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In today's featured Wall Street regulatory settlement, we got a lawyer. He was lawyering while stockbrokering. The lawyering earned the stockbroker about $19 an hour over a six-month span. This stockbrokering lawyer (or lawyering stockbroker, if you prefer) also made about $90,000 over a 17-month stretch doing document scanning and uploading. So . . . we got a stockbrokering-paper-pushing-lawyer, so to speak. In this gig economy, how does all that gigging get you into trouble with FINRA? Ah, now that's why this is today's featured story!
Aegis Frumento says that the Christmas movie to watch this year is Greta Gerwig's re-imagining of Little Women. Aegis didn't read Louisa May Alcott's classic novel as a boy, when all the girls in his middle-school class were reading it, because, well, he was a boy. But now Aegis is younger than that now, he has caught up on many of the great women novelists of that era. What strikes him about all of those women novelists is how deeply founded their stories are on economic worry.
In December 2015, DOJ executed an NPA with Coutts, at which time the bank was hit with about $78 million in penalties. At that time, the bank fessed up to 1,337 subject accounts. You'd sort of think that given the dollars at issue and the threat of a criminal prosecution, that Coutts would have made damn sure that it disclosed every damn covered account. What Coutts did disclose was 1,337 U.S.-related accounts with about $2.1 billion in assets under management. What Coutts didn't disclose as part of its 2015 settlement were some 311 accounts, which is about 19% of the total of 1,648 total U.S.-related accounts.