An investment banker jumped to his death from the window of his million-dollar apartment in the Financial District on Thursday, sources and authorities said.

The 29-year-old man plunged from the 24th floor of the luxury Ocean apartment building at 1 West St. at about 10:40 a.m. and landed on a guardrail near the northbound Battery Park Underpass, narrowly missing a black SUV.

The man’s body was mangled by the impact, leaving one of the vehicle’s passengers horrified, witnesses said.

“I went outside, and the woman in the car was screaming, ‘I didn’t know where he came from!’ ” said Hans Peler, 48, a manager at the building’s parking garage.

“It happened right in front of our guy who waves cars in with the flag. He was so shaken up, I told him to go home.”

Read on.

Assistant Attorney General, Leslie Caldwell, Speaking at Press Conference May 20, 2015

When the U.S. Department of Justice held its press conference on Wednesday to announce that five mega banks were each pleading guilty to a felony charge, paying big fines and being put on probation for three years, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Leslie Caldwell specifically took a battering ram to the reputation of Swiss bank, UBS.

Four banks — Citicorp, a unit of Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Royal Bank of Scotland and Barclays — pleaded guilty to an antitrust charge of conspiring to rig foreign currency trading while UBS pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud for its earlier involvement in rigging the interest rate benchmark, Libor.

In explaining why the Justice Department was ripping up the non-prosecution agreement it had negotiated with UBS in December 2012 over its involvement in the Libor fraud and now charging…

Not in the U.S.!

LONDON — Banks have paid billions. Regulators and prosecutors have extracted guilty pleas from financial institutions. Dozens of employees have been fired, and at least one chief executive has lost his job.

Now, on Tuesday, the first trader in the sprawling, half-decade-old investigation into the rigging of global benchmark interest rates will go on trial in Southwark Crown Court.

The British authorities have charged Tom Hayes, a 35-year-old former trader from Citigroup and UBS with eight counts of conspiracy to commit fraud. Mr. Hayes’s indictment claims that he was a ringleader among more than a dozen traders engaged in what the authorities say was a brazen attempt to manipulate the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, a reference rate used to set various others, including those for student loans and mortgages.

Mr. Hayes has pleaded not guilty to all eight charges. His lawyer…

Go Elizabeth!!!

NEW YORK (Reuters) – US Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling for U.S. Department of Labor hearings on whether banks accused of rigging foreign exchange markets should be allowed to manage retirement accounts, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

“When banks plead guilty to a crime, federal agencies must do more than look the other way,” Warren told the Financial Times. “The SEC has already granted waivers to each of these banks without any detailed explanation, but it is not too late for the Department of Labor to hold a public hearing before it decides that such brazen lawbreakers can be trusted managing workers’ retirement accounts.”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/elizabeth-warren-is-calling-for-public-hearings-on-banks-2015-5#ixzz3b7y536d9

After years of criticizing regulators for lax enforcement of securities law, Elizabeth Warren finally has an outspoken ally on the inside pushing for a crackdown on Wall Street offenders.

Kara Stein, the junior Democrat on the Securities and Exchange Commission, has quickly become one of its more ruthless enforcers, making trouble for Wall Street, and aligning herself with Warren’s views as part of a powerful regulator that polices the financial industry.

Stein has opposed giving free passes, or waivers, to badly behaving financial companies so that they can keep doing certain types of business as if nothing happened. Before she started dissenting, the waiver approval was often a routine formality at the SEC.

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Though she may not have the Massachusetts senator’s star power or political ambition, Stein has rattled financial companies, several banking lobbyists said.

“If you have a motion for a waiver pending before the SEC, Stein is…

New York regulators said Monday that 11 lenders have agreed to monitor and maintain vacant properties in an effort to protect them and combat neighborhood blight.

The banks, mortgage companies and credit unions represent nearly 70 percent of the New York market and will adopt practices to limit damage from so-called “zombie properties,” according to the Department of Financial Services. They agreed to best practices that include checking within 60 days any residential properties that are delinquent on loans to begin determining if they are abandoned, the department said.

The 11 lenders are Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi Mortgage, Ocwen, Nationstar, PHH, Green Tree Servicing, Astoria Bank, Bethpage Federal Credit Union, M&T Bank and Ridgewood Savings Bank.

“The wave of zombie properties that arose in the wake of the financial crisis harms local communities and threatens the long-term health of the mortgage market,” department Superintendent Ben Lawsky said. Many…

see http://www.dailybusinessreview.com/id=1202726876952/Thomas-Ice-Ocwen-Lawyer-SpoonFed-Questions-and-Answers-to-RoboWitnesses#ixzz3acD4fkZE

It was no surprise that the script existed for the “corporate representatives” who testify in court. And it shouldn’t be any surprise that Tom Ice uncovered it. These are robo-witnesses. In nearly all cases, the witness never worked for the bank or servicer other than testifying to facts they knew nothing about. If you sit in any foreclosure courtroom you will hear the exact same questions and the exact same answers every time for every bank and every servicer.

As many of us have previously pointed out — these scripts are obviously prepared by lawyers and used by lawyers who treat these witnesses like trained monkeys. Some lawyers have gotten into trouble for fabricated documents. Now it looks like they will get into trouble for fabricating testimony.

So you have a witness who might never have worked for any bank or servicer testifying as to their confidence that…

As promised, the Justice Department has extracted guilty pleas in FX rigging cases involving JP Morgan, Citi, RBS, and Barclays and as we said twice last week and once this morning, the banks received waivers which ensured that none of the penalties that should rightfully be associated with those pleas will actually apply to the banks.

What do traders say to one another when conspiring to rig a $5 trillion-a-day market you ask?  Here are some examples from the Barclays consent order:

One particular chat room, referred to by the participating traders and other traders as the “Cartel” included FX traders from Citigroup, JP Morgan, UBS, RBS and Barclays who specialized in trading the Euro.

One Barclays FX trader, when he became the main Euro trader for Barclays in 2011, wasdesperate to be invited to join the Cartel because of the trading advantages from sharing information with the…