I can't believe that Jr. was not involved. The whole family had invested heavily in energy projects in Iowa, and with the economy and such, the whole thing must have gone busted.
The memo on July 6 leaves no time for anyone to react considering the Monday's event. IMO, the e-mail was an informal way to thank everyone and say goodbye, and the then a fake suicide to get police protection.
Since this was not a public company, I believe the entire board was the father and the son. Nobody else. Am I correct?
Saw on CNBC that Wasendorf did appear in court wearing a blue polo shirt and looking haggard. How does someone apparently in a coma only a few days ago, appear in court so soon? Was the coma a fraud also?
Sounds like he hired some script writers from Hollywood to write this confession statement, so fake and scripted. An attempt to keep Jr. , his wife, other family members, other big boys and girls in Iowa, and U.S. Bank clean.
I say bull, his suicide was a fake, he is not alone, and authorities should look into the whole PFG gang affairs. They have substantial energy investments in Iowa (perhaps where the money was funneled to) in partnership with well connected Iowans and major Iowa's politicians in their back pocket.
It could be a conspiracy theory, but If our analytical minded authorities can't figure out this whole cover up, we need some help from MI5 and MI6 in this country.
Money is not the answer... and I also don't think more "insiders" doing the regulating is the answer... answer is true accountability, checks and balances, and complete transparency.
Not if you open a new IRA account at a broker or bank. Have them transfer your IRA account from your broker into the new IRA account .
I thought he was referring to pulling the money out of a brokerage firm and taking the cash rather than moving it to another brokerage. I've transferred an IRA from one brokerage to another in the past.
The problem is, how do you know who you can trust? With my luck, I'd transfer my IRA to another brokerage and that brokerage would be shut down. It would be like those MFG accounts that were moved to PFG.
The day I found out about PFG I read that about a banker who swindled $17 million out of his bank customers, left a note/confession and disappeared. They're not sure if he left the country or committed suicide. They're looking for him, or his body. This happened in either Georgia or Florida.
Sounds like he hired some script writers from Hollywood to write this confession statement, so fake and scripted. An attempt to keep Jr. , his wife, other family members, other big boys and girls in Iowa, and U.S. Bank clean..
Mostly agree. All their actions before the exposure incident was to prevent clients from leaving and keeping a good face. Now it's about leaving a personal legacy and Sr. deciding to be the sole fall guy, so clawback attempts can be hindered as much as possible legally from the rest of the conspirators. Similar to Madoff keeping silent.
The NFA assessment fee, payable by FCMs with respect to futures contracts, is $.02 per side, invoiced to customers.
After taking a short look at the publications of the CME regarding just of their futures volume, these numbers made me really dizzy.
With due regards to these huge sums, shouldn't be indicated that "someone" audit the NFA too; simply put are they have been audited? Then also, do they release figures or balance sheets to the public? What happens with all the monies?
I then took a look at the current Opportunities for carreers at NFA. Either they just started now to raise the requirements for positions or they maybe aren't able to hire the right people. A Bachelor's degree in Accounting requires also the ability to anticipate and respond to suspicious practices and analytical and communication skills. At least the latter requirements weren't available at that time. Nobody was able to "anticipate" that this theoretically could be possible and no one also had the "communication skills" to pick up the phone to verify the statements. Seemingly it doesn't matter if it's a top-tier company with triple digit millions of customer assest or a little rat-shop-broker in a one-horse town.
I mean this task could have done the customer himself. Just asking the broker to provide a statement of the bank who helds the segregated accounts, that there is everything in line. Would have this made the customer feeling more reassured? No one pays the customer for that, why would he pay some one else for the same? Only if one can go beyond that, right?
In relation to that, insurance companies send investigators across the states for claims that are one-thenth of a percent and a lot of them have by far less revenues then the NFA.
I think insurance could help, because it's in the interest of the insurance company to prevent the insurance case. Let them do the job when it comes to risk analysis. Therefore they would do very much more, for less premium to audit the way it has to be done. Just one condition of insurance: "If the customer can't withdraw his money due to regulatory actions, this case is coverd by the insurance." Plain and simple.
