User talk:Epstein's Mother

NRSRO

Did you realise there is already an NRSRO article? You could consider expanding that rather than duplicating new articles under different terms. You could then create "redirects" for search terms you believe should point there? --Blowdart 20:52, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

I appreciate the legal nuance you referred to but I must assume that you know that waging aggressive war and committing war crimes is a clear violation of jus cogens. AntonioBu 09:17, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

May 2007

1. Please do not delete or edit legitimate contents, as you did at insider trading; this is considered vandalism. Thank you. —38.113.135.196 12:26, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually, spam is a violation of Wiki's guidelines. And please use a user name if you want to leave comments. That way we know who to block for adding spam. Epstein's Mother 22:37, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

July 2007

I noticed your removals of the insidernewswire.com links. I do run those sites and some might take it as spam that I added them. It's worthwhile to point out that those pages aren't part of a money making venture right now and have no advertising. I thought they might provide some freely available visibility of trading by insiders to the curious.

I will not add them back in, but I thought it would be worthwhile to comment.

Best regards,

Bruce

Rbcwa 06:11, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Alligator

Thanks for editing Alligator; it and its related articles really need some help. However, the article now says that the Chinese alligator is native only to the Yangtze River valley. Admittedly, there aren't any citations on it there, either, but Chinese Alligator says that they were once much more widespread in China. If you know what you're talking about, by all means, leave it, but I'm afraid you might have introduced an inaccuracy. These articles desperately need some TLC and a lot of sources, but I keep not getting around to it. Enuja (talk) 04:39, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Good point. I was trying to just rephrase the original without changing any of the meaning, but you are right that I missed what was actually said. I changed it, following your suggestion. Epstein's Mother 10:47, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

International law (public) or Law of nations

Dear fello Wikipedia:

I've Cut & Pasted the following for your reference & convenience:

Either usage is better. And the former conforms to Wiki style. Yours truly, --Ludvikus 11:30, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Google search results

• "Public international law": 877,000 hits [1].

• "International law": 18,400,000 [2].

• "Law of nations": 630,000 [3].

• "Public international": 1,240,000 [4].

• "Public law (international)": 11,100 [5].

• "International public law": 93,800 [6].

Accordingly, we should REVERT. Yours truly, --Ludvikus 18:27, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Wiki Disambiguation practice

I call the editors attention to the Wiki style practice/format to make distinctions as follows: [[Term (qualification)]]. Accordingly, we should revert. --Ludvikus 18:32, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

International law, Public & Private

It aapears to me that the editors herein essentially adopted usages - contrary to Wikipedia style - in the context of the need to Disambiguate. Unless such usage as these are justified, we must conform to Wiki style if we wish to distinguish between Private , and Public, International law. --Ludvikus 18:41, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Yours truly, --Ludvikus 18:46, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Insider trading ref , Mosaic theory

Dear EpM,

I've always found your edits on Insider trading to be very knowledgable. I reviewed the external link How to Win an Insider Trading Case, with an eye toward deletion as an ad. It is a type of ad, but seems to be quite informative. Could you decide whether to keep it?

Also an article on the Mosaic theory showed up a couple of weeks ago, and it seems a mess, but I don't know what to do with it (see my comments on the talk page). I'd like to limit it to a legal theory (rather than a trading theory), or maybe just delete it. Where does this theory come from? As far as I can tell - only from the CFA Institute. It's funny that I'm tempted to delete it - I first put in the red link to it in the insider trading article - but certainly something is lacking there.

All the best,

Smallbones (talk) 19:03, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads-up. I really don't know much about this theory. My understanding is that it is mostly a Reg FD issue and comes into play with regard to what constitutes "material non-public information" and a "reasonable investor." In other words, Reg FD says an issuer can't provide material non-public info to just one analyst, without making the info public. However, the issuer can provide incidental information that is not "material" to a "reasonable investor," but which may be very material to a particular analyst and for whom the information is an important piece of the analyst's otherwise very complicated puzzle. But I'm not an expert on this area. It sounds like the kind of thing I would not want to litigate if my client were on the receiving end of an investigation.

I'll take a look and see if maybe it just needs some editing. Epstein's Mother (talk) 16:11, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Your comments on MccArthur

Greetings, I just dropped by to say that I was very impressed by your analysis of his generalship or lack thereof. Being interested in military history, it used to boggle my mind how someone with such an abysmal record, consistently receives such good press, but then I realized how well he ran his own PR in his own life time. He was basically a politician in a general’s uniform and did his best to be the American Caesar (without the brilliant generalship). As a result of this modern “patriots” will go out of their way to preserve this image. Ultimately, I’d say you are wasting your time trying to convince such people in a format like Wikipedia which in my opinions is slowly becoming the bathroom wall (for politic discussions at least).

Cheers! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.104.242.4 (talk) 18:04, 7 November 2009 (UTC)

Signed, Epstein's mother

I had forgotten the joke. Is that what that means?

If this is inappropriate, you didn't have an email this user link.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 20:13, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, that's the joke. You must either be addicted to old TV or older than your 20s to get it. Epstein's Mother (talk) 22:34, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Haven't seen the show in years. It took me a while to get it.Vchimpanzee · talk · contributions · 13:32, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Credit Rating Agencies

Can you clarify your argument that the citation did not support the argument, as stated in your edit comment? Surely, that's exactly what John Pilger was saying. Is this simply a different view of it by yourself? Thanks. Jamesinderbyshire (talk) 08:48, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi

My concern about the citation is two-fold: first, the cite you gave is actually to a blog article citing to a New Stateman article. It might work better to cite to the original. (After all, most readers probably have no idea who this guy is, and you can find a blog posting saying just about anything.) Second, the claim that the rating agencies gave the subprime mortgages a high rating and the US a high rating, and Greece a low rating despite having the same deficit level, is not quite the same thing as saying that the CRAs are politically motivated. Particularly since much of the rest of the article seems to be saying that there is a common perception about Greece that is wrong. Just because the CRAs hold the same common perception doesn't mean they are politically motivated -- they could just be herding.

