Foreign Collusion, Naked Shorting (Counterfeiting) & Money Laundering — All Illicit Wealth
Japan Cracks Down on Naked Short Selling
Takashi Nakamichi, Ayai Tomisawa
The Wall Street Journal, 28 October 2008
Japan moved Tuesday imposed new restrictions on so-called “naked” short selling of stocks, stepping up its efforts to arrest the tumble in domestic share prices.
The Tokyo Stock Exchange has asked member brokers to stop accepting naked short-sell orders, TSE President Atsushi Saito told a news conference.
Sad Money: The Backlash Against Jim Cramer
Brendan Collins, 24 Cctober 2008
“Mad Money” host Jim Cramer, that chrome-domed hero of trashy TV addicts and armchair-finance junkies alike, has fallen on hard times. He appeared on “The Today Show” on October 6th, imploring viewers: “Whatever money you may need for the next five years, please take it out of the stock market. Right now.” To say this statement fanned the flames of the Wall Street crisis is an understatement. A more apt analogy would be to say that Cramer dumped rocket fuel on a
Continue reading “Article: Sad Money: The Backlash Against Jim Cramer”
Deutsche Bank Sold Massive Amounts of Phantom Stock
Mark Mitchell
DeepCapture, 14 October 2008
A couple of days before Lehman fell and all hell broke loose on Wall Street, Floyd Norris, the chief business correspondent of The New York Times, published a blog (headline: “Short Sale Conspiracies”) wherein he implied that I was mentally insane for suggesting that Deutsche Bank Securities had been caught selling “massive amounts of phantom stock.”
Michael Kushner to Legislators
Michael Kushner
11 October 2008
The economic problems we are facing have more than one cause. There is an elephant in the room and nobody is saying a word. The financial collapse that resulted in a 2.5 billion-dollar tax payer bail out is not only a result of greed and mismanagement in the sub -a prime mortgage lending market, but is a direct result of hedge funds forcing 16% of listed companies into bankruptcy this year through unregulated criminal naked shorting, shorting with insider information, and criminal programed trading.
PDF (16 pages): Michael Kushner to Legislators
Dick Fuld’s Vendetta Against Short-Sellers—and Goldman Sachs
Heidi N. Moore
Wall Street Journal, 7 October 2008
Fuld didn’t let up on his hatred for short-sellers–primarily David Einhorn–even after his company filed for bankruptcy last month, and he believed the shorts were part of a cabal driven by Goldman Sachs Group.
In April, Fuld reported back to general counsel Thomas Russo about a dinner with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson that Lehman had a “huge brand with treasury,” which “loved our capital raise” and, in perhaps an oblique reference to short-sellers, that Treasury “want to kill the bad HFnds + heavily regulate the rest.”
Cox’s SEC Censors Report on Bear Stearns Collapse
Mark Pittman, Elliot Blair Smith, Jesse Westbrook
Bloomberg cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 7 October 2008
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox’s regulators stood by as shrinking capital ratios and growing subprime holdings led to the collapse of Bear Stearns Cos., according to an unedited version of a study by the agency’s inspector general.
The report, by Inspector General H. David Kotz, was requested by Senator Charles Grassley to examine the role of regulators prior to the firm’s collapse in March. Before it was released to the public on Sept. 26, Kotz deleted 136 references, many detailing SEC memos, meetings or comments, at the request of the agency’s Division of Trading and Markets that oversees investment banks.
SEC Gave “Preferential Treatment” to Wall Street CEO
Brian Ross, Rhonda Schwartz
abc News, 6 October 2008
The SEC gave “preferential treatment” to Wall Street executive John Mack during an insider trading investigation three years ago because Mack was about to become CEO of the Morgan Stanley investment banking firm, the SEC’s inspector general concluded in a report obtained by ABC News.
The report recommended disciplinary action against the SEC’s chief of enforcement, Linda Thomson, and said the firing of an SEC lawyer was “connected” to his persistent attempts to take Mack’s testimony. Read the report’s conclusion and recommendations here.
Fuld says Lehman victim of short sellers
Stephanie Kirchgaessner and Greg Farrell
Financial Times, 2 October 2008
Dick Fuld, Lehman Brothers’ chief executive, broke his silence on the collapse of his bank by telling a congressional committee on Monday that he would go to his grave wondering why the US government opted to save AIG but allowed Lehman to fail.
