June 2021 Archives

The Wolves of Wall Street

Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch are two of the oldest names on Wall Street. Morgan long focused on serving corporations with investment banking services, while Merrill was more of a retail brokerage. Both got caught up in the transformation of the financial services sector. Morgan purchased brokerage firms Dean Witter and Smith Barney, while Merrill was taken over by Bank of America during the 2008 financial crisis.

During the past dozen years, both Morgan and Merrill have seen their reputations tarnished by a series of legal controversies. When Violation Tracker began collecting data on financial offenses in 2015, BofA appeared atop the list of banks that had paid more than $1 billion in fines and settlements, thanks mainly to cases involving Merrill. Morgan ranked 7^th.

The database, now with information extending back to 2000, shows BofA with total penalties of over $80 billion, far more than any other parent company. Morgan has paid out more than $9 billion.

Morgan and Merrill also feature prominently in the newest category of data to be added to Violation Tracker: penalties imposed on securities firms by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Unlike the other agencies whose cases are compiled in Violation Tracker, FINRA is not a government entity. It is, however, authorized by Congress to acted as an industry self-regulator and is overseen by the SEC.

By reviewing all press releases issued since 2000 by FINRA and its predecessor, the National Association of Securities Dealers, we have assembled 726 cases with total penalties of more than $1 billion. And when we matched the firms named in the cases to their corporate parents, we found that roughly half of the actions were linked to the giants of Wall Street. Those companies account for an even larger share of the penalty dollars.

Morgan Stanley and Bank of America (mostly via Merrill Lynch) are tied for first place in terms of the number of cases, with 38 each. Morgan leads in penalty dollars, with a total of $150 million, followed by BofA with $134 million. The other firms with the highest total penalties include Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank, and UBS. (The Morgan and BofA totals on Violation Tracker’s FINRA summary page do not match the amounts cited here because they have been adjusted avoid double-counting of some penalties linked to cases handled jointly with the SEC.)

Because the penalties imposed by FINRA are relatively low, the case numbers are perhaps more significant. What does it say about Morgan and Merrill that they have each been cited more than three dozen times for violating rules meant to protect investors? In one case, Merrill was cited for failing to prevent one of its representatives in Texas from operating a Ponzi scheme.

And what does it say about FINRA that it allows the big players to commit violations over and over again without doing more than imposing additional modest fines?

It should be noted that the cases we collected from the FINRA press releases make up only a portion of the organization’s actions, with thousands more against firms and individuals contained in a proprietary database. In other words, the level of recidivism among the large Wall Street firms is probably even worse than what is suggested by the press releases.

Moreover, just a few days ago, after we finished processing the FINRA data, the organization imposed a new $3.25 million fine on Merrill Lynch and ordered it to pay $8.4 million in restitution to customers.

Neither government action nor industry self-regulation seems to be very effective at curbing financial misconduct.

Note: Along with the new FINRA cases, Violation Tracker has just been updated with information from the more than 300 federal, state and local agencies covered by the database. The Tracker now contains 490,000 entries with total penalties of $669 billion.

The European Banking Blacklist

The European Union has shaken up the financial world by excluding a group of large banks from participating in the marketing of bonds being floated to help in the economic recovery of member states. According to reports in various business publications, the ten banks are being singled out because of their involvement in cases in which they were accused of manipulating bond and currency markets. In other words, they are being punished for misconduct.

While these moves may not have a major bottom-line impact on the banks—which include U.S. giants JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America—the EU is sending an important message about corporate wrongdoing.

Large companies have come to assume they can essentially buy their way out of legal jeopardy by paying fines and settlements that have grown larger but are still far from seriously punitive. As Violation Tracker documents, the big banks are Exhibit A for this phenomenon.

The database shows that the financial sector overall has paid more than $300 billion in U.S. penalties over the past two decades, far and away more than any other part of the economy. Bank of America is at the top of the list of penalty payers, with a total of $82 billion. JPMorgan is second with $35 billion, and Citigroup is fourth with $25 billion.

Non-U.S. banks being singled out by the EU have also accumulated substantial U.S. penalties, apart from what they have paid elsewhere. For example, Deutsche Bank has paid out $18 billion and NatWest (formerly the Royal Bank of Scotland) $13 billion.

The EU’s move is focused on a particular set of scandals in which these banks were alleged to have colluded to rig markets. Among these are cases involving the manipulation of currency markets. In 2015, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland each paid hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements to resolve criminal charges brought by the U.S. Justice Department.

Unlike many other situations in which large corporations are offered deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreements, the banks in this case had to plead guilty to the felony charges. Yet there was little in the way of consequences beyond the penalty payments. The banks were put on probation, on the assumption this would cause them to cease their bad behavior. Yet all the banks continued to rack up regulatory violations in subsequent years.

Reuters estimates that the blacklisted banks will lose out on about 86 million euros in syndication fees. This is a lot less than what the banks have paid in penalties. Yet, if banks begin to see that misconduct will cause them to be excluded from business opportunities, that may be more of an inducement to avoid corrupt behavior.

