Oil futures were originally created to give heating oil dealers, gas retailers, aviation companies and other businesses a method of hedging against adverse price changes. Instead, they’ve become just another Wall Street plaything. – Gary Weiss
There are a lot worse things you can do with all your bucks than giving them to even a mediocre mutual fund – such as, for example, giving them to a mediocre hedge fund. If supporting the lifestyle of a mediocre fund manager is your favorite charity, who am I to stop you? – Gary Weiss
Debt collectors should be required to disclose the applicable statute of limitations in the body of their collection letters, in bold type. While it’s not illegal to dun a consumer for an old debt, it is illegal to sue for one. – Gary Weiss
I’ve met Dick Syron. I like the guy. He’s a man’s man kind of character, a real charmer, the kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with, as well as being an economist of considerable repute. – Gary Weiss
For Randy Neugebauer, the Texas Republican who chairs the investigations subcommittee, the top sources of funding for his 2012 reelection campaign are from the insurance, banking, finance, securities and real estate industries. – Gary Weiss
Ordinarily, the feds piggyback on the S.E.C. in complicated financial cases, but history proves that breath-holding on that score is a dangerous endeavor. – Gary Weiss
With such enormous bucks devoted to trading in oil and other commodities, the distortions that they cause have been exacerbated. – Gary Weiss
Mutual funds dare to be average. In fact, they dare to be lousy. They have long since ceased striving for anything resembling perfection when it comes to managing your money. – Gary Weiss
No other facet of American business is more corrupt, more intoxicated with illegality, more weakly regulated, and has a greater impact on poor and working people than debt collectors; not credit card companies or subprime mortgages, not even payday lenders. – Gary Weiss
When it comes to making laws that protect the public from the financial services industry, Congress has done a progressively worse job since the Pecora Commission hearings of the early 1930s, which led to Congress taking bold steps to regulate banking and securities firms in 1933 and 1934. – Gary Weiss
Beefs against debt collectors are consistently among the top complaints received by both the FTC and state attorneys general. – Gary Weiss
Insider trading by hedge funds has a long and distinguished history, dating to the days when people didn’t know that there was such a thing as a hedge fund. – Gary Weiss
Humiliating events have a way of capturing the public’s imagination. So it has been since antiquity, when gladiators were pitted against each other and the legions of Spartacus were crucified in endless rows on the way to Rome. – Gary Weiss
People are told their rights when they’re arrested. Consumers getting collection letters are entitled to the same courtesy. – Gary Weiss
The heart of the 2008 financial crisis was a coterie of reckless financial executives, working for too-big-to-fail financial companies, who were handsomely compensated for taking risks that almost ruined the economy when they failed. – Gary Weiss
The problem with the focus on speculators, as was demonstrated during the financial crisis, is that it tends to divert attention from the real villains. During the financial crisis, the villains were the actions of the banks, not the speculators betting on bank share prices. – Gary Weiss
I found that options traders – the Amex was mainly an options exchange – routinely conspired to keep as wide as possible the spreads between the prices investors paid and the prices floor traders paid for the same securities. – Gary Weiss
One problem with the focus on speculation is that it tends to promote the growth of the great intellectual cancer of our times: conspiracy theories. – Gary Weiss
Excessive hype, bankruptcy, cash burning like autumn leaves – such is the stuff of short-selling. – Gary Weiss
Newt Gingrich is a boastful kind of guy. But when it comes to Wall Street, the former House speaker is surprisingly modest. – Gary Weiss
Conspiracy theories feed on opacity, and that’s a longtime problem with short selling. Large long positions must be reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission in public filings, but not large short positions. – Gary Weiss
MF Global used to be known as Man Financial, and it had a reasonably good reputation. It did a humdrum business placing commodities trades for fund managers as well as farmers, grain dealers and others whose livelihoods depend on the vagaries of commodity prices. – Gary Weiss
Short-sellers perform a useful function in the market as conduits of negative information, and shorts often complain that they are discriminated against by regulators. – Gary Weiss