Foreign Collusion, Naked Shorting (Counterfeiting) & Money Laundering — All Illicit Wealth
ETFs and the Present Danger to Capital Formation
Prepared Testimony by Harold Bradley and Robert E. Litan
Before the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investments
ETFs have increasingly distorted the role of equities
markets in capital formation, while posing systemic risks from potential
settlement failures.
Continue reading “Testimony: Kauffman Foundation on ETFs Danger to Capital Formation”
Edward Wyatt
New York Times, 9 October 2010
Sitting in a Minneapolis mansion and listening to a charismatic investment manager describe a currency trading system that kept earning handsome returns year after year, Arthur F. Schlobohm IV was certain he had stumbled onto a Ponzi scheme.
A longtime trader who started running tickets on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as a teenager, Mr. Schlobohm, known as Ty, knew that Minneapolis, his home for nine years, was too small a town for a $4.4 billion investment fund to have escaped his notice.
In another Wall Street misdeed, Morgan Stanley settles oil-trading flap
Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy Newspapers, 29 April 2010
In another black eye for Wall Street, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission late Thursday announced a $14 million fine against Morgan Stanley Capital Group Inc. for allegedly hiding its complex oil trades.
The settlement, in which Morgan Stanley did not admit or deny the accusations, comes as oil prices have continued their steady upwards march and have some oil analysts again saying that excessive speculation is again pushing up energy prices. One recent estimate put the cost of that to consumers and businesses at $300 billion annually.
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”
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
The Counterfeiting of Shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Where are Our Regulators and Who are They Protecting?
17 September 2008
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are publicly traded Government Sponsored Enterprises (―GSEs‖), a quasi – partnership between the private sector and the government. The shares of the GSEs trading in the public markets have been counterfeited and deliberately manipulated. This is not rocket science; known ownership of the GSEs shares exceeded the number of shares that were available. Counterfeiting shares of the GSEs caused their stock prices to collapse. The regulators turned a blind eye to the takedown, encouraged it or were not effective enough to recognize it and enforce the laws against market manipulation that have existed since the 1930s. The industry and the regulators have little room for a plausible deniability claim that they did not know what was occurring in the trading of the GSEs.
PDF (33 pages): The Counterfeiting of Shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Where are Our Regulators and Who are They Protecting?
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.
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.
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.
Naked Short Selling: How Exposed are Investors?
James W. Christian, Robert Shapiro, John-Paul Whalen
The Houston Law Review, 10 November 2006
Regulation SHO is a start, but in order to guarantee a fair market place, the SEC must close the loopholes in Regulation SHO and institute comprehensive reforms to the clearing and settlement system. Until the SEC makes these necessary reforms and addresses the DTCC’s mismanagement of the Stock Borrow Program, investors will continue to be exposed to the manipulative potential of naked short selling.
PDF (58 Pages): HLR Naked Short Selling 2006-11-10
Liz Moyer, 29 August 2006
Louisiana State Attorney General Charles Foti is trying to force UBS, the Wall Street investment bank, to turn over vast quantities of information on its trading, stock lending and other activities related to shares of software firm Sedona.
The Louisiana Department of Justice filed documents in a state court Tuesday to compel UBS to hand over the information in ten days.
The state is probing naked short-selling, which is the practice of selling shares short without borrowing them. It is an issue that has already been raised in reference to Sedona Sedona. in an ongoing civil lawsuit against a number of brokers and hedge funds and in a Securities and Exchange Commission federal court case filed in April in New York against one brokerage and several individuals. Continue reading “Article: Naked Justice?”
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.
Lawsuits Accuse “Prime Brokers” of Securities Fraud
Wayne Jett
San Gabriel Valley Tribune cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 19 July 2006
Two class-action lawsuits filed in Manhattan federal court in April allege fraud by the world’s largest “prime brokers” in securities lending practices.
Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Banc of America Securities, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank Securities, UBS Financial and Bank of New York allegedly charge high fees to lend securities for short selling, but fail to deliver the securities sold short by hedge funds.
THE DOLLAR HAS NO INTRINSIC VALUE : DO YOUR ASSETS?
