BrokeAndBroker.com Blog by Bill Singer Esq WEEK IN REVIEW

May 2, 2020

35-year-old mother of two and pregnant nurse Sylvia Licin took care of coronavirus patients in Brooklyn until she got the virus herself. After Licin went on a ventilator, her heart stopped and her brain lost four minutes of oxygen before she was revived. She now needs specialized rehab at a center for brain injury. Each of us can rarely change the world but we can often change at least one person's life for the better. Please, if you can, donate to Sylvia Licin at her GoFundMe page: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-a-front-line-nurse-and-baby-get-proper-care


(BrokeAndBroker.com Blog)
http://www.brokeandbroker.com/5197/FINRA-Zoom-OTR/
FINRA's senior management and Board of Governors have not responded in a compassionate manner to Staff efforts to compel teleconferenced OTRs or hearings. FINRA has not shown much empathy for the plight of the hundreds of hundreds of thousands of men and women who are largely out of work or sheltering in place during this horrific pandemic. With so many Small Member Firms headed for insolvency and thousands of industry employees likely in line for termination, who the hell on the Board of Governors authorized the organization to fill "scores of open positions" at a time when the new hires can't even report to their work-sites?

[In]Securities Guest Blog: Get What You Need by Aegis Frumento Esq (BrokeAndBroker.com Blog)
http://www.brokeandbroker.com/5196/aegis-frumento-insecurities-reopening/
In several of his previous [In]Securities columns, Guest Blogger Aegis Frumento observed that pandemics have always changed how we live. Before COVID, some 80% of us were financially insecure, barely coping or not coping at all. Which leads Aegis to wonder what will happen when over 26 million of us are unemployed. Aegis suspects that there will be a lot of empty restaurants for many months, no matter how soon they are permitted to reopen. Establishments that cannot operate profitably with social distancing, and are too leveraged and cash-starved to outlast it. Most will not survive. All of which prompts Aegis to muse about what is "essential" in a pandemic and post-pandemic world.

http://www.brokeandbroker.com/5194/allstate-defamation-u5/
Today's blog considers several ingredients that would get shaken into a volatile cocktail: a boyfriend, a girlfriend, her grandson, a night of drinking, an argument, his banging on a door, and some marijuana in his bag. Shake. Stir. And we then pour out a nasty concoction whereby the boyfriend gets charged with three crimes and winds up getting fired by Allstate Insurance. Which prompts the boyfriend to sue.  

http://www.brokeandbroker.com/5193/fang-merrill-lynch/
A public customer filed a FINRA arbitration case against Merrill Lynch. According to the customer, Merrill Lynch didn't exactly comply with Discovery rules. Then the customer filed a class action in federal court. Then we wind up with something involving the United Nations . . . yeah, that's not a typo: the UN. Movin' along here, things don't go well at FINRA and the customer appeals. It all comes down to the issue of whether the customer's resort to the federal courts was an improper effort to re-litigate claims that had already been submitted to FINRA arbitration. Ah yes, the old second bite of the lawsuit apple.