had, well, they didn't.
Re:Cry me a River (Score:3, Informative)
The wealth DOESN'T evaporate. Stock is a medium between cash and physical assets. When you start a sole proprietorship, you invest in the business by buying things like desks and chairs and employee salaries out of your own pocket. Your return on investment (revenue-expenses=profit > /dev/pocket) is analogous to dividends. Now, move up to a partnership. Same thing basically, but multiple investors and therefore votes on how that investment is spent (ideally anyway). Next, jump to a corporation: EXACT same thing as a partnership with these mere differences: you're only limited to what you explicitly invest, you can't actually sell off what you invested in (only the holding on it, the stock - unless you get a majority of voting shares to agree), and it's possible to not have a controlling interest. That's what stock is, and yes - you needed to know it to understand what follows.
Here's where people get confused: Stocks are an asset like anything else. My computer is an easy example. I may consider it to be worth $5k, but Bob might only be willing to stick $3k for it. People, expecting a return on their investment, will be willing to pay just so much for something. Stock prices are basically the price of what people are willing to pay to buy the all the stock, just as my Linksys router is as high a price as the manufacturer can get away with. Somebody might be willing to sell me one for only $50, or I may decide to hoard as many as I can and people seeing an opportunity in this will offer it for $200, which I might be willing to pay for it. Now, what if tommorow a major unfixable bug was discovered in all the linky's that the manufacturer couldn't fix and wouldn't replace? Now nobody is willing to pay for them. I'm basically out what I spent. Now this is what almost nobody understands - I DIDN'T LOSE THAT MONEY, I spent it like I would on anything else. Whoever sold me that stock (the linky) got $X dollars. I've already lost it. It didn't evaporate, it just changed hands. Look above to understand how the supposed "value" of a stock fluctuates, but it's really nothing more than what other people value it at.
So, why do people become "broke" if they've already parted with their money? Imagine taking out a loan on your car. Because your car is an asset, you can have equity on it. No more than what other people value it at (Blue Book being the definitive guide here), but it's there. People use equity on their stocks just like they do on their car. But if you crash the car... you know what happens. Equity in a stock is just the same thing - only it's not on what you own, it's on what the business owns. Just like if I opened a convenience store and took a mortgage on the building.
Re: Cry me a River (Score:1)
> Here's where people get confused: Stocks are an asset like anything else.
But of all the assets you could name, they are most like "pyramids".
Re:It's UNREALIZED gain/loss (Score:2)
Re:That's because... (Score:2, Funny)
Until then, the believers will have it good and the non-believers will bitch and moan from the confines of their '63 Volkswagen Beetle.
Re:That's because... (Score:1)
This is pocket change... (Score:1)
2. After looking at the losses JP Morgan and others posted after the Enron Collapse.
The chickens are coming home to roost. (Score:5, Interesting)
At least with CSFB did in fact give a handful of shares to everyone who applied for the friends-in-family deal - AFAIK - while ETrade tried to come up with every excuse in the book to kick out as many people as they could in their friends-and-family program. Although some of us did eventually get our pound of flesh (see my website: E*Trouble [geocities.com] to revisit those exciting times) it would be icing on the cake to see EGRP whacked on the balls, again.
Re:RHAT (Score:2)
Re:RHAT (Score:1)
It is also the standard "sue the management when the stock goes down" lawsuit(false expectations, etc.)
It also claims that RHAT promised a certain amount of shares for the open source community and did not fulfill it.
There were a few more points to the lawsuit, but I forgot them and I apparently threw out the paper.
Re:The chickens are coming home to roost. (Score:2, Insightful)
Triumph? I think capitalism is no different from the pirate drama played out on the high seas centuries ago. These companies will all come and go, none triumphant. As long as their is money, there will be dishonesty. Not all will be caught.
CSFB was fined before (Score:1, Insightful)
2 [fsa.gov.uk]
3 [thisislondon.co.uk]
4 [thisismoney.com]
I smell a whore... (Score:1)
In May 1999 Swedish authorities fined Credit Suisse First Boston 2 million Swedish kronar because of an attempt by the Flaming Ferraris group of traders to manipulate the Swedish stock market index.
