Foreign Collusion, Naked Shorting (Counterfeiting) & Money Laundering — All Illicit Wealth
Germany bans naked short-selling
Holder Hansen, Andreas Rinke
Reuters, 18 May 2010
Germany, in an attack on the financial speculation on which it blames much of the euro zone’s debt crisis, on Tuesday announced a ban on some high-risk bets that prices of bonds and stocks will fall.
Analysts, however, were skeptical that Germany’s surprise move to ban some trades in a strategy known as naked short selling could be effective in taming market volatility, with one saying it suggested “desperation.”
Deutsche Bank’s naked wrist slap
Colin Barr
Fortune, 23 May 2010
Securities industries watchdogs have had it with naked short selling — and if the biggest securities firms don’t watch out, they could be left with some unsightly welts on their wrists.
13 May 2010
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced today that it has fined two broker-dealers a total of $925,000 for executing numerous short sale orders in violation of Regulation SHO and for related supervisory violations. FINRA fined New York’s Deutsche Bank Securities $575,000 and Boston’s National Financial Services (NFS) $350,000.
Press Release
December 8, 2009 at 5:34 PM EST
Rocker Pays $5 Million to Overstock.com to Settle Lawsuit
‘A fine victory for Overstock, a triumph for the cause of cleaning up US capital markets’ says CEO Patrick Byrne.
Full text below the fold.
Continue reading “Press Release: Rocker Pays $5 Million to Overstock.com to Settle Lawsuit”
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.”
Deutsche Bank Unit Hit With Record Short-Sale Fine
Law360, 10 September 2008
According to NYSE Regulation, NYSE Euronext’s enforcement arm, Deutsche Bank Securities made a significant but unquantified number of short sales without borrowing the stocks, entering an agreement to borrow the stocks or even being reasonably sure that the stocks were available to borrow. Deutsche Bank Securities also agreed to be censured.
The Economist, 17 August 2008
For much of this financial crisis, America’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has cut a pathetic figure, relegated to the sidelines as a hyperactive Federal Reserve tried a variety of creative measures to keep the system afloat. When the market watchdog finally did get in on the act, it was highly controversial: a temporary order restricting short-selling the shares of 19 financial firms deemed systemically important, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two troubled mortgage agencies.
Did It Help to Curb Short Sales?
Floyd Norris
The New York Times, 12 August 2008
A rule that made it harder to short some financial stocks and that may have helped raise prices and reduce the volume of shorting in those stocks expired Tuesday, as the Securities and Exchange Commission considers whether to tighten the rules on all short selling.
It may be a coincidence, but the announcement of the rule on July 15 coincided with the bottom of the bear market for financial stocks, which leaped that day and are now well above where they were. And the final day proved to be a very bad day for those shares.
MarketWatch cited by RGB Communications via Wayback, May 28, 2008
Today the legal consortium of The O’Quinn Law Firm and Christian Smith & Jewell, both of Houston, Texas and Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore, LLP of Atlanta, Georgia filed a Complaint in the State Court of Fulton County, Georgia on behalf of certain shareholders of TASER International Inc. (“TASER”) against eight of the largest Wall Street firms, including Bank of America Securities LLC, Bear Stearns Securities Corp., Credit Suisse USA Inc., Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc., Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc., UBS Securities LLC.
Article: SEC is Looking at Stock Trading
Jenny Anderson
New York Times, 6 February 2007
The Securities and Exchange Commission has begun a broad examination into whether Wall Street bank employees are leaking information about big trades to favored clients, like hedge funds, in an effort to curry favor with those clients, executives at Wall Street banks said.
The inquiry, these people said, seems aimed at determining how pervasive insider trading, or the illegal use of market-moving nonpublic information, may be on Wall Street. Knowledge about a large trade, like the sale of a big block of stock by the mutual fund giant Fidelity, would tell a trader which way the stock would move.
Naked Short Victim Strikes Back
Liz Moyer
Forbes, 2 February 2007
Overstock.com filed a $3.5 billion lawsuit in California state court Friday accusing 10 of the largest U.S. securities firms of participating in a “massive, illegal stock market manipulation scheme” to distort its stock.
Suit Against Prime Brokers for Phony Stock Borrow Charges Filed
Bud Burrell, Chad Bray
Dow Jones Newswires cited by Sanity Check via Wayback, 12 April 2006
An antitrust lawsuit was filed Wednesday against the securities industry’s largest brokerage firms over fees charged as a result of “naked short selling.”
The lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan by Electronic Trading Group LLC alleges that the major broker-dealers charged unearned fees, commissions or interest on short sales where those broker-dealers failed to borrow or deliver the stock to back a short position.
DTCC Chief Spokesperson Denies Existence of Lawsuit
Financial Wire cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 11 May 2004
FinancialWire received a confidential email between a reporter and Stuart Z. Goldstein, Managing Director of Corporate Communications for the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. in which Goldstein was represented as denying that a lawsuit filed by Nanopierce Technologies (OTCBB: NPCT) exists.
The chief spokesperson for the DTCC, whose board of directors represent a who’s who of financial entities, including Lehman Brothers (NYSE: LEH), Citigroup / Solomon Smith Barney’s Corporate Investment Bank (NYSE: C), and Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MWD), was quoted as stating that the “lawsuit” did not exist and was simply “charges being leveled by internet crackpots.”
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