Three weeks after the 158-year-old firm sought bankruptcy protection – the largest such filing in US history – Mr Fuld blamed Lehman’s collapse on a plague of naked short selling, and said in response to a question that he had no idea why US regulators would judge his company unworthy of a federal bail-out.
The Naked Short Selling That Toppled Wall Street
Mark Mitchell
DeepCapture, 2 October 2008
The Wall Street Journal stated in a lead editorial last week that the SEC was “reasonable” to “clamp down” on naked short selling. Well, that was progress of sorts, though one wonders how it could have taken all these years for the nation’s most important newspaper to suggest that it might be “reasonable” to put an end to criminal activity that has eviscerated hundreds of companies and destroyed countless lives.
And now that this criminal activity has been implicated in the Humpty Dumptying of our financial system, one grows wistful for the golden age of journalism when editorialists (people working for famous newspapers, not just cyber weirdos) would express a little outrage, demand that heads roll – muster something better than “reasonable” to describe the limpid “clamp down” of an SEC that bows in oily servitude to the very short-sellers who manhandled our markets.
Emails show journalist rigged Wikipedia’s naked shorts
Cade Metz
The Register, 1 October 2008
Two and a half years ago, Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne penned an editorial for The Wall Street Journal, warning that widespread stock manipulation schemes – including abusive naked short selling – were threatening the health of America’s financial markets. But it wasn’t published.
“An editor at The Journal asked me to write it, and I told him he wouldn’t be allowed to publish it,” Byrne says. “He insisted that only he controlled what was printed on the editorial page, so I wrote it. Then, after a few days, he got back to me and said ‘It appears I can’t run this or anything else you write.'”
The Business Ethics of Short Selling and Naked Short Selling
James J. Angel, Douglas M. McCabe
Journal of Business Ethics, 30 September 2008
The controversy over short selling has continued unabated from the introduction of modern equity trading in Amsterdam in 1610 to the present day. Nevertheless, the business ethics literature has not really addressed short selling. Short sellers not only profit from the misery of others, they also create it through their selling activities. However, they also provide a socially useful service by making prices better reflect true values, protecting other investors from purchasing overpriced securities.
Patrick Byrne
Forbes via Wayback, 23 September 2008
Recent concerns about short-selling have culminated in a regulatory flurry of emergency orders and amendments. What should be of concern, however, is not short-selling per se: As its devotees frequently remind us, short-selling is a vital and legitimate market activity. What should be of concern are specific types of stock manipulation that cloak themselves within legitimate activities such as shorting, and which, in one way or another, rely upon loopholes in our nation’s system of stock settlement.
“Settlement” is the moment in a stock trade when the seller receives money and the buyer receives stock. Our settlement system has gaping loopholes that allow sellers to sell shares but fail to deliver them. In such cases, the system creates IOUs for shares, and lets those “stock IOUs” circulate in the expectation the seller will soon correct his error. This is harmless–as long as the IOUs are inadvertent, temporary and few.
Calling Out the Culprits Who Caused the Crisis
Eric D. Hovde
Washington Post via Wayback, 21 September 2008
Looking for someone to blame for the shambles in U.S. financial markets? As someone who owns both an investment bank and commercial banks, and also runs a hedge fund, I have sat front and center and watched as this mess unfolded. And in my view, there’s no need to look beyond Wall Street — and the halls of power in Washington. The former has created the nightmare by chasing obscene profits, and the latter have allowed it to spread by not practicing the oversight that is the federal government’s responsibility.
S.E.C. Temporarily Blocks Short Sales of Financial Stocks
Vikas Bajaj, Graham Bowley
The New York Times, 19 September 2008
The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a temporary ban on short sales of 799 financial stocks on Friday, a move against traders who have sought to profit from the financial crisis by betting against bank shares.
The SEC May Be The Country’s Worst Enemy
Bob O’Brien
Sanity Check via Wayback, 19 September 2008
Government has now, with the stroke of a pen, altered the way the markets work. Which again, is fine, if short selling goes the way of the buggy whip, for good. But that is unlikely. So what it has done is prepare the stage for volatility unlike any seen in the markets ever before. Wildly high highs, to be followed by devastating lows.
I’m not so concerned about the wildly high highs. It’s when the rule expires that I have a problem with. And it is the absence of coherence in the reasoning that I have a huge problem with.
THE DOLLAR HAS NO INTRINSIC VALUE : DO YOUR ASSETS?
