Tag: WSJ

Credit Suisse Was Alerted to Private Banker’s Misconduct Years Before Criminal Charges

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/credit-suisse-was-alerted-to-private-bankers-misconduct-years-before-criminal-charges-11612462705

Excerpt:

Credit Suisse Group AG overlooked red flags for years while a rogue private banker stole from billionaire clients, according to a report by a law firm for Switzerland’s financial regulator.

The private banker, Patrice Lescaudron, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2018 for fraud and forgery. He admitted cutting and pasting client signatures to divert money and make stock bets without their knowledge, causing more than $150 million in losses, according to the Geneva criminal court.

The regulator, Finma, publicly censured Credit Suisse in 2018 for inadequately supervising and disciplining Mr. Lescaudron as a top earner, and said he had repeatedly broken internal rules, but it revealed little else about the bank’s actions in the matter. Credit Suisse said it discovered Mr. Lescaudron’s fraud in September 2015 when a stock he had bought for clients crashed.

Author: Margot Patrick

Publication Date: 5 February 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

GameStop Day Traders Are Moving Into SPACs

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/gamestop-day-traders-are-moving-into-spacs-11612175401?mod=djemwhatsnews

Excerpt:

Day traders fueling enormous gains in popular stocks such as GameStop Corp. are also powering big swings for another suddenly hot investment: so-called blank-check companies.

Special-purpose acquisition companies—shell companies planning to merge with private firms to take them public—are rising more than 6% on average on their first day of trading in 2021, up from last year’s figure of 1.6%, according to University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter. Before 2020, trading in SPACs was muted when they made their debut on public markets.

Now, shares of blank-check companies almost always go up. The last 140 SPACs to go public have either logged gains or ended flat on their opening day of trading, per a Dow Jones Market Data analysis of trading in blank-check companies through Thursday. One hundred and seventeen in a row have risen in their first week. The gains tend to continue, on average generating bigger returns going out to a few months.

Author: Amrith Ramkumar

Publication Date: 1 December 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

The NFL’s Covid-19 Finding That Saved the Season

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/super-bowl-nfl-covid-cdc-11612104460?fbclid=IwAR3Vw7GGYCX7CGfh3zfxRHzj7mMXmQSGIQADdUGsqkxaHzq6aldnckpk_YQ

Excerpt:

The NFL was slowly discovering something far deeper: a core tenet of Covid-19 transmission wisdom—how to define when individuals are in “close contact”—was just wrong. 

The safety of interactions during this global pandemic had been for months measured by a stopwatch and a tape measure. The guidance was that someone had been exposed to the virus if they had been within six feet of an infected person for more than 15 minutes. It was drilled into everyone for so long it became coronavirus gospel. 

But that wasn’t proving true during the NFL’s outbreaks. People were testing positive for the virus even though they had spent far less than 15 minutes or weren’t within six feet of an infectious person—and the league had the contact-tracing technology to prove it. 

Authors: Andrew Beaton and Louise Radnofsky

Publication Date: 31 January 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Cuomo’s Tax Ultimatum

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomos-tax-ultimatum-11611359134?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Excerpt:

Viewers of Andrew Cuomo’s Emmy-award winning Covid-19 briefings may have noticed how the New York Governor has become increasingly excitable. In this week’s budget show, he pointed an economic gun at New York and threatened to shoot if Washington doesn’t fork over $15 billion.

“If the federal government doesn’t fund state and local governments, it’s going to hurt all New Yorkers,” Mr. Cuomo warned Tuesday while proposing to raise the state’s top income tax rate in New York City to 14.7%. This would be the highest rate in the country, at least until New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy makes a competing bid.

Publication Date: 22 January 2021

Publication Site: WSJ

Covid-19 Is Speeding Up How Deaths Are Recorded

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-is-speeding-up-how-deaths-are-recorded-11611397800

Excerpt:

When governments realized death tolls were too low, they revamped the way they counted them

….

Weeks after the virus hit Italy last year, doctors, funeral homes and officials realized that government Covid-19 death tolls were too low and many victims weren’t getting included. Informal tallies quickly revealed that thousands of deaths most likely caused by the virus had been omitted. Limited testing left the number of infections unknown, and many people had died outside hospitals, which were the initial source of fatality figures.

Italy’s statistical agency, Istat, scrambled to assemble more reliable information, collecting data from towns and cities faster than ever before. In May, it revealed what people at the front lines had suspected: a 39% jump in nationwide deaths between Feb. 21 and March 31 compared with previous years.

“Normally, they [the data] would have arrived six months later,” said Istat President Gian Carlo Blangiardo in May. “We made an extraordinary effort.”

Author: Daniel Michaels

Publication Date: 23 January 2021

Publication Site: WSJ

Joe Biden’s Covid-19 Vaccine Plan: How He Intends to Speed Up Distribution

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-bidens-covid-19-vaccine-plan-how-he-intends-to-speed-up-distribution-11610794800?st=b86yaopaxch9dgx&twopenpaywall

Excerpt:

President will add community vaccination sites, deploy mobile units and enlist pharmacies to achieve his pledge that 100 million doses will be administered in U.S. during his first 100 days in office

President Joe Biden has promised a more forceful U.S. government response to the coronavirus pandemic, and on his second day in office released a national strategy and signed 10 executive orders and other directives as part of the plan.

Authors: Betsy McKay and Sabrina Siddiqui

Publication Date: 21 January 2021

Publication Site: WSJ

The Covid-19 Death Toll Is Even Worse Than It Looks

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-19-death-toll-is-even-worse-than-it-looks-11610636840

Graphic:

Description: Estimating global excess mortality, and comparing against official COVID death counts. As of date of publication, official COVID deaths globally were about 2 million (excluding: China and India, and many other large countries), while excess deaths for 2020 were about 2.8 million.

Authors: Paul Overberg, Jon Kamp and Daniel Michaels

Graphs by: Lindsay Huth

Publication Date: 14 January 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal