Bill Clinton signed the bill
- Thread starter Big Money
- Start date
Taft2016
Verified User
And what caused the crash darling? Inflated housing prices, because anyone could get a mortgage. And then people not repaying their mortgages.
And when banks tried to be cautious they were punished by the government. Because obviously the right-wing extremists were hell-bent on minority home ownership.
Who took the loss? The banks and the financial institutions. How many of them are no longer in existence?
Taft2016
Verified User
Government releases? This would be the same government that caused the problem in the first place?
If you want to shore your case up, you could begin by explaining to us how all of this deregulation helped banks and financial institutions. You can start with:
*Merrill Lynch
*Bear Stearns
*Washington Mutual
*ING
Repeal of Glass-Steagall has become for the Democratic left what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are for the Republican right — a simple and facially plausible conspiracy theory about the crisis that reinforces what they already believed about financial markets and economic policy.
But why let facts get in the way of a good screenplay?
Facts such as that Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch — three institutions at the heart of the crisis — were pure investment banks that had never crossed the old line into commercial banking. The same goes for Goldman Sachs, another favorite villain of the left.
The infamous AIG? An insurance firm. New Century Financial? A real estate investment trust. No Glass-Steagall there.
Two of the biggest banks that went under, Wachovia and Washington Mutual, got into trouble the old-fashioned way – largely by making risky loans to homeowners. Bank of America nearly met the same fate, not because it had bought an investment bank but because it had bought Countrywide Financial, a vanilla-variety mortgage lender.
Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo — two large banks with big investment banking arms — resisted taking government capital and arguably could have weathered the crisis without it.
Did U.S. investment banks create a shadow banking system and derivatives market outside the normal regulatory framework that encouraged sloppy lending and created what turned out to be toxic securities? You betcha.
And did regular banks make some of those bad loans and buy up some of those toxic securities? Yes, they did.
But that was as much a problem at the banks and investment banks that combined as those that remained independent. More significantly, the bulk of the money that flowed through the shadow banking system didn’t come from government-insured bank deposits. It came from money market funds, hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies, foreign banks and foreign central banks.
Confronted with these inconvenient facts, the conspiracists like to double-down and argue that the real damage caused by repeal of Glass-Steagall is that it triggered a wave of bank consolidation — which has now left more than half of the country’s banking assets under the control of a handful of institutions that are so big that the government has no choice but to bail them out if they risk a meltdown of the financial system.
No doubt about it — too-big-to-fail is a problem. It turns out, however, that it was also a problem in 1984, when Continental Illinois, the seventh-largest U.S. bank with a whopping $40 billion in assets, had to be rescued. It was a problem a few years later when the Fed quietly rescued Citicorp because of mountains of loans to Latin American governments that turned sour. It was a problem in 1998 when the Fed had to orchestrate the rescue of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund with less than $5 billion in capital. And it was the reason behind the Fed’s 2007 rescue of Bear Stearns, with less than a quarter the size of its biggest Wall Street rivals.
A bank doesn’t have to have $1 trillion in assets to be too big to fail. Context matters. It depends on how much it has borrowed from, or lent to, other financial institutions. And it depends on the degree to which the banks are a counterparty on futures, credit-default swaps and other derivatives contracts.
The decision of whether an institution needs to be rescued also depends on the overall state of the market. When markets are strong, the failure of even a highly visible institution might be dismissed as a one-off event. But when markets are nervous, even the failure of a second-tier institution can spook investors and lenders to begin pulling back from all similar institutions, creating a contagion effect that can send global markets crashing.
Don’t infer that I think bank consolidation has been a good thing. There aren’t many who have railed against it in print for as long, or as consistently, as I have — to no particular effect, I might add. But repeal of Glass-Steagall has not been the key driver of this consolidation, which began long before 1999.
Excessive bank consolidation has left us with megabanks that are too large and complex to properly manage and regulate. The evidence is now overwhelming that top executives and directors and regulators are often clueless about risks deliberately taken and corners knowingly cut by people working under their direction. The chances of that happening grow with the size and complexity of the bank.
