SUPPORTIVE RESIDENTS & CARERS ACTION GROUP INCRegistered with the Justice Department of Victoria Consumer Affairs DivisionDear FSI Review,"Citi also said Monday that quarterly earnings fell 96 percent, largely because of the settlement. -"We note ASIC continues to blame 'poor advice': it is impossible to get 'good advice' when banks bet against their clients, falsify data taken from gullible borrowers, and engage in frauds: see Eric Holder's pres statement in US v Citigroup as an example. Please investigate ASIC's wilful blindness. Shareholders are also affected when fines of $7b to $17 billion wipe out profits. Apart from lost dividends, there may be margin calls: we think we need moritorium clauses and, frankly, we need a return to the original ex turpi causa doctrine so banks can't enforce contracts that they set their clients up with. Would you pay a bet to a bookie who bribed the jockies, nobbled the horses, drafts the Rules, drafts the Arbitration, and pays the Arbitrator? Of course not - No wonder the public want the Guillotine as ASIC eats cake. Regarding ASIC's role as a gatherer of market intelligence, they make Maxwell Smart look brilliant. ASIC ignored whistleblowers and actively allowed the rebundled toxic investments of the type in cases like US v Citi to go on 'down under'. They are the Mr Magoo of the regulatory world. They are nearly a decade behind other jurisdictions in an age where foreign groups form BRICS, the IMF has their SDRs and 'mystery buyers' in Belgium prop up the $USD as the Russians and Chinese turn greenbacks into hard assets like powerplants. ASIC needs glasses. Similar ineptness in a traffic cop would have ICAC looking for secret accounts to explain the incompetance on such as grand scale. So please investigate their in/competancies. We believe the banks should be investigated for supplying false data to rating agencies. R. Christopher Small, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, 2014/08/25 09:02 Eastern Daylight TimeEditor's Note: The following paper comes to us from Alessio Pacces and Alessandro Romano, both of the Erasmus School of Law at Erasmus University Rotterdam.In our recent ECGI working paper, A Strict Liability Regime for Rating Agencies, we study how to induce Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) to produce ratings as accurate as the available forecasting technology allows.Referring to CRAs, Paul Krugman wrote that: It was a system that looked dignified and respectable on the surface. Yet it produced huge conflicts of interest. Issuers of debt [] could choose among several rating agencies. So they could direct their business to whichever agency was most likely to give a favorable verdict, and threaten to pull business from an agency that tried too hard to do its job.However, the conflicts of interest stemming from the issuer-pays model and rating shopping by issuers are not sufficient to explain rating inflation. Because ratings are valuable only as far as they are considered informative by investors, in a well-functioning market, reputational sanctions should prevent rating inflation.There should be mandatory reporting/whistleblowing of suspect activity as already occurs with reporting child abuse to child welfare, reporting trust account reports to law society inspectors, and in this example (that Fos disagreed with): After all, the academic research and analysts say that surprises, like charges laid 'out of the blue' by regulators (which Fos knew were coming down) , can call huge falls in share prices. (We think Fos' systemic reports should be detailed, name culprits, and go to Attys General). Police Officers who are repeatedly blind are often investigated: do your laws need to say that the wilfully or recklessly 'blind' public officials and FOS Ltd Directors are complicite in malfeasance? Unlike the myopic rose coloured Mr Magoos in Fos/ASIC, your Courts and Ministers & United Nations Officials seem alive to wilful blindness - "acquiesced in or was wilfully blind as to any person receiving or attempting to receive a bribe or improper payment"FOS for example seemingly disagrees with RBA documents, referrals to foreign law enforcement involving suspected mob money behind construction projects in Australia for US Subsidiaries, phone call transcripts, applications by foreign law enforcement special agents for international arrest warrants, the FBI & top foreign prosecutors like the British Serious Fraud office and US Attorneys General, regarding for example the causal connection between Libor and Eurobor and other fx rigging to interest rates on mortgages and credit cards. How can FOS and ASIC 'side with' banks against all the evidence? We believe a Royal Commission would be very instructive. This is some of the material that Fos disagreed with: Before there is another economic trainwreck from rewarding bad behavior, please investigate the CBA Spy Scandal and ascertain if former Fos staff, who work at a bank, threatened to withdraw support from Fos (at a time coinciding with fiscal cutbacks in Fos) unless FOS 'sided with the banks'. and if they 'just made mistakes' and 'didn't see', please send them to SpecSavers. Supportive Residents & Carers Action Group Inc