Byron – Financial Treason & Crime

Byron Christopher (born May 1, 1949) is a Canadian news reporter from Campbellton, New Brunswick. His style of work has been referred to as “Armageddon-like blood-and-guts crime reporting”.[.

Christopher has filed stories across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, with most of his journalistic career focused on Western Canada, often reporting on criminal justice. During the two decades that he worked for The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and for 630 CHED, he won national awards for both his print and radio journalism. Continue reading “Journalist: Byron Christopher”

12/25/200605/13/2021

Paper: The Deep Capture Story by Mark Mitchell

Paper

The Story of Deep Capture

By Mark Mitchell, with reporting by the Deep Capture Team

The Columbia School of Journalism is our nation’s finest. They grant the Pulitzer Prize, and their journal, The Columbia Journalism Review, is the profession’s gold standard. CJR reporters are high priests of a decaying temple, tending a flame in a land going dark. In 2006 a CJR editor (a seasoned journalist formerly with Time magazine in Asia, The Wall Street Journal Europe, and The Far Eastern Economic Review) called me to discuss suspicions he was forming about the US financial media. I gave him leads but warned, “Chasing this will take you down a rabbit hole with no bottom.” For months he pursued his story against pressure and threats he once described as, “something out of a Hollywood B movie, but unlike the movies, the evil corporations fighting the journalist are not thugs burying toxic waste, they are Wall Street and the financial media itself.” His exposé reveals a circle of corruption enclosing venerable Wall Street banks, shady offshore financiers, and suspiciously compliant reporters at The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, CNBC, and The New York Times. If you ever wonder how reporters react when a journalist investigates them (answer: like white-collar crooks they dodge interviews, lie, and hide behind lawyers), or if financial corruption interests you, then this is for you. It makes Grisham read like a book of bedtime stories, and exposes a scandal that may make Enron look like an afternoon tea.

Introduction By Patrick M. Byrne, Deep Capture Reporter

PDF (69 Pages): Deep Capture Story

07/03/200605/21/2020

Article: Dismantle the SEC

Article - Media

Dismantle the SEC

Christopher Byron

New York Post cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 3 July 2006

It looks like the Securities and Exchange Commission has finally come up with a plan for dealing with the devastating Court of Appeals decision two weeks ago that nullified the SEC’s efforts to regulate the hedge fund industry.

The strategy: Do nothing – except perhaps pout a bit and blame everything on the media.

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03/06/200605/26/2020

Article: SEC: Gone Fishin’

Article - Media

SEC: Gone Fishin’

Chris Byron

New York Times cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 6 March 2006

It’s good to see that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has come to its senses and that – at least for the time being – it won’t be enforcing the media subpoenas that have gotten the press so riled up.

But before anyone breaks out the pom-poms for SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, let’s remember that these wrong-headed subpoenas were 100 percent the responsibility of Cox’s own agency in the first place – and until the SEC develops better, more focused leadership, problems like those caused by these subpoenas are going to keep occurring.

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09/26/200505/26/2020

Article: Overgrown Hedges

Article - Media

Overgrown Hedges

Christopher Byron

New York Post cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 26 September 2005

One of the first things any new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission does after getting the job is to clear his throat, put on his best “I mean business” scowl, and announce to the world just how tough he intends to be on the miscreants of Wall Street.

Normally, this harmless ritual lets the man taking on Washington’s most thankless job preen a bit in public before getting smacked to the canvas by a system that basically doesn’t want him to be tough at all.

But these are not normal times — and the one thing this country needs more than anything is a government that knows what it is doing and that deserves to be taken seriously by its citizens.

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06/27/200505/26/2020

Article: Faulty Regulator

Article - Media

Faulty Regulator

Christopher Byron

New York Post cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 27 June 2005

On Thursday the Securities and Exchange Commission’s departing chairman, William Donaldson, will step down from his two-and-a-half year stint as Wall Street’s top regulator, vacating the most thankless and difficult job in the administration to make way for President Bush’s third nominee.

Though Donaldson is widely credited with having been an effective and activist-oriented SEC chairman who — among other things — pursued more high-profile corporate-fraud cases than any chairman before him, he actually initiated only one major SEC fraud probe that has led to litigation against a defendant.

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01/10/200505/21/2020

Article: Shame on the SEC

Article - Media

Shame on the SEC

Christopher Byron

New York Post cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 10 January 2005

Investors with money in the large and well- capitalized companies of the Dow Jones industrial average certainly felt blue last week, as the first five trading days of the new year brought a 180-point, or 2 percent, drop on well-placed fears that the Federal Reserve intends to keep raising interest rates until the economy stalls out.

But to any of the growing legions of investors lucky, nervy, or foolish enough to have been slumming instead last week in the investing world’s seediest dive of them all – the penny stock market – Wall Street definitely looked pretty in pink.

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