Perhaps more important is that consolidation has created the kind of oligopoly that has reduced price competition in the market for many financial services. That has allowed the industry to earn operating profits well above those of more competitive industries. And those excess profits — largely captured by the top executives, bankers and traders in the form of bonuses — create the perverse incentives to take excess risk and cut corners.
Any number of factors led to the recent financial crisis.
At the top of the list — and rarely mentioned — is the willingness of our trading partners to finance our trade deficit with an artificially low interest rate and an artificially high exchange rate. And right behind it was the growth of a vast new shadow banking system largely outside the reach of regulators.
Shoddy lenders, foolish borrowers and investors, greedy investment bankers, compromised appraisers and ratings analysts, clueless regulators — all of these were also part of the story — along with excessive consolidation.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-07-28/business/35489373_1_glass-steagall-commercial-banks-biggest-banks
But why let facts get in the way of a good screenplay?
Facts such as that Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch — three institutions at the heart of the crisis — were pure investment banks that had never crossed the old line into commercial banking. The same goes for Goldman Sachs, another favorite villain of the left.
The infamous AIG? An insurance firm. New Century Financial? A real estate investment trust. No Glass-Steagall there.
Two of the biggest banks that went under, Wachovia and Washington Mutual, got into trouble the old-fashioned way – largely by making risky loans to homeowners. Bank of America nearly met the same fate, not because it had bought an investment bank but because it had bought Countrywide Financial, a vanilla-variety mortgage lender.
Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo — two large banks with big investment banking arms — resisted taking government capital and arguably could have weathered the crisis without it.
Did U.S. investment banks create a shadow banking system and derivatives market outside the normal regulatory framework that encouraged sloppy lending and created what turned out to be toxic securities? You betcha.
And did regular banks make some of those bad loans and buy up some of those toxic securities? Yes, they did.
But that was as much a problem at the banks and investment banks that combined as those that remained independent. More significantly, the bulk of the money that flowed through the shadow banking system didn’t come from government-insured bank deposits. It came from money market funds, hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies, foreign banks and foreign central banks.
Confronted with these inconvenient facts, the conspiracists like to double-down and argue that the real damage caused by repeal of Glass-Steagall is that it triggered a wave of bank consolidation — which has now left more than half of the country’s banking assets under the control of a handful of institutions that are so big that the government has no choice but to bail them out if they risk a meltdown of the financial system.
No doubt about it — too-big-to-fail is a problem. It turns out, however, that it was also a problem in 1984, when Continental Illinois, the seventh-largest U.S. bank with a whopping $40 billion in assets, had to be rescued. It was a problem a few years later when the Fed quietly rescued Citicorp because of mountains of loans to Latin American governments that turned sour. It was a problem in 1998 when the Fed had to orchestrate the rescue of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund with less than $5 billion in capital. And it was the reason behind the Fed’s 2007 rescue of Bear Stearns, with less than a quarter the size of its biggest Wall Street rivals.
A bank doesn’t have to have $1 trillion in assets to be too big to fail. Context matters. It depends on how much it has borrowed from, or lent to, other financial institutions. And it depends on the degree to which the banks are a counterparty on futures, credit-default swaps and other derivatives contracts.
The decision of whether an institution needs to be rescued also depends on the overall state of the market. When markets are strong, the failure of even a highly visible institution might be dismissed as a one-off event. But when markets are nervous, even the failure of a second-tier institution can spook investors and lenders to begin pulling back from all similar institutions, creating a contagion effect that can send global markets crashing.
Don’t infer that I think bank consolidation has been a good thing. There aren’t many who have railed against it in print for as long, or as consistently, as I have — to no particular effect, I might add. But repeal of Glass-Steagall has not been the key driver of this consolidation, which began long before 1999.
Excessive bank consolidation has left us with megabanks that are too large and complex to properly manage and regulate. The evidence is now overwhelming that top executives and directors and regulators are often clueless about risks deliberately taken and corners knowingly cut by people working under their direction. The chances of that happening grow with the size and complexity of the bank.
Perhaps more important is that consolidation has created the kind of oligopoly that has reduced price competition in the market for many financial services. That has allowed the industry to earn operating profits well above those of more competitive industries. And those excess profits — largely captured by the top executives, bankers and traders in the form of bonuses — create the perverse incentives to take excess risk and cut corners.
