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Another White-Collar Robbery Term To Learn Before It All Comes Crashing Down: ''RE-HYPOTHECATION''
Remember life before you ever knew what a derivative, a subprime mortgage, a credit default obligation or what high frequency trading was? Well here's a new financial (white-collar robbery) term for us to learn: RE-HYPOTHECATION.
[font size=4]MF Global And The Great Wall Street Re-hypothecation Scandal[/font]
Thomson Reuters - News & Insight
12/7/2011
By Christopher Elias (UK)
(Business Law Currents) A legal loophole in international brokerage regulations means that few, if any, clients of MF Global are likely to get their money back. Although details of the drama are still unfolding, it appears that MF Global and some of its Wall Street counterparts have been actively and aggressively circumventing U.S. securities rules at the expense (quite literally) of their clients.
MF Global's bankruptcy revelations concerning missing client money suggest that funds were not inadvertently misplaced or gobbled up in MF’s dying hours, but were instead appropriated as part of a mass Wall St manipulation of brokerage rules that allowed for the wholesale acquisition and sale of client funds through re-hypothecation. A loophole appears to have allowed MF Global, and many others, to use its own clients’ funds to finance an enormous $6.2 billion Eurozone repo bet.
If anyone thought that you couldn’t have your cake and eat it too in the world of finance, MF Global shows how you can have your cake, eat it, eat someone else’s cake and then let your clients pick up the bill. Hard cheese for many as their dough goes missing.
*snip*
RE-HYPOTHECATION
By way of background, hypothecation is when a borrower pledges collateral to secure a debt. The borrower retains ownership of the collateral but is “hypothetically” controlled by the creditor, who has a right to seize possession if the borrower defaults.
MORE
Thomson Reuters - News & Insight
12/7/2011
By Christopher Elias (UK)
(Business Law Currents) A legal loophole in international brokerage regulations means that few, if any, clients of MF Global are likely to get their money back. Although details of the drama are still unfolding, it appears that MF Global and some of its Wall Street counterparts have been actively and aggressively circumventing U.S. securities rules at the expense (quite literally) of their clients.
MF Global's bankruptcy revelations concerning missing client money suggest that funds were not inadvertently misplaced or gobbled up in MF’s dying hours, but were instead appropriated as part of a mass Wall St manipulation of brokerage rules that allowed for the wholesale acquisition and sale of client funds through re-hypothecation. A loophole appears to have allowed MF Global, and many others, to use its own clients’ funds to finance an enormous $6.2 billion Eurozone repo bet.
If anyone thought that you couldn’t have your cake and eat it too in the world of finance, MF Global shows how you can have your cake, eat it, eat someone else’s cake and then let your clients pick up the bill. Hard cheese for many as their dough goes missing.
*snip*
RE-HYPOTHECATION
By way of background, hypothecation is when a borrower pledges collateral to secure a debt. The borrower retains ownership of the collateral but is “hypothetically” controlled by the creditor, who has a right to seize possession if the borrower defaults.
MORE
[font color=blue] - Instead of my usual pithy remark, I'll substitute the following:[/font]
[font color=blue]DeSwiss[/font]
See also------->
3 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Ecclesiastes 1 : 9 (KJV) The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
- Mr. Durden's prognostications are quite apt. He speaks the TRUTH when he says MF may be our undoing. But I believe we've seen this movie before......
- Mr. Durden's prognostications are quite apt. He speaks the TRUTH when he says MF may be our undoing. But I believe we've seen this movie before......
