Italian police seize 1.8 bil euros from Japan's Nomura

Well, at least that's a start!

Poor ignarant Italians were hoodwinked by Nomura????

Italy and Japan has much in common when it comes to fraud and scams, it seems. The difference is that in Italy, the authorities sometimes actually hit these fraudsters and hit them hard. Not so much in Japan...

Notice how the J-media hasnt said much about this, pretty typical, lets see how quickly they can bury this "olympus" style!

Poor ignarant Italians were hoodwinked by Nomura????

It's Nomura that was hoodwinked by a group of Italians working at Monte dei Paschi in collusion with Sadeq Sayeed.

As part of the deal with Nomura, Monte Paschi bought Italian government bonds using a loan from the Tokyo-based bank. It swapped the fixed-rate interest payments on the bonds with a floating rate and guaranteed the credit risk on the bonds, effectively making a bet on the future value of Italian government bonds. As those securities tumbled during Europe's sovereign debt crisis, Monte Paschi was forced to post additional margin at a cost of 173 million euros, the bank said.

Bankers as crooks? Say it isn't so!

Italy and Japan has much in common when it comes to fraud and scams, it seems.

Such a racist comment. Show me how much better are USA, for example. Lehman Brother? Uh.

I see that many retirees in Japan run out of funds right now .. and sleepless too.

@Knox Harrington: USA: Bush (both father and son). Yeah, you are racist, because in every country there are fraud and scams.

lock 'em up.

Unless Nomura lied, I don't see how the Italian government can sustain seizing the money.

If the Italian bank was buying derivatives and didn't know what they were buying, then they deserved to lose their money. There have just been so many cases of people (including some very smart people and governments) not knowing about the risks of derivatives and losing their money.

The question is whether there was sufficient information for the investor to make an informed choice and whether Nomura lied or misstated the truth. In this case, you have a bank selling to another bank, so there is a level of sophistication on both sides.