Any number of factors led to the recent financial crisis.
At the top of the list — and rarely mentioned — is the willingness of our trading partners to finance our trade deficit with an artificially low interest rate and an artificially high exchange rate. And right behind it was the growth of a vast new shadow banking system largely outside the reach of regulators.
Shoddy lenders, foolish borrowers and investors, greedy investment bankers, compromised appraisers and ratings analysts, clueless regulators — all of these were also part of the story — along with excessive consolidation.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-07-28/business/35489373_1_glass-steagall-commercial-banks-biggest-banks
evince
Truthmatters
NO FUCKING RULES ON WHO AND HOW SOMEONE COULD BE A BROKER,
'
their brokers had no rules to follow you fucking idiot
There is very little doubt that the underlying cause of the current credit crisis was a housing bubble. But the collapse of the bubble would not have led to a worldwide recession and credit crisis if almost 40% of all U.S. mortgages–25 million loans–were not of the low quality known as subprime or Alt-A.
These loans were made to borrowers with blemished credit, or involved low or no down payments, negative amortization and limited documentation of income. The loans’ unprecedentedly high rates of default are what is driving down housing prices and weakening the financial system.
The low interest rates of the early 2000s may explain the growth of the housing bubble, but they don’t explain the poor quality of these mortgages. For that we have to look to the government’s distortion of the mortgage finance system through the Community Reinvestment Act and the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac .
In a recent meeting with the Council on Foreign Relations, Barney Frank–the chair of the House Financial Services Committee and a longtime supporter of Fannie and Freddie–admitted that it had been a mistake to force homeownership on people who could not afford it. Renting, he said, would have been preferable. Now he tells us.
Long-term pressure from Frank and his colleagues to expand home ownership connects government housing policies to both the housing bubble and the poor quality of the mortgages on which it is based. In 1992, Congress gave a new affordable housing “mission” to Fannie and Freddie, and authorized the Department of Housing and Urban Development to define its scope through regulations.
Shortly thereafter, Fannie Mae, under Chairman Jim Johnson, made its first “trillion-dollar commitment” to increase financing for affordable housing. What this meant for the quality of the mortgages that Fannie–and later Freddie–would buy has not become clear until now.
On a parallel track was the Community Reinvestment Act. New CRA regulations in 1995 required banks to demonstrate that they were making mortgage loans to underserved communities, which inevitably included borrowers whose credit standing did not qualify them for a conventional mortgage loan.
To meet this new requirement, insured banks–like the GSEs–had to reduce the quality of the mortgages they would make or acquire. As the enforcers of CRA, the regulators themselves were co-opted into this process, approving lending practices that they would otherwise have scorned. The erosion of traditional mortgage standards had begun.
Shortly after these new mandates went into effect, the nation’s homeownership rate–which had remained at about 64% since 1982–began to rise, increasing 3.3% from 64.2% in 1994 to 67.5% in 2000 under President Clinton, and an additional 1.7% during the Bush administration, before declining in 2007 to 67.8%. There is no reasonable explanation for this sudden spurt, other than a major change in the standards for granting a mortgage or a large increase in the amount of low-cost funding available for mortgages. The data suggest that it was both.
As might be expected, the market for subprime and Alt-A loans grew along with the rise in homeownership. Some have argued that unregulated groups such as mortgage brokers and bankers, working with subprime lenders such as Countrywide Financial, supplied both the easier credit and the lower loan standards, but the facts belie this.
From 1995 until 2004, subprime loans by the traditional subprime lenders like Countrywide averaged slightly more than 5% of all mortgages, far too few to account for the growth in either homeownership or the housing bubble. CRA loans, totaling 3% of originations, were also too few. Where, then, did all the low-quality loans come from?
From 1994 to 2003, Fannie and Freddie’s purchases of mortgages, as a percentage of all mortgage originations, increased from 37% to an all-time high of 57%, effectively cornering the conventional conforming market. With leverage ratios that averaged 75-to-1, and funds raised with implicit government backing, the GSEs were pouring money into the housing market. This in itself would have driven the housing bubble.
