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Thursday, May 21, 2015

Construction Up, How Banks Are Supervised, CFTC Meeting Agenda, NDDF & Sethi Petroleum

Residential construction statistics for April 
 Supervising Large, Complex Financial Companies: What Do Supervisors Do? 
The CFTC Market Risk Committee Agenda
NDDF, Sethi Petroleum, & Sameer Praveen Sethi's fraudulent oil and gas investments

The U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development published residential construction statistics for April. Permits were up a staggering 10.1% from March and up 6.4% from April 2014. Housing starts were up 20.2 % from March and 9.2% from last year.

The Federal Reserve published a working paper titled Supervising Large, Complex Financial Companies: What Do Supervisors Do? The paper describes the Fed's "supervisory approach for large, complex financial companies and how prudential supervisory activities are structured, staffed, and implemented on a day‐to‐day basis at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as part of the broader supervisory program of the Federal Reserve System." The ultimate goal of the paper is to provide an overview of what supervision is in order to determine its impact.  

The CFTC Market Risk Committee is having a meeting on June 2. The agenda is published on the website.

The SEC filed an emergency civil action against Sethi Petroleum, LLC and its president, Sameer Praveen Sethi. The action accuses the firm of offering fraudulent oil and gas investments. Since January 2014 the firm raised ~$4 million "through the fraudulent offer and sale of securities in the Sethi-North Dakota Drilling Fund-LVIII Joint Venture ("NDDF")". The offering materials were for oil and gas wells in the Bakken Shale formation in North Dakota. The firm spent less than 25% for these purposes. The suit accuses the SEC of spending more than 75% of investor funds on unapproved expenditures. As a result "less than $1 million of the funds raised went to NDDF's actual oil and gas operations."