Yet another UK trader is being punished by overzealous regulators for an accomplishment that should instead have earned him accolades: Outsmarting the machines.
In a case that echoes some of the circumstances surrounding the scapegoating of former UK-based trader Nav Sarao, former Bank of America Merrill Lynch bond trader Paul Walter has been fined 60,000 pounds by the FCA for a practice that regulators call ‘algo baiting’.
In October, we discussed Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi’s, decision to hand over $32bn to recapitalise India’s state banks. The motivation was India’s slowing growth rate and the need to add one million Indians to the workforce every month. Crippled by massive bad debts, the state-owned banks were struggling to extend more credit to the economy. The announcement caused a surge in India’s Sensex equity index, led by the banks.
In the run up to the 'great recession' of 2008/2009, it was unsuspecting European and Asian buyers that supplied the marginal capital required to turn America's plain vanilla, fed-induced housing bubble into a turbo-charged, global financial time bomb by indiscriminately scooping up highly-levered structured mortgage products with absolutely no idea what was behind those products.
Now, it seems that China's lust for levered returns in U.S. structured products has returned and is focused this time around on the CLO market. Per Bloomberg:
It looks like BoJ Governor, Haruhiko Kuroda’s, minions are getting out and about to brief the financial news services that the biggest stimulator of all the central banks might reduce stimulus earlier than expected. The recipient of the unofficial briefings by BoJ officials is Reuters, which has this to say.
The Bank of Japan is dropping subtle, yet intentional, hints that it could edge away from crisis-mode stimulus earlier than expected, through a future hike in its yield target, according to people familiar with the central bank’s thinking.
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
On October 3, 1913, US President Woodrow Wilson signed the Underwood-Simmons Act into law, creating what would become the first modern US income tax.
The legislation (at least, the income tax portion) was only 16 pages and imposed a base tax rate of just 1%.
The highest tax rate was set at 7%– and it only applied to individuals earning more than $500,000 per year, which is about $12.6 million today according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.