But it also appears that, perhaps as early as 1993, Fannie Mae began to offer easy financing terms and lowered its loan standards in order to meet congressionally mandated affordable housing goals and fulfill the company’s trillion-dollar commitment. For example, in each of the years 2000 and 2001, the first years for which data are available, 18% of Fannie’s originations–totaling $157 billion–were loans with FICO scores of less than 660 (the federal regulators’ cut-off point for defining subprime loans). There is no equivalent data available for Freddie, but it is likely that its purchases were proportionately the same, amounting to an estimated $120 billion.
These sums would have swamped originations by the traditional subprime lenders, which probably totaled $119 billion in these two years. Data for Alt-A loans before 2005 are unavailable, but the fact that that Fannie and Freddie now hold 60% of all outstanding Alt-A loans provides a strong indication of the purchases they were making for many earlier years.
The GSE’s purchases of all mortgages slowed in 2004, as they worked to overcome their accounting scandals, but in late 2004 they returned to the market with a vengeance. Late that year, their chairmen were telling meetings of mortgage originators that the GSEs were eager to purchase subprime and other nonprime loans.
This set off a frenzy of subprime and Alt-A mortgage origination, in which–as incredible as it seems–Fannie and Freddie were competing with Wall Street and one another for low-quality loans. Even when they were not the purchasers, the GSEs were Wall Street’s biggest customers, often buying the AAA tranches of subprime and Alt-A pools that Wall Street put together. By 2007 they held $227 billion (one in six loans) in these nonprime pools, and approximately $1.6 trillion in low-quality loans altogether.
From 2005 through 2007, the GSEs purchased over $1 trillion in subprime and Alt-A loans, driving up the housing bubble and driving down mortgage quality. During these years, HUD’s regulations required that 55% of all GSE purchases be affordable, including 25% made to low- and very low-income borrowers. Housing bubbles are nothing new. We and other countries have had them before. The reason that the most recent bubble created a worldwide financial crisis is that it was inflated with low-quality loans required by government mandate. The fact that the same government must now come to the rescue is no reason for gratitude.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/13/housing-bubble-subprime-opinions-contributors_0216_peter_wallison_edward_pinto.html
These loans were made to borrowers with blemished credit, or involved low or no down payments, negative amortization and limited documentation of income. The loans’ unprecedentedly high rates of default are what is driving down housing prices and weakening the financial system.
The low interest rates of the early 2000s may explain the growth of the housing bubble, but they don’t explain the poor quality of these mortgages. For that we have to look to the government’s distortion of the mortgage finance system through the Community Reinvestment Act and the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac .
In a recent meeting with the Council on Foreign Relations, Barney Frank–the chair of the House Financial Services Committee and a longtime supporter of Fannie and Freddie–admitted that it had been a mistake to force homeownership on people who could not afford it. Renting, he said, would have been preferable. Now he tells us.
Long-term pressure from Frank and his colleagues to expand home ownership connects government housing policies to both the housing bubble and the poor quality of the mortgages on which it is based. In 1992, Congress gave a new affordable housing “mission” to Fannie and Freddie, and authorized the Department of Housing and Urban Development to define its scope through regulations.
Shortly thereafter, Fannie Mae, under Chairman Jim Johnson, made its first “trillion-dollar commitment” to increase financing for affordable housing. What this meant for the quality of the mortgages that Fannie–and later Freddie–would buy has not become clear until now.
On a parallel track was the Community Reinvestment Act. New CRA regulations in 1995 required banks to demonstrate that they were making mortgage loans to underserved communities, which inevitably included borrowers whose credit standing did not qualify them for a conventional mortgage loan.
To meet this new requirement, insured banks–like the GSEs–had to reduce the quality of the mortgages they would make or acquire. As the enforcers of CRA, the regulators themselves were co-opted into this process, approving lending practices that they would otherwise have scorned. The erosion of traditional mortgage standards had begun.
Shortly after these new mandates went into effect, the nation’s homeownership rate–which had remained at about 64% since 1982–began to rise, increasing 3.3% from 64.2% in 1994 to 67.5% in 2000 under President Clinton, and an additional 1.7% during the Bush administration, before declining in 2007 to 67.8%. There is no reasonable explanation for this sudden spurt, other than a major change in the standards for granting a mortgage or a large increase in the amount of low-cost funding available for mortgages. The data suggest that it was both.
