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Corporate ethics in todays business
Corporate ethics and governance
Ethics within corporations
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“Corporate executives and business owners need to realize that there can be no compromise when it comes to ethics, and there are no easy shortcuts to success. Ethics need to be carefully sown into the fabric of their companies” (Vivek Wadhwa). Therefore, if Merrill Lynch had not forgotten their ethics the lawsuits would not have been so detrimental to their brand. Charles Merrill, who was a native of Florida, embarked on a journey that would lead him on his way to New York; he had the precognition to separate much of his holdings before the 1929 crash. Similar consideration would have served the firm well during the era of collateral securities in the early 2000s. So on January 6, 1914, Charles Merrill launched his brokerage firm as a one-man …show more content…
In 1926, they purchased a controlling interest in Safeway, which was their most paramount financial investment for the firm because it transformed a minuscule grocery store chain into the third most astronomically immense grocery store chain by the early 1930s (Edwin Perkins, 1999, p. 238). Furthermore Merrill, Lynch & Co. made prosperous investments in the companies’ early history. The company, founded themselves on five ethical concepts such as client focus, respect for the individual, teamwork, responsible citizenship, and integrity (Anne Szustek, 2014). Throughout the 1930s, Fenner & Beane was consistently the second most exceedingly immense securities firm in the U.S. the fused firm, which became the clear bellwether in securities brokerage in the U.S., was renamed Merrill Lynch, Perforate, Fenner & Beane (Wigmore, 1985, p.238). By March of 1958, the firm had become a Big Board member of the New York Stock …show more content…
Merrill Lynch was incidentally connected to the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme by sanctioning the infamous fraudster to trade utilizing feeder funds issued by Merrill Lynch (Touryalai, 2011, p.1). The Trustee seeking reprisal for Madoff’s victims went by the designation of Irving Picard; he claimed that Merrill Lynch was well cognizant of the possibility of fraud within Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. However, Merrill decided not to take notice of any of the transactions, even though another company had gainsaid prospects that had previously invested with Madoff. Merrill Lynch had to pay back $16 million after the lawsuit was
The case that was provided in the Stanwick textbook provided information on the Madoff Ponzi scheme which is said to be the largest of Ponzi schemes in the world. This case was a very interesting case. It showed how Bernard Madoffs massive falsehood created disaster for around 13,600 clients. The impact from Madoff did not end with his clients being impacted but also people far and in between. Madoffs Ponzi scheme was controlled through his company that consisted of his family being the head of the company, friends, and employees. This scheme was a result for the recession that hit in 2008. The two sons of Madoff that were top employees claimed to have no connections with the Ponzi scheme.
House of Cards describes in particular the complicated series of events that led to the downfall of Bear Sterns in March 2008. Its actual appeal, however, deduces from its complete and careful analysis of the history of the firm since its origination as an upstart brokerage firm in 1923 and a gripping account of the demise of Bear Sterns in 2007. This failure prognosticated a lot of issues that would eventually stultify the firm, and the author puts forward that its deviation from various historical operating practices led to its ultimate sale to JPMorgan Chase at $10 per share, down from over $170 just a year earlier.
Lies were the beginning of the end. Neither Madoff or his partners were licensed to be financial advisors for the number of clients they represented and they knew this. The client regulations stated that if you were not licensed then you could have no more than 15 clients and Madoff had 3,200 clients. This one simple violation could have shut down the entire operation if it had been enforced from the start.
Vanguard Case Analysis After reading through the Vanguard case, there were a few difficult forks in the road that Vanguard seems to be facing. The company’s future can be greatly affected by some of these difficult choices. Vanguard has to decide whether to change their investment offerings, further develop Internationally, or to simply advertise to increase their client base. Top managers at Vanguard have to step up to the plate and rollout detailed plans as to what path the company should take regarding some of these issues. Through our in-class discussions, the majority of the students argued on one major problem that Vanguard was facing.
There’s no real reason as to why Madoff planned to do this scheme, but it seems that he did it, simply because he was in a league of his own and he knew it, which is why it’s possible he went South. The only reason he came forward was because he failed to follow one of the first rules of a Ponzi scheme, he had too many investors in one year and on top of that, he had the global market crisis in 2008, which had opened up the skeletons in his closet. He later began telling his two sons of what he had been doing the last decades, and it wasn’t until Andrew Madoff had told FBI authorities, that his father, Bernie Madoff would be arrested the next day. It wasn’t until 2009 that Madoff pleaded guilty to securities fraud, investment adviser fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, perjury, money laundering and etc. His assets were then sold in order to try and repay all the investors; evidently it wasn’t enough to repay $65million. He was then sentenced to the maximum sentence of 150years in prison. One law that was put in to place was that the SEC now requires all independent public accountants to double check an investment advisor’s numbers. In addition, all investment advisors are subject to surprise exam and custody controls. Also, in corporation with the Dodd Frank Act, whistleblowers can now receive up to 30percent of what the SEC recovers in fines. This will
...y were “earning” that they continued to invest. Most never tried to cash out their earned dividends and had the profits reinvested. There were a few people that did receive their profits and it became known in Madoff’s RICO case that they were all his friends. His friends were able to profit greatly from this scheme. One of his friends Jeffry Picower was able to make $5,771,339,795 from his investments in Madoff’s company. It was well documented in the RICO case that Picower told Madoff how much return on his investment he wanted and then he got that amount. In one particular instance he was able to have over nine hundred and fifty percent returns on his investment. This is an astronomical amount for a return on a stock investment. Picower was one of many believed to have known about the scheme, but most investors did not know they were being scammed.
