The Magazine of Corporate Responsibility

Tag Archive for ‘Citigroup’

The Year in Wall Street Investigations

It’s been over three years since credit markets started shaking with the early tremors of the subprime crisis, and two years since that spread into a marketwide collapse. Prosecutors, regulators, Congress and journalists have spent the year uncovering the financial shenanigans that brought the market to its knees. It’s been marked by a few blockbuster settlements and more revealing investigations — as well as by some noticeable inaction in the reckoning.

Banks’ Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis

Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history. Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses: They created fake demand.

Courts Fault Feds, SEC for Going Easy on Banks

When big banks have announced settlements with the Securities and Exchange Commission, ProPublica put those agreed-upon fines into perspective, and often found that even millions of dollars in fines aren’t too hard for these big financial firms to shell out. Judges, increasingly, seem to agree.

Citigroup Fined $1 for Every $500 in Subprime Exposure It Hid

Citigroup has agreed to pay the SEC $75 million to settle charges that the bank hid exposure to more than $40 billion in subprime CDOs. (That works out to roughly a $1 fine for every $500 worth of hidden exposure.)