Federal Appeals Court Reverses PCAOB and SEC over Denial of Ernst & Young Expert Witness (BrokeAndBroker.com Blog) You know when you read something that's "official" and, at first blush, it doesn't make sense? Of course, you figure you must have missed something, so you re-read it but, gee, it still doesn't make sense. Then you look at the heading of the document and it's from some governmental agency or court and you figure that they must know what they're talking about and, after all, I'm just an idiot. At this point, you often go back, re-read the thing a third time but now assume whatever is necessary to bring reason to the pages and you relinquish all sorts of objections that get in the way. Voila, it now all makes sense! Of course, you may also wind up walking away as did Galileo muttering "And yet it moves." Speaking of walking away and how things still move, I recently followed a mess involving the crosshairs PCAOB, the SEC, and a Ernst & Young audit partner. The E&Y audit partner came within the of PCAOB and was suspended and fined, which the SEC affirmed. Frankly, I didn't feel much sympathy for the guy and felt and still feel that PCAOB had him dead to rights. On the other hand, when the PCAOB was investigating the audit partner, they scheduled an interview at which he was accompanied by a lawyer employed by E&Y. Not my preferred manner of representation given the potential for conflicts in such cases but it's common enough that it's not that big a deal. On the other hand, PCAOB denied the lawyer's request to be accompanied by an accounting expert, who was also an E&Y employee. As best I could understand PCAOB's position on denying the expert's attendance, the regulator kept saying that it didn't want an employee of the firm present at the individual's interview -- but, you know, I kept noticing that the lawyer representing the individual was an E&Y employee and, hey, what's up with that? How come it's okay to have one E&Y employee present at the interview but not another? Seemed to me that PCAOB was sort of making it up as it went along. http://www.brokeandbroker.com/3903/laccetti-pcaob-sec/

Federal Courts Wrestle With Opening Doors To US Courthouse To KOSPI Class Action (BrokeAndBroker.com Blog) When we talk about the globalization of Wall Street, we need look no further than a recent class action lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ("SDNY") by five Korean citizens plaintiffs, who traded KOSPI 200 future contracts in the after-hours (the "night market") on the Korea Exchange ("KRX"). You might ask with some validity as to how such a case would have jurisdiction in the US courts. That's a fair question and, frankly, you're a pretty clever person to have raised the point. Then there's the whole mixing of the real and the digital worlds. Where does anything online occur anymore? If you enter a trade in Korea that is sent to a server based in the United States but routed back for settlement to Korea, how do we figure out just where "where" is? As more transactions move to the Cloud, the question of where something takes place may become more difficult. Read on and see how the US court system handled that very problem. http://www.brokeandbroker.com/3901/kospi-tower-2cir/