The message that every American investor should is very simple: when it comes to investing on Wall Street, you’re entering a rigged game with its own rigged, private justice system
By almost any measure, Wall Street is the most serially corrupt industry in America. And since Americans now permanently seem to live in the Failing Up society where no bad deed goes unrewarded, being serially corrupt thus entitles Wall Street to its own private justice system. If you want to open an investment account with any of the major Wall Street firms, you have to sign away your right to the nation’s courts and agree to take any dispute into Wall Street’s kangaroo court – which has none of the procedural protections of a courtroom, including the right to appeal. The public and media are also barred from the proceedings to keep things nice and dark like Wall Street likes it.
The private justice system for Wall Street is referred to as “mandatory arbitration” and its documented abuses over the decades are legion.
The way the system is being gamed today is that legitimate claims made by customers against a broker, which have already been decided in the customers’ favor or settled and appear on the disclosure pages at BrokerCheck, are being disappeared. The act of disappearing the disclosures is called “expungement.” This gaming of the arbitration system typically works like this: the broker files a claim against his own firm for $1. That low dollar amount usually guarantees that his claim will be heard by just one arbitrator instead of three. Since his brokerage firm and he both would like to see those customer charges removed from public record files, they pick an arbitrator that they feel will not challenge the expungement request. And to further move things along in their favor, they select law firms specializing in this expungement maneuver.
