Foreign Collusion, Naked Shorting (Counterfeiting) & Money Laundering — All Illicit Wealth
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”
Judge Rejects Settlement Over Merrill Bonuses
Zachary Kouwe
New York Times, 14 September 2009
As President Obama traveled to Wall Street on Monday and chided bankers for their recklessness, across town a federal judge issued a far sharper rebuke, not just for some of the financiers but for their regulators in Washington as well.
Giving voice to the anger and frustration of many ordinary Americans, Judge Jed S. Rakoff issued a scathing ruling on one of the watershed moments of the financial crisis: the star-crossed takeover of Merrill Lynch by the now-struggling Bank of America.
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
Merrill Pays $15 Billion in Compensation After Taking $10 Billion in TARP Funds
Bob O’Brien
Sanity Check via Wayback, 23 January 2009
After all, the logic, or rather the gun to the head of the taxpayer by Hank Paulson, was that the economy would vaporize if we didn’t take taxpayer money and give it to Wall Street banks and insurance companies, to, er, lend, or to relieve them of the burden of having to carry the toxic paper they created on their books any longer.
At the time, I said that was clearly a lie, and all this would be is a redistribution from the Treasury, to the Wall Street buddies of Paulson’s who got us into the mess in the first place.
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.
Complaint Over Auction Rate Securities Market Details Brokers’ Greed
Courthouse News Service, 5 September 2008
In a federal filing replete with lurid examples of document destruction, inside trading, naked greed, lies and market manipulation, the City of Baltimore joins the long list of plaintiffs demanding treble damages from Citigroup, UBS, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Lehman Bros., Wachovia and other banks that conspired to prop up the auction rate securities market, until it collapsed in a $300 billion rubble heap from which investors are still digging out.
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.
Bringing Down Bear Began as $1.7 Million of Options
Gary Matsumoto
Bloomberg cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 11 August 2008
On March 11, the day the Federal Reserve attempted to shore up confidence in the credit markets with a $200 billion lending program that for the first time monetized Wall Street’s devalued collateral, somebody else decided Bear Stearns Cos. was going to collapse.
In a gambit with such low odds of success that traders question its legitimacy, someone wagered $1.7 million that Bear Stearns shares would suffer an unprecedented decline within days. Options specialists are convinced that the buyer, or buyers, made a concerted effort to drive the fifth-biggest U.S. securities firm out of business and, in the process, reap a profit of more than $270 million.
Bryan Burrough
Vanity Fair, 30 June 2008
On Monday, March 10, the rumor started: Bear Stearns was having liquidity problems. In fact, the maverick investment bank had around $18 billion in cash reserves. But soon the speculation created its own reality, and the race was on to keep Bear’s crisis from ravaging Wall Street. With the blow-by-blow from insiders, Bryan Burrough follows the players—Bear’s stunned executives, trigger-happy reporters at CNBC, a nervous Fed, a shadowy group of short-sellers—in what some believe was the greatest financial scandal in history.
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.
Overstock attempts to uncover malicious naked shorts
Keith Hahn
Dealbreaker, 25 April 2007
Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com, is seeking $3.5bn in damages from 10 prime brokers for intentionally manipulating Overstock’s share price through naked shorting. The big names charged are Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley.
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.
Liz Moyer
Forbes, 25 August 2006
Suspicious trading last year in shares of Global Links, a small Nevada real estate holding company, was far more intense than previously thought.
Data released to Patch earlier this month had shown trade fails of 10 million shares starting in mid-April, a time when 4 million shares of Global Links were issued and outstanding.
Liz Moyer
Forbes cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 28 July 2006
Toronto-based Fairfax Financial Holdings filed a $5 billion lawsuit against SAC Capital, Rocker Partners and a number of other hedge funds, claiming they manipulated the insurance company’s stock, shearing its market cap by one-third.
Earlier this week, the regulatory arm of NYSE Group, fined Daiwa Securities America, Goldman Sachs Execution & Clearing, Credit Suisse Securities, and Citigroup Global Markets $1.25 million for violations of Regulation SHO–a rule put in place in January 2005 to clamp down on abuses–related to how they handle and monitor short-sale transactions by hedge funds and other clients.
THE DOLLAR HAS NO INTRINSIC VALUE : DO YOUR ASSETS?
