Tag: Lehman Brothers

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Web: 5,000 Reasons Why the Overstock.com Saga is Crazier Than Ever

Web

5,000 Reasons Why the Overstock.com Saga is Crazier Than Ever

Gary Weiss

gary-weiss.com, 30 January 2018

It’s been a long time since the financial press has cast a skeptical eye on Overstock.com and its CEO, Patrick Byrne, Yet there are multiple reasons to do so. Five thousand to be exact. So I’ve dusted off my blog for an update on my favorite fraudulent stock.

As in all soap operas, its continuing story line is not new: Byrne wants the stock to go up. The stock has a history of manipulation, mainly through cooking the books, resulting in multiple restatements. But it takes an expert to sniff out accounting irregularities. All you need to detect the latest Overstock scam is a working pair of eyes and an Internet connection.

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Article: Marc Cohodes On The EIC Ponzi Scheme

Article - Media, Publications

Marc Cohodes On The EIC Ponzi Scheme

ValueWalk, 15 October 2017

Farmer Marc Cohodes is one of the world’s most feared short sellers. Former General Partner of Rocker Partners/ Copper River from 1985 to 2009, Cohodes has made a name for himself by focusing on the details. He calls out companies where the numbers don’t add up, and he’s usually right. In the financial crisis, he hit the jackpot when he correctly called the demise of Lehman Brothers. After retiring in 2009, Cohodes has since returned to the markets, betting against Canadian mortgage lender Home Capital and Valeant Pharmaceuticals among others.
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Article: Deutsche Bank’s $10-Billion Scandal

Article - Media, Publications

Deutsche Bank’s $10-Billion Scandal

Ed Caesar, 22 August 2016

Almost every weekday between the fall of 2011 and early 2015, a Russian broker named Igor Volkov called the equities desk of Deutsche Bank’s Moscow headquarters. Volkov would speak to a sales trader—often, a young woman named Dina Maksutova—and ask her to place two trades simultaneously. In one, he would use Russian rubles to buy a blue-chip Russian stock, such as Lukoil, for a Russian company that he represented. Usually, the order was for about ten million dollars’ worth of the stock. In the second trade, Volkov—acting on behalf of a different company, which typically was registered in an offshore territory, such as the British Virgin Islands—would sell the same Russian stock, in the same quantity, in London, in exchange for dollars, pounds, or euros. Both the Russian company and the offshore company had the same owner. Deutsche Bank was helping the client to buy and sell to himself. Continue reading “Article: Deutsche Bank’s $10-Billion Scandal”

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Web: RGM Communications Archive on Naked Short Selling

Web

RGM Communications Archive on Naked Short Selling

Accessed via Wayback, 31 January 2001 – 31 March 2014

Listed below are a large number of public information articles and reports detailing the brokerage houses, market makers and the conduct of the main “street” characters engaged in the illegal practice of “naked short selling”, “death-spiral financing”, “failure to delivers (FTDs)” and/or stock fraud. This page is a resource for anyone wishing to educate themselves regarding the depth and breath of these illegal activities. Please note that some of the articles may have been added out of time sequence because they were discovered weeks or months after publication. All the dates are, to the best of our knowledge, when they came into the public domain.

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Article: UBS, in Theory, a Conspiracy to Naked Short “Tens of Millions” of Shares

Article - Media, Publications

UBS, in Theory, a Conspiracy to Naked Short “Tens of Millions” of Shares

MARK MITCHELL, 01 May 2013

It wasn’t long ago when they were saying that naked short selling never happened. They said it simply did not exist, that only wild-eyed conspiracy theorists believed in naked short selling. That was before 2008, when the CEOs of some big banks started hollering that naked short selling was causing the stock prices of their banks to nosedive. With the CEOs of the big banks hollering, the SEC, in June, 2008, issued an Emergency Order banning naked short selling (that previously did not exist) in the stocks of 19 big financial institutions (i.e. the financial institutions that were doing the naked short selling—to each other). But the SEC did nothing about the naked short selling of other stocks because, apparently, that naked short selling existed only in the fevered imaginations of people who believed that their savings were being wiped out by little green men. Continue reading “Article: UBS, in Theory, a Conspiracy to Naked Short “Tens of Millions” of Shares”

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Article: The Emperor is Naked: David Stockman

Article - Media

The Emperor is Naked: David Stockman

Karen Roche, JT Long

The Gold Report cited by NASDAQ.com, 4 May 2012

A “paralyzed” Federal Reserve Bank, in its “final days,” held hostage by Wall Street “robots” trading in markets that are “artificially medicated” are just a few of the bleak observations shared by David Stockman, former Republican U.S. Congressman and director of the Office of Management and Budget. He is also a founding partner of Heartland Industrial Partners and the author of The Triumph of Politics: Why Reagan’s Revolution Failed and the soon-to-be released The Great Deformation: How Crony Capitalism Corrupts Free Markets and Democracy.The Gold Report caught up with Stockman for this exclusive interview at the recent Recovery Reality Check conference.