The dilemma for policymakers is that misconduct is so widespread in the financial sector that it is difficult to find service providers with clean hands. While excluding the ten banks, the EU turned to a group of others to handle the debt issue. Those included the likes of HSBC and BNP Paribas, which have their own substantial corporate rap sheets. Perhaps a larger blacklist is needed.

Gently Regulating Corporate Election Involvement

A recent announcement by the Federal Election Commission that it was fining the National Enquirer’s parent company was unusual in two ways.

The first had to do with which parties were targeted by the FEC and which were not. The agency imposed a penalty of $187,500 against A360 Media LLC (formerly known as American Media Inc.) for making a payment to Karen McDougal in 2016 to suppress her story about having had an affair with Donald Trump.

Watchdog group Common Cause alleged that the payment – which was facilitated by Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen– amounted to an illegal in-kind contribution to Trump’s campaign by American Media. The FEC agreed, but it chose not to sanction the beneficiary of the payment. In other words, this was another example of how Trump manages to avoid personal consequences for misconduct for which he was ultimately responsible.

The FEC action was also out of the ordinary because it entailed a penalty directed at a company. It has become so rare for the FEC to bring cases against corporations themselves (as opposed to their political action committees), that I have not been including the agency among those federal regulators from whom I collect data for Violation Tracker.

Seeing the A360 decision, I decided it was time to add the FEC, but I didn’t know how many corporate cases could be found. I knew that the heyday of prosecuting corporations for election finance violations came in the 1970s as an outgrowth of the Watergate investigations. Those cases would have to be left out, since Violation Tracker coverage begins in 2000.

I also knew that there were likely to be few cases after January 2010, when the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision wiped away most limitations on campaign spending by corporations as well as other entities. The ban on the direct use of corporate funds for campaign contributions remained in place.

The other factor has to do with the FEC itself, which often deadlocks along partisan lines and has difficulty imposing penalties against corporations or other entities and individuals.

As I dove into the case archives on the FEC website, I focused on what the agency calls Matters Under Review and ignored its administrative fines brought against PACs and campaign committees for matters such as late filing of reports.

I ultimately found a total of 31 cases in the period since January 2000 in which a corporate entity was fined $5,000 or more for an election violation. There were only four penalties above $100,000 – including one for $1 million – and the overall average was just $77,000.

Most of these cases involved allegations that the corporation improperly reimbursed employees for their individual donations to try to get around the ban on the use of corporate funds.

It is difficult to believe that fewer than three dozen corporations broke this rule and other remaining regulations during the past two decades. Instead, the low case count is another symptom of underregulation of corporate activities with regard to elections and much more.

Note: the new FEC entries will be added to Violation Tracker later this month as part of an overall update of the database.

The Obscure Companies Threatening the Planet

Hilcorp Energy, a privately held oil and gas producer based in Texas, shows up in Violation Tracker with only $2 million in regulatory penalties, compared to more than $1.5 billion for petroleum giant Exxon Mobil. Yet according to a detailed new report published by Ceres and the Clean Air Task Force, Hilcorp dwarfs Exxon when it comes to climate-ruining emissions of methane gas.

Hilcorp is one of a group of lesser-known energy producers which turn out to be responsible for a remarkable portion of greenhouse gas emissions. The findings of the Ceres report, which outed the companies using data from the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Project, were surprising enough to merit a front-page article in the New York Times.

Among the other low-profile/high-emissions companies featured in the report are Terra Energy Partners, Flywheel Energy, Blackbeard Operating and Scout Energy. These firms have few or no listings in Violation Tracker.

One of the reasons these companies fly under the radar is that they are not publicly traded. Some are controlled by private equity firms, making their business even more opaque.

As the Times article points out, some of these producers have purchased operations from larger, publicly traded corporations subject to more scrutiny. For example, Hilcorp acquired gas wells in the San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico from ConocoPhillips, reducing that company’s carbon footprint while doing nothing to reduce the burden on the climate.

It is significant that the Ceres report is appearing in the wake of the showdown at Exxon Mobil, where institutional investors concerned about the risks associated with climate change have just succeeded in winning three seats on the corporation’s board of directors.

That is a vitally important development in the effort to bring about change at the company which is still the largest overall emitter of greenhouse gases. The Ceres findings point out the necessity for the climate movement to target not only the corporate giants but also the smaller players which are having an outsized impact.

One difficulty in changing the practices of both larger and smaller corporations is the fact that the U.S. environmental regulatory system does little to punish firms for their greenhouse gas emissions. A producer such as Hilcorp can get away with its massive methane emissions because it does not need to worry about activist institutional investors or the possibility of substantial penalties from the EPA.

The EPA has gone after automobile producers such as Hyundai for their greenhouse gas emissions, but the agency has faced strong legal obstacles in the effort to regulate emissions by power plants and energy producers.

Those obstacles need to be overcome, and corporations of all kinds need to face substantial monetary penalties for their contributions to the climate crisis.

Note: Apart from the Ceres report, good use of the EPA’s greenhouse gas data has been made by the Political Economy Research Institute’s Greenhouse 100 Polluters Index, which ranks parent companies by the total emissions of their subsidiaries. In that index, power plant owners such as Vistra Energy and Duke Energy are at the top. Exxon is number 11 and Hilcorp number 36.