Brooks Adams’ chosen time-span begins and ends with the same arc of the cycle: the collapse of the Roman Empire and the threatened collapse of Western Civilization. Without subscribing to the inevitability structure inherent in cyclical theories of history, one nevertheless reads Adams’ description of societal fragmentation in Rome with a certain feeling of déjá-vu: the accelerating centralisation of money and agriculture; the dependence of status on wealth; the impoverishment of the small farmer; and especially the migration of the poor to the big cities. If you substitute the growth of automation for the influx of foreign slaves, the points of similarity with modern America are particularly striking. Both slaves and. machines provide a cheap, depersonalized energy source, whose productivity enriches the entrepreneur rather than the worker who has been displaced. Adams had no illusions about the relationship between law and justice:
. . . as {the usurer} fed on insolvency and controlled legislation, the laws were as ingeniously contrived for creating debt, as for making it profitable when contracted. . . As the capitalists owned the courts and administered justice, they had the means at hand of ruining any plebeian whose property was tempting.
Nor was Adams’ perception of the nature of law confined to ancient Rome. He was able to see, clearer than his contemporaries, that it is no mere coincidence, nor a lex naturae, that the modern legal system is concerned mostly with the protection of property rights:
Abstract justice is, of course, impossible. Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation. As competition sharpens . . . religious ritual is supplanted by civil codes for the enforcement of contracts and the protection of the creditor class.
The more society consolidates, the more legislation is controlled by the wealthy, and at length the representatives of the moneyed class acquire that absolute power once wielded by the Roman proconsul, and now exercised by the modern magistrate. Thus the modern legal system is infinitely subtle, and its enforcing officers equally efficient, in punishing those forms of theft which are not practiced by the ruling class; but robbery in the market-place is governed by primitive controls which lag far behind the sophisticated mechanisms which company lawyers contrive to circumvent them. One measure of a society is the problems it chooses to solve.
Rome’s ruling class was unable to restrain its rapacity, even in its own ultimate interest. Adams saw what liberals are rarely willing to admit—namely, that a system based on corrupt practice cannot be saved merely by tinkering with it. The stronghold of usury lay in the fiscal system, which down to the fall of the Empire was an engine for working bankruptcy. Rome’s policy was to farm the taxes; that is to say, after assessment, to sell them to a publican, who collected what he could. The business was profitable in proportion as it was extortionate, and the country was subjected to a levy, unregulated by law, and conducted to enrich speculators.
MORE: The Economics of Human Energy in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University - http://www.whitings-writings.com/diatribes/ehe03.htm
. . . as {the usurer} fed on insolvency and controlled legislation, the laws were as ingeniously contrived for creating debt, as for making it profitable when contracted. . . As the capitalists owned the courts and administered justice, they had the means at hand of ruining any plebeian whose property was tempting.
Nor was Adams’ perception of the nature of law confined to ancient Rome. He was able to see, clearer than his contemporaries, that it is no mere coincidence, nor a lex naturae, that the modern legal system is concerned mostly with the protection of property rights:
Abstract justice is, of course, impossible. Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation. As competition sharpens . . . religious ritual is supplanted by civil codes for the enforcement of contracts and the protection of the creditor class.
The more society consolidates, the more legislation is controlled by the wealthy, and at length the representatives of the moneyed class acquire that absolute power once wielded by the Roman proconsul, and now exercised by the modern magistrate. Thus the modern legal system is infinitely subtle, and its enforcing officers equally efficient, in punishing those forms of theft which are not practiced by the ruling class; but robbery in the market-place is governed by primitive controls which lag far behind the sophisticated mechanisms which company lawyers contrive to circumvent them. One measure of a society is the problems it chooses to solve.
Rome’s ruling class was unable to restrain its rapacity, even in its own ultimate interest. Adams saw what liberals are rarely willing to admit—namely, that a system based on corrupt practice cannot be saved merely by tinkering with it. The stronghold of usury lay in the fiscal system, which down to the fall of the Empire was an engine for working bankruptcy. Rome’s policy was to farm the taxes; that is to say, after assessment, to sell them to a publican, who collected what he could. The business was profitable in proportion as it was extortionate, and the country was subjected to a levy, unregulated by law, and conducted to enrich speculators.
MORE: The Economics of Human Energy in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University - http://www.whitings-writings.com/diatribes/ehe03.htm