As might be expected, the market for subprime and Alt-A loans grew along with the rise in homeownership. Some have argued that unregulated groups such as mortgage brokers and bankers, working with subprime lenders such as Countrywide Financial, supplied both the easier credit and the lower loan standards, but the facts belie this.
From 1995 until 2004, subprime loans by the traditional subprime lenders like Countrywide averaged slightly more than 5% of all mortgages, far too few to account for the growth in either homeownership or the housing bubble. CRA loans, totaling 3% of originations, were also too few. Where, then, did all the low-quality loans come from?
From 1994 to 2003, Fannie and Freddie’s purchases of mortgages, as a percentage of all mortgage originations, increased from 37% to an all-time high of 57%, effectively cornering the conventional conforming market. With leverage ratios that averaged 75-to-1, and funds raised with implicit government backing, the GSEs were pouring money into the housing market. This in itself would have driven the housing bubble.
But it also appears that, perhaps as early as 1993, Fannie Mae began to offer easy financing terms and lowered its loan standards in order to meet congressionally mandated affordable housing goals and fulfill the company’s trillion-dollar commitment. For example, in each of the years 2000 and 2001, the first years for which data are available, 18% of Fannie’s originations–totaling $157 billion–were loans with FICO scores of less than 660 (the federal regulators’ cut-off point for defining subprime loans). There is no equivalent data available for Freddie, but it is likely that its purchases were proportionately the same, amounting to an estimated $120 billion.
These sums would have swamped originations by the traditional subprime lenders, which probably totaled $119 billion in these two years. Data for Alt-A loans before 2005 are unavailable, but the fact that that Fannie and Freddie now hold 60% of all outstanding Alt-A loans provides a strong indication of the purchases they were making for many earlier years.
The GSE’s purchases of all mortgages slowed in 2004, as they worked to overcome their accounting scandals, but in late 2004 they returned to the market with a vengeance. Late that year, their chairmen were telling meetings of mortgage originators that the GSEs were eager to purchase subprime and other nonprime loans.
This set off a frenzy of subprime and Alt-A mortgage origination, in which–as incredible as it seems–Fannie and Freddie were competing with Wall Street and one another for low-quality loans. Even when they were not the purchasers, the GSEs were Wall Street’s biggest customers, often buying the AAA tranches of subprime and Alt-A pools that Wall Street put together. By 2007 they held $227 billion (one in six loans) in these nonprime pools, and approximately $1.6 trillion in low-quality loans altogether.
From 2005 through 2007, the GSEs purchased over $1 trillion in subprime and Alt-A loans, driving up the housing bubble and driving down mortgage quality. During these years, HUD’s regulations required that 55% of all GSE purchases be affordable, including 25% made to low- and very low-income borrowers. Housing bubbles are nothing new. We and other countries have had them before. The reason that the most recent bubble created a worldwide financial crisis is that it was inflated with low-quality loans required by government mandate. The fact that the same government must now come to the rescue is no reason for gratitude.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/13/housing-bubble-subprime-opinions-contributors_0216_peter_wallison_edward_pinto.html
Taft2016
Verified User
I think an argument could be made that without the derivatives market -a sort of all-or-nothing hedge- the crisis could have been worse.
The problem was that politicians saw a problem they wanted to address - minority home ownership. So they altered the rules with that in mind, oblivious to the unintended consequences.
By its nature, business is always going to seek ways to make money. It's not going to seek ways to fulfill the wishes of politicians. Without that fundamental understanding, the libs were diddling with dynamite.
The problem was that politicians saw a problem they wanted to address - minority home ownership. So they altered the rules with that in mind, oblivious to the unintended consequences.
By its nature, business is always going to seek ways to make money. It's not going to seek ways to fulfill the wishes of politicians. Without that fundamental understanding, the libs were diddling with dynamite.
Taft2016
Verified User
The brokers? Explain to us how the brokers could possibly have caused this.