I've read that it could be more complicated than MF Global because it appears there is fraud involved, based on the CFTC complaint. But this frees the regulators only, if they did everything, I mean at least everything one avarage simple-minded person would do in a regulatory position. If not, there could be possibly someone else to sue with at least sufficient estate to fully satisfy claims...
There have to be made deeply changes in the system, now an immediately. But foremost, the customers have to be compensated to restore the trust!
You are absolutely correct. I have a friend who has been in the insurance business for almost 40 years and we discussed this very issue. He lost two accounts with PFG and he is hopping mad. He's calling for a meeting with his congressman next week....and I'm sure he'll give him an earful. An insurance company would have a vested interest in making sure proper audits are conducted and as you said, they would do the risk analysis. With all the "news" that has come out, with Sr. fudging the records/statements for 20 years....it doesn't sound like the NFA or the CTFC were doing their jobs......and it would seem that they were negligent and should be held accountable right along with Wasendorf. Maybe someone should investigate the CFTC and NFA! I can understand PFG flying under the radar for 2, maybe 3 years, but 20??!! The regulators had to have known about this a long time ago and maybe it's possible since he was on the NFA board he was given preferential treatment?
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The simulation hypothesis asserts that life as we know it – that reality – is actually just a simulation, perhaps a simulation that is housed in some great computer.
Of course, as Marcello Truzzi famously asserted, “the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded,” (Carl Sagan popularized this as “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”). That is to say, currently, the evidence that we actually are in a simulation is rather lacking. So the point is not to try and convince you that the world is all just make-believe; rather, to look at what some experts have to say on the matter and engage with an interesting hypothesis critically.
Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has a wonderful article on the topic, which you can read here if you want to see another take on the topic.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn, the creator, writer and host of “Closer to Truth,” a public television and multimedia program, spoke with several scientists and philosophers about how humanity might be living in an artificial reality. Ultimately, some of our world’s most profound minds have considered the possibility that everything we see and know may merely be a simulation, much like a gigantic computer game created by super-intelligent hackers.
Much like in the movie “The Matrix,” philosopher Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, describes a fake universe as a “richly detailed software simulation of people, including their historical predecessors, by a very technologically advanced civilization.” However, unlike the film, “instead of having brains in vats that are fed by sensory inputs from a simulator, the brains themselves would also be part of the simulation. It would be one big computer program simulating everything, including human brains down to neurons and synapses.”
Notably, Bostrum is not saying that humanity is (or must be) living in such a simulation. Rather, his “Simulation Argument” seeks to show that, based on what we know about the number of potentially habitable worlds and the absence of alien life, one of three possible scenarios must be true (assuming there are other intelligent civilizations):
Technology visionary Ray Kurzweil opines, “maybe our whole universe is a science experiment of some junior high school student in another universe.” He claims that a precise simulation is not meaningfully different from real reality. He believes there is enough evidence to support the conclusion that “the universe is a computer.”
David Brin, sci-fi writer and space scientist, suggests that the programmers of the universe computer may have installed “back doors” in order to retain control over their program. “If we are living in a simulation, then everything is software, including every atom in our bodies,” Brin said, “and there may be ‘back doors’ that the programmers left ajar.”
In a paper published in 2014, “Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation, physicists Silas R. Beane, Zohreh Davoudi, and Martin J. Savage outline a possible method for detecting if our world is actually a computer simulation.
They note that, in our own simulations that we have created, when elementary particles collide, they generate slight, distinctive anomalies. Ultimately, these asymmetries might be able to be detected in the actual universe. To that end, in their paper, they suggest that a closer look at cosmic rays, those high-energy particles coming to Earth’s atmosphere from outside the solar system, may reveal similar asymmetries.
Still, even if we did detect these anomalies, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that we do live in a simulation, but science is all about investigating even the most unlikely hypotheses.