Having ranted before on securities lending and how it adds to the systemic risk of the financial system and how the division of the spoils appears to shortchange retail investors, there is a modicum of satisfaction in seeing the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) commence an investigation into the practice. ...

The literary term "pathetic fallacy" describes when a writer gives human traits or feelings to nature or some other inanimate object to reflect the mood of a scene in the story. On the second day of Maria Messina's cross examination, pathetic fallacy came to life with dramatic thunder claps outside ...

Jean-Paul Sartre once said: "Hell is other people." For Maria Messina, hell might just be other people's alleged frauds. She said so on the stand. "For me it was a personal hell," she told the court in describing a particularly brutal interrogation by investigators for the U.S. Securities and Exchange ...

Attempts by Livent co-founders Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb to continue to allegedly cook the company's books finally prompted Maria Messina to blow the whistle on the fraud that ultimately destroyed the theatre company.