Do you even know what a broker does, you dingleberry clinging to a baboon's ass?
evince
Truthmatters
http://obsbankwatch.blogspot.com/2012/08/wells-fargo-fined-for-selling.html
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Wells Fargo fined for selling securities without understanding them
Wells Fargo was fined $6.5 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission after the bank's brokerage firm sold complex investments tied to mortgage-backed securities without fully understanding or disclosing their risks, the regulator announced Tuesday.
Instead, the bank relied solely on credit ratings, the SEC said. The investments were sold to cities and non-profits between January 2007 and August 2007.
Read more here: http://obsbankwatch.blogspot.com/2012/08/wells-fargo-fined-for-selling.html#storylink=cpy
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Wells Fargo fined for selling securities without understanding them
Wells Fargo was fined $6.5 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission after the bank's brokerage firm sold complex investments tied to mortgage-backed securities without fully understanding or disclosing their risks, the regulator announced Tuesday.
Instead, the bank relied solely on credit ratings, the SEC said. The investments were sold to cities and non-profits between January 2007 and August 2007.
Read more here: http://obsbankwatch.blogspot.com/2012/08/wells-fargo-fined-for-selling.html#storylink=cpy
evince
Truthmatters
Banks Fined 1.5 Million for Improper Variable Annuities and Mutual Funds
August 17, 2009
Posted in: Variable Annuities
Last month, FINRA announced they would be fining five firms for failing to supervise the sales of unsuitable variable annuities and mutual funds.
The firms were ordered to repay the clients’ money, and individual brokers involved are now under investigation.?
Here is the bit of info from www.investmentnews.com on FINRA’s latest crackdown:
The five firms are Cleveland-based McDonald Investments Inc., which is now part of Zurich-based UBS AG; IFMG Securities Inc., which is now owned by LPL Financial of Boston; Wells Fargo Investments in San Francisco; PNC Investments LLC in Pittsburgh and WM Financial Services Inc., which is now part of Chase Investment Services Corp. in New York.
New York- and Washington-based Finra alleged that between June 2004 and January 2006, an ex-broker at McDonald made 32 unsuitable sales of variable annuities with enhanced death-benefit riders to 25 elderly customers. All of the customers were at least 78 years old and thus either too old for the rider or close to the age of ineligibility.
http://www.stockbrokerlawyer.com/bl...improper_variable_annuities_and_mutual_funds/
August 17, 2009
Posted in: Variable Annuities
Last month, FINRA announced they would be fining five firms for failing to supervise the sales of unsuitable variable annuities and mutual funds.
The firms were ordered to repay the clients’ money, and individual brokers involved are now under investigation.?
Here is the bit of info from www.investmentnews.com on FINRA’s latest crackdown:
The five firms are Cleveland-based McDonald Investments Inc., which is now part of Zurich-based UBS AG; IFMG Securities Inc., which is now owned by LPL Financial of Boston; Wells Fargo Investments in San Francisco; PNC Investments LLC in Pittsburgh and WM Financial Services Inc., which is now part of Chase Investment Services Corp. in New York.
New York- and Washington-based Finra alleged that between June 2004 and January 2006, an ex-broker at McDonald made 32 unsuitable sales of variable annuities with enhanced death-benefit riders to 25 elderly customers. All of the customers were at least 78 years old and thus either too old for the rider or close to the age of ineligibility.
http://www.stockbrokerlawyer.com/bl...improper_variable_annuities_and_mutual_funds/
evince
Truthmatters
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/morgan-stanley-fined-selling-exotic-195213153.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Morgan Stanley has agreed to pay a $100,000 fine to New Jersey state securities regulators for selling exotic exchange-traded funds to unwary investors, state officials said on Tuesday.
The New Jersey Bureau of Securities says improperly trained Morgan Stanley financial advisers sold non-traditional funds, such as leveraged and inverse ETFs, to elderly investors seeking investments that would provide income. The investments resulted in losses for those clients, regulators said.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Morgan Stanley has agreed to pay a $100,000 fine to New Jersey state securities regulators for selling exotic exchange-traded funds to unwary investors, state officials said on Tuesday.
The New Jersey Bureau of Securities says improperly trained Morgan Stanley financial advisers sold non-traditional funds, such as leveraged and inverse ETFs, to elderly investors seeking investments that would provide income. The investments resulted in losses for those clients, regulators said.