How about the clients that made the money? (Score:4, Insightful)
The cynical view says it won't happen - the brokers like to keep the clients happy.
The funny thing is ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Corporations have such wierd ways of doing things...
Re:The funny thing is ... (Score:2)
When I get a traffic ticket, I can sign 1 of 3 spots on the back, either admitting guilt and paying the fine, pleading no content, and paying the fine (thus, paying the fine, but not admittin guilt.) or pleading innocence.
I see what they have done there along the same lines.
Re:The funny thing is ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't exactly see a bunch of suits smoking fat cigars in the boardroom going "Yeah, yeah, it's only a hundred mil. Sign the back of the motherfucker and send it in."
Re:The funny thing is ... (Score:2)
Re:The funny thing is ... (Score:2)
Heay! I just had an amazing idea!
Don't commit a crime, don't get fined, but still jack the fees to the clients! You'll make a FORTUNE!
-
"disciplined" (Score:2)
And who is surprised? (Score:1)
The only gold rush is the rush to screw the poor.
Re:And who is surprised? (Score:2)
Your idea of poor and my idea of poor are obviously very very different.
LNUX got screwed too. (Score:2)
Actually, the company got screwed too. When you have an IPO, only the proceeds from the *initial* sale of shares goes the the company going public. When an IPO skyrockets on its first day of trading, it leaves money on the table. VA went public at $30 and closed at $299 the first day. That means that it probably could have gone public for $250 per share or so and gotten roughly 14 times the amount of capital they got. Since VA sold 4,400,000 shares in its IPO, that's $968,000,000 that went to CSFB's big institutional account holders instead of the company.
I think slashdot could survive a while on $1Bn cash, don't you?
To sum up: the company got screwed because it was denied a fair and rational IPO price.
Didn't bribe officials like SBC did (Score:1)
Wall Street Shenanigans (Score:5, Informative)
No penalties will ever be assessed against the hundreds of analysts who hyped internet stocks in exchange for those companies giving their firms a slice of the investment banking business.
Ask any analyst from any wall street firm, sell side or buy side, and they will tell you that everybody does this. Compare the SEC's treatment of big firms doing outwardly crooked things to their treatment of the little guy. [nytimes.com]
It looks like they're too busy busting 15-year olds to attack the real stock manipulators.
Well, at least someone made money on the .com boom (Score:2)
I wonder how long the investigation into this has been going on anyway? It seems a lot of irregularities are cropping up now that a lot of these companies are defunked (I.E. Enron). I guess when you have a lot of fake money in the form of overvalued stocks you can afford to cover things like this up, but when that dries up your fucked.
But then again, it seems people ought to be more pissed off if the stocks actually turned out to be, you know, worth something
More shredded documents? (Score:2, Funny)
Dot com (Score:4, Interesting)
Then you find your mark, and agree to go drinking. Show him the huge wad of "fifties". Drop it (with him in tow) in a locker or safety deposit box and keep the key.
Later on in the evening, get a phone call/page or something telling you to get out of town or whatever. (This works really well if both of you are dopers/criminal element) Suggest to your new friend that you need to boot out of town and could he grab you $400 from the ATM for bus fare, etc? He's totally entitled to keep the $1000 in the locker - you haven't time to get it and get out of town and are willing to eat the loss in order to save your neck.
You get the $400 and split. Your "friend" finds out his wad was worth $75 or so.
Dotcoms were pigeon drops. Legal ones. "Oh, uh, yeah, this stock's going to be the next Microsoft. Want mine for $100 a share? I made enough money on it having bought in at $3 a share!"
On that note, when will ESR step up and write... (Score:4, Interesting)
A back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that $36M to now be $350K. Of course, to be fair, that still ain't exactly hurting. But yeesh, hindsight makes "Surprised By Wealth" one seriously painful read...
