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Web: Wikipedia – Naked Short Selling

Web

Naked Short Selling

Naked short selling, or naked shorting, is the practice of short-selling a tradable asset of any kind without first borrowing the security or ensuring that the security can be borrowed, as is conventionally done in a short sale. When the seller does not obtain the shares within the required time frame, the result is known as a “failure to deliver” (“FTD”). The transaction generally remains open until the shares are acquired by the seller, or the seller’s broker settles the trade.

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Paper: Counterfeiting Stock

Paper

Counterfeiting Stock

Anna McParland

The Creation of Counterfeit Shares — There are a variety of names that the securities industry has dreamed up that are euphemisms for counterfeit shares. Don’t be fooled : Unless the short seller has actually borrowed a real share from the account of a long investor, the short sale is counterfeit. It doesn’t matter what you call it and it may become non–counterfeit if a share is later borrowed, but until then, there are more shares in the system than the company has sold.

The magnitude of the counterfeiting is hundreds of millions of shares every day, and it may be in the billions. The real answer is locked within the prime brokers and the DTC. Incidentally, counterfeiting of securities is as

It is estimated that 1000 small companies have been put out of business by the shorts.

PDF (12 Pages): Paper Counterfeiting Stock

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Web: Merrill Pays $15 Billion in Compensation After Taking $10 Billion in TARP Funds

Web

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.

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Article: Refco – When Smart Money Isn’t So Smart

Article - Media

Refco: When Smart Money Isn’t So Smart

Matthew Goldstein

Bloomberg, 16 July 2007

The titans of the private equity world fancy themselves smarter, shrewder, and more sophisticated than any one else on Wall Street. Investors have bought into the sentiment as they’ve scooped up the shares of the private equity firms that have gone public recently: Blackstone Group (BX) and Fortress Investment Group (FIG). But a recent report on the spectacular collapse of Refco—the once-dominant commodities broker that was laid waste by a massive accounting fraud—paints an unflattering portrait of the private equity firm that engineered Refco’s August, 2004, leveraged buyout and its initial public offering a year later (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/11/07, “Kill the Private-Equity Tax Break”).

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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