HOUSTON CONSUMER LAW ATTORNEY

Here is link to the article contained in the Houston Chronicle regarding Stanford Financial Group.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/stanford/6272687.html

Basically, the Stanford Financial Group is accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of defrauded consumers of billions of dollars in a scheme involving the misrepresentation of the investment performance of the investment company’s Certificates of Deposit (CD) rates. This story continues a trend of recent headlines involving financial services companies being accused of securities violations, fraud, and other unlawful activity. My question in all of this is simply, “Where are the regulators”. I mean why does it seem that the regulators only step in after the damage is already done. How can these massive amounts of fraud go on undetected by regulators? It’s the job of the SEC, Federal Trade Commission, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, FDIC, Federal Reserve, and other federal and state regulators to insure that these types of massive fraud and unlawful activity never happen. However, to often it seems that these agencies are not adequately doing their jobs. In my opinion, regulators often place the profits of banks and financial services companies ahead of the need of to protect consumers from fraudulent or unlawful business practices. For far to long, the banking and financial services industry have stated that regulation was not necessary because the industry could regulate itself, or that increased regulation would increase the costs of doing business and that these costs would be passed down to consumers. After the collapse of our financial markets, I find that the banking and financial services reasoning against increased regulation is lacking. First of all, I find it hard for the industry to say that it can self regulate itself after the massive amounts of fraud and unlawful activity that we have seen recently. Furthermore, I find it hard for the industry to state that costs would be passed down to consumers as a result of more regulation, after the billions of dollars lost by consumers as a result of fraud and lax oversight of the industry. Not to mention, the amount of money that taxpayers are having to pay to bail out the industry due to its greed and the lack of oversight by regulators. At this time, I believe we need stronger oversight and regulation of the industry. The industry has not shown that it can adequately regulate itself and regulators have shown the inability or capability to oversee this industry under the current regulatory scheme. It’s time that regulators place consumer protection ahead of business profits.

Administrator Consumer Fraud, Consumer Law Consumer fraud