And even richer a read, given CSFB's plight, is the ZDNet article on the subject of ESR's fortune [com.com], which, with unintended irony, observes: Yeah. It's been answered alright.
Re:On that note, when will ESR step up and write.. (Score:1)
CSFB has a LONG history of blunders... (Score:2, Interesting)
CSFB has a LONG history of blunders, the least of which is their sub-standard analysis department.
Check out [analystscan.com] their calls... they even rated Enron a "Strong Buy" when the stock was near its all time high.
While all of the Wall Street houses seem to have skeletons in their closet, CSFB seems to be unable to hide theirs well...
Re:CSFB has a LONG history of blunders... (Score:1)
To be fair, everybody rated Enron as a Strong Buy, because there were no indications that the Enron executives were such a bunch of evil folks.
Re:CSFB has a LONG history of blunders... (Score:2)
Paying the fine (Score:1)
DZM
Thats Close To the Capitilization (Score:3, Funny)
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=lnux&d=t
But thats right, there are no real viable Linux based companies anymore, and their really never were.
Re:Thats Close To the Capitilization (Score:1)
They have a huge market cap, due to the staggering number of outstanding shares, but in all, they exploited their high stock price in a very intelligent way with their secondary offering, instead of buying tons of worthless companies with their inflated stock. Now they have a ton of cash to sit on, and even though they paid a lot for some companies, and they are still charging that off in large chunks, their pro forma earnings are pretty close to true earnings.
If thier stock goes up enough to see massive employee options exercising, then there might be an additional dilution issue, but as long as they stay below $10 a share for a while, they will be in a healthy position with a sane stock price, and a winning business plan.
Disclaimer: I own some RHAT shares.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Thats Close To the Capitilization (Score:2)
It is, considering their revenues.
As for the "tons of cash they have to sit on", it can best be described as: $68M. If they continue to burn -15M per quarter (which is generous, considering the previous three quarters they lost -55M, -27M, and -34M)
You keep referring to the amortization of goodwill as a loss. It isn't. Goodwill is a worthless asset on the balance sheet. The one time charges that RHAT is taking are not of dubious nature like the Cisco inventory write-down, RHAT's one times are "money" that was spent a long time ago (It wasn't really money, only in the opportunity cost sense).
Returning 0.01 per share isn't much of an achievement is it? On an investment of $1000 (~100 shares right now) you'd get $1 per quarter ($4 a year). After paying capital gains you and the wife might be able to split a diet coke at the local soda fountain.
Do you even understand how the stock market works?
Oh, I see by your later paragraphs. You are a microsoftie. I guess that allows you to totally disregard the way accounting and the stock market works.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Thats Close To the Capitilization (Score:2)
You implied earlier that somehow earnings were automatically distributed as dividends, this shows a clear ignorance of the stock market, or if that isn't the case, then a twisting of the facts to confuse those less familiar with the stock market that might fall for your ruse.
Second, I never said RHAT was "great stock" per se. I was only originally responding to the original post that said there were "no viable Linux companies".
I'm not promoting anything. I'm just pointing out some facts.
A lot of your numbers are just wrong. RHAT has 63 cents per share in cash, with about 169 million shares outstanding. This is about 106 million dollars in cash.
This is all irrelevant though. RHAT is putting itself in a position where they will be rolling in the money. They aren't in direct competition with MSFT at all, the are more in competition with Sun, and other Unix vendors.
RHAT concentrates on legacy UNIX->Linux conversions. MS can continue to push their toy products for home DSL users to use, and it won't affect the people that need real servers, and it won't matter to RHAT either.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Thats Close To the Capitilization (Score:2)
Oh, and name the declaration date of a single MSFT dividend, if my statement is so patently false.
A real cash dividend, not a stock split (which is not a disbursement of any sort).
Maybe this [google.com] will help you.
Please... (Score:1)
Why do I get the distinct impression that no one at Enron or Andersen is going to get punished either (with the possible exception of a low-ranking scapegoat or two)?
