Wall Street Firms Using Their Dark Pools To Make Markets In Their Own Stocks

 

These dark pools are operating as private exchanges, with a faux type of specialist system, managing the order book, with all the insight and power that it entails. The layman may not quite comprehend this, but anyone familiar with Wall Street operations and history will certainly do so.

That they are trading for their own parent company stocks, and possibly for their own books, ought to raise more than a few eyebrows.  

We ought to have internalized the lesson by now that markets are not naturally efficient and self-regulating.  But even moreso when the business of price setting and order matching is being done in darkness, and apparently with lax regulatory oversight.

No wonder that Russia and China have decided to create their own joint credit ratings agency.   The lack of integrity in the Western financial system seems appalling to anyone whose ears are not firmly taped to the corporate news feed droning out of New York and London.

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.

After Charges of Running a Price Fixing Cartel on Nasdaq in the 90s, 
Wall Street Banks Are Now Trading Their Own Stocks in Darkness 
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: June 3, 2014

On July 17, 1996, the U.S. Justice Department charged the biggest names on Wall Street, names like Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and predecessor firms to Citigroup, with pricing fixing on the electronic stock market known as Nasdaq…

Yesterday we learned that the very same Wall Street firms charged with price fixing in the 90s have somehow conned their regulators into allowing them to own their own dark pools – effectively unregulated stock exchanges – and make markets in the stock of their very own Wall Street bank.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) – a self-regulatory Wall Street body (which under a previous name was responsible for missing the Nasdaq price fixing for more than a decade) released trading data yesterday for the dark pools operating the week of May 12 – 16. This was the first time such data has been released. The data releases are set to continue…”

Read the entire article with the details 
here.