Corporation Watch

 

A Nov. 20 Wall Street Journal article reported that the FBI and SEC are investigating widespread insider trading on Wall Street, involving a variety of schemes in which non-public information about forthcoming mergers and other corporate activity was disseminated to hedgefund managers and other professional investors in advance, allowing them to essentially place no-lose bets on things they knew were going to happen.

 

A few things stand out about the investigation:

1. Goldman Sachs is involved in certain aspects of it. (Now there's a tremendous surprise.)
2. The healthcare industry figures prominently. (See parentheses above.)
3. This quote from the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan: "Illegal insider trading is rampant [on Wall Street], and may even be on the rise."
4. It's been going on for at least three years, which means that the conduct under scrutiny was happening well before the current financial crisis. That in turn implies that, even while the greatest rip-off in world financial history was going on in plain sight, some of Wall Street's finest corporate citizens weren't satisfied making millions of dollars through the fixed-casino game of over-leveraged securities, and instead chose to essentially "tunnel into the vault while the bank was closed" to steal even more money.

 

 

Northern German Radio (NDR) reported in April that Germany's largest savings bank, Hamburg-based HaSpa, had been using psychological profiling software since 2007 to divide their clients into different classifications, in order to help its salespeople sell them more "products", such as insurance or stocks.

 

HaSpa said its use of the software, called Sensus, was actually in the "best interests" of its customers, because it allowed the bank to tailor its sales pitches to their individual needs. But in response to the uproar that resulted when its profile-driven sales tactics were revealed to the public, HaSpa said it had discontinued the practice.

 

 

An Oct. 21 New York Times article entitled "Top Corporations Aid U.S. Chamber of Commerce Campaign" reveals that a small number of large corporations are bankrolling one of the largest non-party election campaigns in U.S. history, being conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The article describes a relatively small coterie of major U.S. corporations who supported the Chamber with donations averaging more than $1.5 million in 2008 — undoubtedly much higher this year, due to the elections — and how it in turn carried water for their specific issues, rather than (as it claims) representing the interests of what it says are 300,000 members and 3 million businesses.