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Article: SEC under Schapiro struggles to turn around amid political, financial head winds

Article - Media

SEC under Schapiro struggles to turn around amid political, financial head winds

David S. Hilzenrath

Washington Post, 7 October 2011

Mary L. Schapiro took over a discredited SEC in early 2009 and vowed to rebuild it.

She promised tougher enforcement — “war without quarter” on financial fraud. Modernized rules to keep up with Wall Street. And a new, more effective organization.

Her tenure at the federal agency responsible for protecting investors and policing markets offers a Washington lesson: Even when epic crises create a sense of urgency, it is tough to tighten the reins on powerful industries. Dramatic results can prove elusive.

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Article: Europe Comes to Terms With Market Manipulation; the SEC and the American Media Bury Heads in the Sand

Article - Media, Publications

Europe Comes to Terms With Market Manipulation; the SEC and the American Media Bury Heads in the Sand

Mark Mitchell, DeepCapture,  21 May 2010

Well, the current state of the global financial markets is certainly interesting. I mean, you have to be a bit sick in the head, but if you think about it the right way, it really is “interesting” — sort of like, oo-wee, look, the girl in the cute leotard is falling off the tightrope, there’s no net, and she’s going to go “splat” when she hits that pavement. How interesting! And check it out, the circus animals have gone berserk — the tigers are tearing the trainer into bloody shreds, the elephants are stampeding, the tent might very well collapse, maybe we’re doomed, and look at those clowns – they’re still smiling. How deliciously interesting! Continue reading “Article: Europe Comes to Terms With Market Manipulation; the SEC and the American Media Bury Heads in the Sand”

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Article: Wall Street’s Naked Swindle

Article - Media

Wall Street’s Naked Swindle

Matt Taibbi

Rolling Stone, 5 April 2010

On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who —made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — “like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets,” according to one financial analyst.

But what’s even crazier is that the bet paid.

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Article: Our Watchdogs and the Financial Scandal of the Century

Article - Media

Our Watchdogs and the Financial Scandal of the Century

Mark Mitchell

Deep Capture, 3 April 2009

“Accountability – Integrity – Reliability”

That’s the motto of the Government Accountability Office, and it almost makes you believe that there really is a functioning watchdog – somebody, aside from us Internet loons, to investigate and report on the incompetence and malfeasance that pervade our public institutions.

Certainly, there were high hopes when the GAO began investigating the Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a black box Wall Street outfit that is at the center of one of the great financial scandals of our era.

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Article: How Wall Street Is Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution

Article - Media

How Wall Street Is Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution

Matt Taibbi

Rolling Stone, 2 April 2009

It’s over – we’re officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline – a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

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Article: Naked short sales hint fraud in bringing down Lehman

Article - Media

Naked short sales hint fraud in bringing down Lehman

Gary Matsumoto

Bloomberg, 22 March 2009

The biggest bankruptcy in history might have been avoided if Wall Street had been prevented from practicing one of its darkest arts. As Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc struggled to survive last year, as many as 32.8 million shares in the company were sold and not delivered to buyers on time as of September 11, according to data compiled by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Bloomberg. That was a more than 57-fold increase over the prior years peak of 567,518 failed trades on July 30. The SEC has linked such so-called fails-to-deliver to naked short selling, a strategy that can be used to manipulate markets. A fail-to-deliver is a trade that doesn’t settle within three days. We had another word for this in Brooklyn, said Harvey Pitt, a former SEC chairman. The word was fraud.

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Report: SEC IG Practices Related to Naked Short Selling Complaints and Referrals

Report

Editor: bottom line up front: SEC does not “do” complaints and considers naked short selling to be legal and generally contributing to “liquidity,”

Practices Related to Naked Short Selling Complaints and Referrals

Naked short selling has been a controversial practice for several years and, while not illegal per se, abusive or manipulative naked short selling (e.g., intentionally failing to borrow and deliver shares sold short in order to drive down the stock price) violates the federal securities laws.

The prior GAO audit found that Enforcement’s system for receiving and tracking referrals from the Self-Regulatory Organizations (SRO) needed improvements and recommended enhancements that would facilitate the monitoring and analysis of trend information and case activities.

Continue reading “Report: SEC IG Practices Related to Naked Short Selling Complaints and Referrals”

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Article: In Pursuit of the Naked Short by Alexis Stokes

Article - Academic

In Pursuit of the Naked Short

Alexis Stokes, Texas State University

Journal of Law and Business 5/1 (Spring 2009)

This article explores the origins of naked short-selling litigation; considers
the failures of significant naked short-selling lawsuits in federal court;
surveys the obstacles erected collectively by constitutional standing requirements, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, brokerage firms, death spiral financiers, and the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation; examines the efficacy of Regulation SHO, SEC rule 10b-21, and new FINRA rules; discusses recent state legislation and state court litigation; and identifies non-litigation options to curb naked short-selling. Ultimately, this article seeks to answer the question: If manipulative naked short-selling is more than a mythological scapegoat for
small cap failure, what remedies are, or should be, available?

PDF (62 Pages): Article In Pursuit of the Naked Short

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