Can Netflix Show Americans How to Cut the Cost of Drugs?

Australia seems to have found a way to entice Big Pharma into making essential new medicines affordable. Why can’t the United States?

Why don’t streaming services like Hulu or Netflix go bankrupt? After all, most businesses couldn’t survive if customers paid a flat subscription fee each month for all they could eat or all the gasoline they could use. Yet you can pay Netflix $8.99 and watch one movie or all 342 episodes (so far) of “Grey’s Anatomy.” Netflix doesn’t care.

Netflix and Hulu can do this because they sell products with a very low marginal cost. Movies and TV shows are expensive to make. But once that’s done, each new stream costs Netflix little or nothing.

Another product works in a similar way: medicine. read more »

Rajaratnam's $92.8 million SEC civil fine is upheld

A federal appeals court upheld the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s $92.8 million civil fine against convicted Galleon Group hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, nine months after refusing to shorten his 11-year prison term for insider trading.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan on Tuesday rejected Rajaratnam’s arguments that the SEC penalty was excessive, improperly took his wealth into account and had no deterrent value.

Rajaratnam’s criminal punishment also included a $10 million fine and $53.8 million forfeiture.

Prosecutors accused the Sri Lankan native of making up to $63.8 million from 2003 to 2009 by trading illegally in stocks such as eBay Inc, Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Google, now called Alphabet Inc. read more »

BB&T to Return More Than $5 Million to Retail Investors and Pay Penalty Relating to Directed Brokerage Arrangements

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that BB&T Securities has agreed to return more than $5 million to retail investors and pay a $500,000 penalty to settle charges that a firm it acquired misled its advisory clients into believing they were receiving full service brokerage services in-house at a discount while significantly less expensive options were available externally.

According to the SEC’s order, Valley Forge Asset Management used misleading statements and inadequate disclosures about its brokerage services and prices to convince customers to choose the in-house broker.  Despite promises of a high level of service at a low cost, the SEC’s order finds that Valley Forge did not provide any additional services to advisory clients using its in-house brokerage than it did to advisory clients who chose other brokerages with significantly lower commission rates. read more » 

Troika Laundromat revelations hit European bank shares

New leaks show 1.3m transactions involving mainly tax haven shell companies

Shares in European banks were hit as revelations from the Troika Laundromat investigation raised new questions about the extent of their involvement in the movement of suspicious funds from Russia into Europe.

Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International, Finland’s Nordea Bank and Germany’s Deutsche Bank have been drawn into the widening money laundering allegations, which began with revelations about the alleged Russian capture of the Estonian branch of Danske Bank. The Danish lender has lost half of its market value since claims about its Baltic operations first surfaced.

The latest revelations centre on one of the largest banking information leaks: some 1.3m transactions involving 238,000 customers, most of which were tax haven shell companies with accounts at Lithuania’s Ukio Bank. read more »

FBI stepping up efforts to root out international corruption

Aiming to crack down on money laundering and bribes to overseas governments, the FBI is stepping up its efforts to root out foreign corruption with a new squad of agents based in Miami.

The squad will focus its efforts not only on Miami but also in South America, a continent that has been home to some of the Justice Department's most significant international corruption prosecutions of the last several years. The Miami squad joins three others based in the FBI's largest field offices - Washington, New York and Los Angeles.

The unit aims to identify violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a U.S. law that makes it illegal to bribe foreign officials. The FBI has also been doing outreach to companies in a variety of industries, from oil to pharmaceuticals, to teach them about red flags that could indicate corruption and encourage the companies to "self-report" potentially improper conduct to the bureau. read more »