In May 2002 the SIPC trustee filed a 255.3 million lawsuit against the Madoff family. Madoff company BLMIS ended on December 11 2008 when he was arrested for stealing his customer’s money. For more than 50 years Madoff s company money from people and on June 29th 2009 he pleaded guilty "to 11 counts Complaint and was sentenced as a hundred fifty years in prison"(Lewis, 2013
The Bernie Madoff Ponzi Scheme is a well-known case and is known as one of the biggest Ponzi scheme’s. In summary the scheme occurred for many reasons that I will some up into 3 points; A lack in competency by regulatory agencies, a lack of regulation, and finally a breach in ethics by Bernie Madoff himself. To explain further, the regulatory agencies like the lawyers and SEC are supposed to prevent schemes such as this one from happening but because they lacked the skills to correctly assess the situation, interpreting the number of tips they had received regarding scheme that had been filed, and to act on those in an efficient manner. One of the tips was made by Harry Markopolos in 2000, of who correctly predicted that Madoff was guilty of fraud. Even after this tip from Markopolos, Madoff was not arrested until 2009. Many family members were also a part of the fraud along with some non-family members such as Frank DiPascali and a team known as the 17th floor team, who helped Madoff carry out his fraud. The idea behind Madoff’s fraud was that he would produce false statements of their investments and when people wanted to pull out their investments, the money wasn’t actually there, which rightfully rose more than a few eyebrows and ultimately led to his arrest.
Bernard Madoff had full control of the organizational leadership of Bernard Madoff Investments Securities LLC. Madoff used charisma to convince his friends, members of elite groups, and his employees to believe in him. He tricked his clients into believing that they were investing in something special. He would often turn potential investors down, which helped Bernard in targeting the investors with more money to invest. Bernard Madoff created a system which promised high returns in the short term and was nothing but the Ponzi scheme. The system’s idea relied on funds from the new investors to pay misrepresented and extremely high returns to existing investors. He was doing this for years; convincing wealthy individuals and charities to invest billions of dollars into his hedge fund. And they did so because of the extremely high returns, which were promised by Madoff’s firm. If anyone would have looked deeply into the structure of his firm, it would have definitely shown that something is wrong. This is because nobody can make such big money in the market, especially if no one else could at the time. How could one person, Madoff, hold all of his clients’ assets, price them, and manage them? It is clearly a conflict of interest. His company was showing high profits year after year; despite most of the companies in the market having losses. In fact, Bernard Madoff’s case is absolutely stunning when you consider the range and number of investors who got caught up in it.
RBC Financial Group uses a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy that provides a variety of services for a variety of clients. The strategy allows for individual customers to trust RBC and develop a personal relationship with each and every client. One major factor that allows CRM to operate effectively is the use of technologies and analytics to help classify each client’s financial situation. These customer profitability-based techniques allowed RBC to categorize their clients into A, B, and C groups so that the sales teams could optimize their efforts in catering to these different clients. This strategy holds the following strengths: optimizing sales efforts to different customers, easily accessible electronic sales leads, centralized and standardized financial decisions, and building personalized and sustainable customer relationships. There are a few weaknesses to the system though including the complexity in predicting future positions of companies despite the use of analytics as well as the complexity in creating consistency when using these
Bernie Madoff is one of the greatest conman in history. The Bernie Madoff scandal takes the gold as one of the top ponzi scheme in America. Madoff started the Wall Street firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC, in 1960. Starting off as a penny stock trader with five thousand dollars, earned from his workings as a lifeguard and sprinkler installer, his firm began to grow with the support of his father-in-law, Saul Alpern, who helped by referred a group of close friends and family. Originally, his firm made markets by the National Quotations Bureau’s Pink Sheets. However, in order to compete with the bigger firms that were trading on the New York Stock Exchange floor, his firm started to use very intelligent computer software that help distributed their quotes in second’s rater then minutes. This software later became the NASDAQ that we know today. In December of 2008 Bernard Madoff confessed that he had embezzling billions of dollars from investors. It is estimated to have lasted nearly two decades, and stolen approximately $64.8 billion. On December 11, 2008 he was arreste...
Mackay, Tim. "The Ethics Of The Wolf Of Wall Street." Charter 85.2 (2014): 67.Web. 23 Mar. 2014.
Markopolos was working as a portfolio manager for an equity derivatives asset management firm located in Boston when he was asked to look into Madoff’s
In 2008, Irving Picard was assigned as the Securities Investor Protection Act (SIPA) Trustee for the liquidation of Bernard Madoff Investment Securities LLC (BLMIS) (Ferrell, J, Ferrell, O, and Fraedrich, 2015, p. 421). The Appeals court threw out Picard's suits against the banks due to lack of evidence proving the banks participated in the Madoff fraud. The ruling included that bankruptcy trustees have no authority to sue third parties on behalf of the estate's creditors. In turn, Picard petitioned the Supreme Court October 9, 2013, to reverse the decision and allow him to sue the banks for their participation in the scheme with Madoff. The petition insisted that the court misunderstood the SIPA. The SIPA was created to protect investors from
During the 1920s, approximately 20 million Americans took advantage of post-war prosperity by purchasing shares of stock in various securities exchanges. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the fortunes of many investors were lost. In addition, banks lost great sums of money in the Crash because they had invested heavily in the markets. When people feared their banks might not be able to pay back the money that depositors had in their accounts, a “run” on the banking system caused many bank failures. After the crash, public confidence in the market and the economy fell sharply. In response, Congress held hearings to identify the problems and look for solutions; the answer was found in the new SEC. The Commission was established in 1934 to enforce new securities laws that were passed with the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The two new laws stated that “Companies publicly offering securities must tell the public the truth about their businesses, the securities they are selling and the risks involved in the investing.” Secondly, “People who sell and trade securities must treat investors fairly and honestly, putting investors’ interests first.”2