Re:Please... (Score:1)
From personal experience (Score:2, Interesting)
The company I worked for had some strange affiliations, from the seemingly normal [canaccord.com] to the questionable [wsrn.com] to the downright shady (a Las Vegas land development company whose name I thankfully forget
I saw quite a bit there...the VP dumping his options just days before the stock crashed, unqualified people getting paid a lot of money to do nothing (myself included), and of course massive document shredding in the accounting office.
Of course, my views on this might be slightly skewed, this all occuring in the stock market scam capital [vancouver.bc.ca] of the Western world...
AC for obvious reasons.
Me Me Me (Score:1)
Let the poonishment fit the crime.
This wouldn't have happened... (Score:3, Insightful)
For some reason only "privilidged" people are allowed to buy the stock before it starts. So why do we allow the rich to get richer? Everybody should be able to buy those stocks before trading starts.
No exceptions.
Re:This wouldn't have happened... (Score:1)
Jesus...
Re:This wouldn't have happened... (Score:1)
Do you know how to read?
No where did I say that there should be an unlimited number of stocks to buy. I said that everyone should be given the chance to buy - first come first served. Why should only a select few be able to get in on the ground floor? Everybody should be given that chance.
Re:This wouldn't have happened... (Score:2)
Re:This wouldn't have happened... (Score:2)
No exceptions.
Believe me, the companies would love it if everybody could get in on the IPO at the same time, before the bell starts. Because what would really happen is everyone with a broker would place their bets before the stock 'prices.' Then the firms would raise their opening amount to what they think everyone would be willing to pay. The more people bidding, the more it goes up. Then those companies would actually profit from the huge upward swings that have accompanied these IPO's, instead of the initial buyers profiting from them.
IPO's are handled the way they are, because most of the stock being bought is held by large organizations that will NOT sell them on the open market for a while. The investment firms set this up so that they can keep the stock price stable. But there's always those that get in on the IPO and flip the stock anyway, and that's why the opening days can be crazy for the price.
Awwww, shucks! (Score:1)
Linux - "Linus, I Now Understand Xenophobia!"
Thursday's Frontline is all about this (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
remove corporate "status" people would go to jail.
Why do you think corporations exist, to help consumers? hahaha
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Corporate status only sheilds you from civil liabilities. An individual in this situation would end up paying fines, the same as a corporation would. If you commit fraud as part of a corporation and you still go to jail just as easily as Bill Gates would if he hired Uncle Vinnie to go whack Larry Ellison on behalf of the Microsoft corporation. Besides, the penalty for breaking SEC regulations is almost never jail time, regardless of who you are, unless you actually commit Fraud.
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Indeed. But certain corporations have enough money that almost any fine doesn't seem like much punishment for them. Perhaps there ought to be a way to send the corporation to "jail", by forcing it to cease all business operations for a set amount of time....
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Using your company/Bank to get kickbacks and/or insider trading.
Don't you remember the Savings and Loan scandle of the 80's? People did jail time for that, maybe not the responsible people, but that is another story.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
It reminds me of those guys who spent like $20,000 to set up a bunch of fake ATM's to grab ATM cards and PIN's. They actually lost money on their investment because the crime was so original and got so much media attention that the FBI devoted a legion of Agents to track every lead.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, if these people had to take responsibility for their lilly white asses and spend their time in a real max security jail cell this shit wouldn't happen. Either that, or you'd have prison reform really quick.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
As for genitals, I doubt they have any, though if that's the case I'm not sure how they managed to screw so many of their employees. Probably hired accountants to do it.
Fines to the offender (Score:2)
Jail time vs fines and corporate vs personal punishments for wrongdoing are not really the same issue.
It's a civil matter, not criminal (Score:4, Informative)
Because the "charge" involved a violation of SEC and NASD regulations, not a criminal charge (e.g., Murder.) The $100m is a combination of "disgorged profits" (you have to love the legalese) and a fine.
This has nothing to do with "the Swiss" -- CSFB is a multinational.