A Success in Fighting Wall Street
Gretchen Morgenson is a business columnist for the New York Times. I enjoy reading her articles in the Sunday Business section for their relentless focus on the criminal activities conducted by Wall Street -- criminal in the moral sense, as they are usually legally defensible. But that's changing: in last week's article (April 24, 2011), titled A Crack in Wall Street's Defenses , describes how two investors (who are neighbors in Aspen) successfully battled Smith Barney (a Citigroup subsidiary) and were recently awarded $54 million in a securities arbitration case, $17 million of which was for punitive damages. This was decided by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (or FINRA ), an industry sponsored self-regulatory board that is approved by the SEC. These investors were told that a complex arbitrage portfolio involving municipal bonds would provide above average returns between 2002 and 2007. In reality, it was providing Smith Barney guaranteed profits at investors