According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the chairman and chief executive officer of Wall Street’s self-regulator, Richard Ketchum, has reported that the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is looking at trading data to see if brokers sometimes earn unusually large profits on bond trades. According to the report, the central bank suggested it may scale back its own bond purchases.
In the United States, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. is a private corporation that acts as a self-regulatory organization. It is a self-regulatory organization, a non-governmental organization that performs financial regulation of member brokerage firms and exchange markets. A spokeswoman for the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Nancy Condon, confirmed the report in the Wall Street Journal in an e-mail.
A person with direct knowledge of the inquiry told Bloomberg News last month that, the SEC has been looking at the practice of dealers who are showing clients different prices for the same securities on electronic bond-trading platforms. The person also reported that according to Bloomberg News, regulators are examining whether being able to turn quotes on and off allows market manipulation, and whether smaller buyers are given the worse prices. Reuters has reported that the agency is looking for instances in which the middlemen have earned unusually large profits on bond deals.
Chief Executive Richard Ketchum said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that, FINRA whose headquarters is within blocks of the White House, is also investigating how banks apportion hot bond offerings among investors. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, according to Online Barrons, has a well-deserved reputation for catching small-fry scoundrels and the letting big dogs run wild. FINRA regulated both Bernie Madoff and R. Allen Stanford and never noticed their Ponzi schemes. A spokeswoman for the Federal Reserve did not respond to a request for comment from Bloomberg News on the report.
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