Another concern is that this is not as common an accusation as is the others, though that may be different in Europe. If you believe it should be in there and you see this charge made relatively frequently, and not just by one guy, it might make sense to put it in a separate bullet. But on that point, though, I would contrast it with the more common claim that CRAs using the issuer-pays business model are inherently conflicted -- you can't one one side say that the CRAs go easy on issuers because the issuers are paying their fees, and then say that the CRAs have a political grudge against those same issuers and give them too low a rating. (Particularly since, in this case, the CRAs are actually regulated by the governments getting downgraded.)

But on Pilger's article in particular, the argument about the CRA ratings and the comparison between US and Greek debt levels is weak. US debt is denominated in US currency -- worse comes to worst, the US can just inflate some of that debt away while still nominally paying it off. Greek debt is denominated in Euros. It can't inflate the debt away (in this sense, Greece is more akin to California) and the worst case scenario is default. Also, US economic growth rate is far greater than Greece's, so the prospects of the US outgrowing its debt is greater. These are just the more obvious reasons for the discrepancies. My real point is that any article on this point should really present stronger evidence. Or, alternatively, a statement from an EU politician or something like that (since they don't really need evidence to have an impact). Epstein's Mother (talk) 03:33, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the trouble to explain this - sorry it's taken me a while to reply. To some extent I agree with your analysis, although personally I think there is an element of right-wing political control and market manipulation by large financial interests going on in the so-called "independent" credit agencies. Putting our own views to one side though, it appears that your answer to my question "is this based on your view" is correct, would you agree? Or am I not getting something? Why is it that the Pilger reference is not worth including - he is a celebrated journalist and there is room in the article for different viewpoints, surely? Jamesinderbyshire (talk) 10:15, 30 December 2010 (UTC)

I've not heard of him, so I'm not sure if he's a financial journalist or not. At any rate, it's just one guy's accusation -- and being a famous commenter doesn't necessarily mean much unless the idea seems to have "legs" and others start to agree. More importantly, it's not even a central claim but almost an afterthought of the article. The claim about the CRAs in that article are really secondary to the article itself -- "dicta," in legal parlance -- and the article itself isn't really about the CRAs having a political agenda, but that everyone is wrong about Greece and Greece is getting a raw deal. It doesn't even directly say that the big CRAs are politically motivated -- just implied.

It might be different if the article itself were about the CRAs and arguing that they are playing international politics. But as it stands, the article doesn't really support that position -- it just throws out a one-line claim, backed up by the flimsiest logic. By constrast, the other claims made against the CRAs in that section of the article are repeated in many places (even if only one cite is offered), and tend to have some type of "expert" support or are claims made by policymakers (which are important even if demonstrably wrong, because they will still have policy implications). So I'm not saying that this claim about the CRAs shouldn't be included, but it needs stronger support than the side statement in the Pilger article. Epstein's Mother (talk) 07:12, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

When I get chance, I will take a look through the article and check out the credibility of some of the other refs. I think it would be useful to have more in the article about international critiques of the role and conduct of CRAs - at the moment, it all seems a bit deliberately "non-political" and the view that the CRAs both then and subsequently played a major, possibly deliberate role in market manipulation, covert and non-covert actions on behalf of particular US corporations and other vested interests is fairly widespread, so I'm sure other references can be brought forward. Jamesinderbyshire (talk) 12:10, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I've read most of the official (government) US, Japanese and EU literature on CRAs and the recent financial crisis, and haven't actually seen any evidence offered of deliberate manipulation on behalf of US corporation (or any corporation). The most there has been is a case brought by the SEC against Moody's French arm for not downgrading quickly enough a credit rating that was too high because of bad math in a computer program, and the SEC fining a small CRA (LACE) because its ownership by Kroll put it over the SEC's rules. Most of the accusations have been just that, and by politicians, with no cases filed after formal investigations. On the Greece stuff, the claims are just not credible. If anything, given the credit default swap market spreads, you could easily argue that the big CRAs are far too optimistic on Greek debt since they haven't downgraded their ratings to the same levels that the market has. Of course, there are real cases of politics playing a role, but it tends to cut in the other direction. Dagong (a tiny Chinese CRA) very publicly downgraded US debt right after being notified that the SEC was not going to give it NRSRO status. Very hard not to see that as politically motivated, but Dagong is tiny and it's not really relevant to the article. And, of course, S&P's decision not to release further "warnings" of future downgrades of German Landesbank debt after being threatened by the German parliament was probably a result of political pressure. But that was a few years ago.Epstein's Mother (talk) 17:31, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Egan Jones

On the page describing Egan-Jones Ratings Company you have posted the following:

The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved.

Following this link wiki suggests that the use of this label is for the following purposes:

Please note: This label is meant to indicate that a discussion is still going on, and that the article's content is disputed, and volatile. If you add this template to an article in which there is no relevant discussion underway, you need at least to leave a note on the article's talk page describing what you consider unacceptable about the article. The note should address the troubling passages, elements, or phrases specifically enough to encourage constructive discussion that leads to resolution. In the absence of an ongoing discussion on the article's talk page, any editor may remove this tag at any time.

So please help me understand your specific concerns with the neutrality of the article posted, or remove your dispute statement please.

CP — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pruette (talk • contribs) 19:11, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

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