Connaughton – Financial Treason & Crime

The GameStop Mess Exposes the Naked Short Selling Scam

LUCY KOMISAR, 25 February 2021

At the House Financial Services Committee hearing last week on the GameStop debacle, there was an elephant in the room: naked short selling.

Short selling, effectively betting that a stock will go down, involves a trader selling shares he does not own, hoping to buy them back at a lower price to make money on the spread. The trader is supposed to locate (or have a “reasonable belief” he can locate) or borrow the shares in brokerage accounts, and then transfer them to the buyer within two days. This accounts for as much as 50 percent of daily trading. Continue reading “Article: The GameStop Mess Exposes the Naked Short Selling Scam”

Steve Cohen: The Feds Get Tough, Sort Of

MATT TAIBBI, 01 August 2013

He’s Wall Street’s ultimate comic-book villain – with his glowing bald head and marble eyes, he looks a little like Lex Luthor. But maybe the best comparison for famed hedge-fund shark and long-suspected insider-trading ringleader Steve Cohen is the Joker. Earlier this year, when the SEC extracted $616 million from Cohen’s fund in two regulatory settlements, he expressed his deep remorse by buying, within weeks, a $155 million Picasso and a $60 million beach house in the Hamptons, right down the road from his other Hamptons beach house, worth $18 million.

It was a big fat middle finger to the government, flipped by a man who clearly thought he was getting away with a slap on the wrist, the way every other brazen Wall Street crook in the past half-decade has done so far. Continue reading “Article: Steve Cohen: The Feds Get Tough, Sort Of”