When a Wall Street firm trades billions of dollars of securities a day and sometimes showers seven-figure bonuses on top executives, regulators are hard-pressed to fashion a penalty that really hurts. Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan added another dimension to that quandary on Monday when he told the Securities and Exchange Commission that he could not determine whether a proposed $285 million penalty against Citigroup was adequate if he did not know what had really happened. Read New York Times report here.
