BLS Library Blog

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that The New York Times will begin charging for access to its website in January 2011 and The Atlantic Monthly has a cover story in the current issue entitled “Inside Google: the Company’s Daring Plan to Save the News (and Itself)” by James Fallows, discussing, among other things, the need for newspapers to set up “paywalls,” where their website users will have to pay for content. As you may have heard, many newspapers and news magazines are in dire financial straits; Newsweek is reportedly looking for a buyer; newspapers are losing advertising dollars to Craigslist.

Now that it’s summer in law school (if not in the real world) and you may have a few more minutes to browse and even read some newspapers and magazines in print, here is a list of what the library has accessible and available in the first floor newspaper rack and magazine stand:

Newspapers:
Financial Times
National Law Journal
New York Law Journal
New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Washington Post

Magazines:
Atlantic Monthly
Bloomberg Markets
Economist
Forbes
Nation
New York
New Yorker
Wired

The library has also stopped binding law reviews so that unbound issues are now accessible and available on the third floor in the Law Review Room and the Subin Reading Room.

The dramatic drop in the stock market that occurred on May 6 causing the Dow Jones Average to plummet 1,000 points, 10% of its total value, in a half hour has prompted the Securities and Exchange Commission to propose a rule that would pause trading of individual stocks if the trading price falls 10 percent or more in a five-minute period. A Wall Street Journal article ‘Flash Crash’ Plan: a Circuit Breaker for Every Stock reports the SEC proposed rule change announced this week. The SEC is working with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) on this issue. 

SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said she believed that disparate trading rules and conventions across the exchanges exacerbated the “flash crash”. The proposed rule comes as the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) released Preliminary Findings Regarding the Market Events of May 6, 2010. On page 75, the staff report states “the SEC is taking a number of steps to identify the cause or causes of the May 6 market disruption as well as factors that may have exacerbated that event, and to develop regulatory initiatives to help prevent a recurrence.” 

While the cause of the “flash crash” remains unclear, the report focused on orders placed by high-frequency traders, or HFTs, firms that barely existed a few years ago but now account for two-thirds of all US stock trading. It makes these observations about high frequency traders which it defines as “professional traders that use computer systems to engage in strategies that generate a large number of trades on a daily basis.”:
 

Both the CFTC and the SEC have had extensive conversations with a wide variety of market participants (investors, hedge funds, exchange traded funds, dealers, high frequency traders, etc.) to better understand their trading activities throughout May 6, and to gather anecdotal evidence from which common themes and/or trends can be identified to inform further areas of investigation.

The SEC needs to develop the tools necessary to readily identify large traders and be able to evaluate their trading activity is heightened by the fact that large traders, including certain high-frequency traders, are playing an increasingly prominent role in the securities markets.

See the NY Times DealBook article Speedy New Traders Make Waves Far From Wall Street for more on the growing impact of high-frequency traders.

In a press release issued by the SEC this week, Schapiro said “I believe it is important that all the exchanges quickly reached consensus on a set of uniform circuit breakers that would be triggered when needed. Today’s filings reflect that consensus. I am pleased by the constructive cooperation of the exchanges and FINRA, as evidenced by their rapid response.” The proposed rule is laid out in the SEC Release No.34-62131.

A CNN.Money report Schapiro: Robo-trading eyed in ‘flash crash’ says that Schapiro told a Senate panel that computerized trading could be responsible for the historic market plunge on May 6 and that the 1,000-point stock plunge was “possibly exacerbated by the withdrawal of liquidity by electronic market makers and the use of market orders, including automated stop-loss market orders.” This video featuring Fortune’s Managing Editor Andy Server explains the more proactive regulatory stance that the SEC is now taking:

Transparancy International (TI), an international non-governmental organization fighting corruption is trying to raise public awareness about corruption. Its 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) measures the perceived level of public-sector corruption in 180 countries and territories around the world and lists the US as number 18 (behind 17 other nations: New Zealand, Denmark, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Netherlands, Australia, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Germany, Ireland, Austria, Japan and the United Kingdom). In its regional highlights for the Americas, TI states: 

The United States (US) is weathering widespread concerns over a lack of government oversight in relation to the financial sector. A swift government response to the financial crisis and moves towards regulatory reforms that include transparency and accountability measures, may have countered scepticism. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether proposed reforms are far-reaching enough and to what extent they will be implemented. Another reason for concern is that in the US the legislature is perceived to be the institution most affected by corruption, according to TI’s Global Corruption Barometer, a public opinion survey published in 2009.

An investigative article by Bloomberg News on one of the biggest criminal investigations in public finance may worsen that perception. The story involves accusations of wrongdoing against big banks (including JPMorgan, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, Bank of America and Citigroup) involved in an alleged conspiracy in a massive bid-rigging scandal over the use of guaranteed investment contracts, or GICs in the municipal bond market. The GICs act like certificates of deposit for the cash raised from municipal bond offerings. Since interest rates on GICs are not published, local governments put the contracts out for competitive bidding for small advisory firms to run the auctions in order to get the highest interest rates. The indictments from October 2009 against one of the advisory firms, CDR Financial Products of Beverly Hills, allege that the process appears to have been rigged, according to the Bloomberg story. In March and February, three employees of CDR Financial Products pleaded guilty to bid-rigging, fraud conspiracies and wire fraud.

The charges against CDR claim the firm told over a dozen big banks that sell GICs, how to lowball their bids to win business from the state and local governments. The banks, in turn, paid kickbacks to CDR. Involved are 160 state agencies, local governments and non-profits that may have lost hundreds of millions of dollars. States including West Virginia were effected by the nationwide conspiracy. The US Justice Department filed a criminal antitrust case over contracts holding tens of billions of taxpayer dollars in the US District Court in Manhattan on March 24 that is now under seal.

The workings of the conspiracy — which stretched from California to Pennsylvania in the $2.8 trillion municipal bond market and included more than 200 deals involving about 160 state agencies, local governments and non- profits — can be pieced together from the Justice Department’s indictment of CDR Financial Products Inc., civil lawsuits by governments around the country, e-mails obtained by Bloomberg News and interviews with current and former bankers and public officials. Bloomberg News has this quote: 

“The whole investment process was rigged across the board,” said Charlie Anderson, who retired in 2007 as head of field operations for the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt bond division. “It was so commonplace that people talked about it on the phones of their employers and ignored the fact that they were being recorded.
Anderson said he referred scores of cases to the Justice Department when he was with the IRS. He estimates that bid rigging cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Anderson said prosecutors are lining up conspirators to plead guilty and name names.
“This will go on for a long time and a lot of people will be indicted.”

Stay tuned as this story develops.

Next week, a scene from a new production titled Something Borrowed will be filmed in the Crea reading room on the second floor of the Library. The film, directed by Luke Greenfield and starring Kate Hudson, is based on the Emily Griffin debut novel of the same name. The story is about a young, New York lawyer who has a drunken, one night fling with her best friend’s fiance (who is also a lawyer) and ends up falling in love with him. The N.Y. Times Booklist gave it a starred review and called it a compelling read in the crowed genre of “chick lit.” Publishers Weekly was not as generous but still advised that it was an enjoyable “beach read.”

On May 27th, the film crew will be working in the Crea reading room and prepping it for filming on the 28th. The room will be closed on both May 27th and May 28th. Please plan to make yourselves comfortable in other areas of the library. We are not sure if Ms. Hudson will be in the scene or not – so keep your eyes peeled!