The financial allegations need to be seen in the context of the time. By '98-2000 the stuff mentioned in the charges had become practically standard procedure in US brokerages... it was a quite deranged time in that industry. It wasn't all coming from the brokers, either: clients in those days were pushing for larger and larger returns and more aggressive strategies. You couldn't sell a conservative low-risk financial strategy in 98-99; brokers who tried went out of business... everybody wanted "the next Yahoo" strategies. When the balloon popped in 2000/2001 there were tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of similar cases, which might be one reason why this was never followed up. That doesn't excuse the actions, but I wouldn't look at them as something that was a major deviation from norm either. If everyone involved in shady financial dealings from '97-2000 was a murderer waiting to happen there'd be a whole heap of murders going on.
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