Credicorp Securities Headlines: EU pushes for global financial trading tax

 Taxing financial trades has been touted as a panacea for all kinds of global ills, a cash source to fight poverty and global warming. But the latest European attempt to introduce a worldwide standard 40 years after it was first conceived is facing stiff opposition from the U.S. and Britain.

Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the EU’s executive arm, on Wednesday threw his weight behind the tax that his office estimated could raise euro57 billion ($77 billion) a year in Europe to help combat a debt crisis that is threatening the euro currency.

“In the last three years, member states have granted aid and provided guarantees of euro4.6 trillion to the financial sector,” Barroso said. “It is time for the financial sector to make a contribution back to society.”

The tax would be a tiny percentage of the value of a trade in assets like stocks and bonds. Although some countries already have a minimal duty on share trading, the new proposal would not only increase the scope and size of the tax but also siphon off some revenue to Brussels.

The European Commission has formally backed the tax to take effect from January 2014.

As a result of the financial crisis in 2008 and the ensuing recession, debt levels across Europe, and not just in the bailed out countries of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, have risen sharply. Across the 27-nation EU, debt as a percentage of national income has spiked from below 60 percent in 2007 to 80 percent this year.

Credi Corp Securities Headlines: JPMorgan Chase accused in two mortgage-backed securities cases

In a one-two punch to its reputation, JPMorgan Chase & Co. was accused by regulators in separate cases of misleading big investors about the riskiness of mortgage-related securities it was selling just as the home-loan market was melting down.

The Securities and Exchange Commission sued the giant bank’s securities unit over its sale in 2007 of a complex investment product whose value was indirectly tied to a collection of residential mortgages. JPMorgan did not tell the product’s institutional buyers that it had been partly designed by a hedge fund that would profit if the security lost value, the SEC said in a complaint filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court.

As it filed the complaint, the agency announced that JPMorgan, the second-largest U.S. bank by most measures, had agreed to pay $153.6 million to settle the case.

A day earlier, the National Credit Union Administration, a federal regulator of credit unions, sued JPMorgan and Royal Bank of Scotland, accusing them of selling mortgage-backed bonds that were “destined to perform poorly,” leading to losses that brought down five large credit unions. The suit, filed in federal court in Kansas, seeks $800 million from the banks. JPMorgan and RBS declined to comment on that case.

This week’s allegations are notable because unlike some Wall Street rivals, JPMorgan until now hadn’t been explicitly accused of misconduct that helped lead to the global financial crisis.