Financial Crime of the Century

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Illegal naked short selling

From Jim Puplava's Financial Sense News Hour

netcastdaily.com

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This may be illegal naked short selling of the type Jim Puplava calls "Carpet Bombing Technique".

1. Platinum, palladium are up, gold, silver are up, oil is up and North American Palladium (PAL) which has drill results indicating the worlds richest untapped palladium reserves is down 3%, though the stock had clearly broken out 3 days ago.

2. Note the uneconomic method of sales clearly designed to depress the price rather than maximize profit.

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Unbelievable decline in the last 1/2 hour of trading. This is not natural as the stock had been rising all day.

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Financial Sense Newshour of 7/12/2008.

Jim Puplava interviews Bud Burrell who calls naked short selling "The Greatest Crime in History"

http://www.financialsense.com/fsn/main.html



On July 15, 2008, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox appeared on national TV to announce his new short-selling rule which ONLY applies to large financial stocks.

BNP Paribas Securities Corp.
Bank of America Corporation
Barclays PLC
Citigroup Inc.
Credit Suisse Group
Daiwa Securities Group Inc.
Deutsche Bank Group AG
Allianz SE
Goldman, Sachs Group Inc
Royal Bank ADS
HSBC Holdings PLC ADS
J. P. Morgan Chase & Co
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc.
Mizuho Financial Group, Inc.
Morgan Stanley
UBS AG
Freddie Mac
Fannie Mae

The rule already exists and this, in my view is selective enforcement. What happened to equal protection under the law?

Jim Cramer said on CNBC:

"Cox declared he'll no longer allow traders to short stocks without borrowing them first, at least when it comes to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This "naked shorting" is banned, he said. Strange that the SEC chairman doesn't know that the practice is already illegal.

The rule is that all traders shorting a stock need to first borrow it first. And it doesn't matter whether it's Fannie, Freddie, Ford or Pfizer. This rule applies to any stock out there. It's just that the SEC isn't enforcing the rule anywhere else. As a result, hedge funds are sending down the shares of any number of companies in the market.

This move just goes hand in hand with the SEC's dissolution of the uptick rule, in which a trader must wait for a stock to go up before he can sell it short. Hedge funds have been taking advantage of that as well, again hurting companies and shareholders alike."

Cramer's suggestion to the SEC: Start doing your job. Regulate the markets, for cryin' out loud. The average investor is watching his net worth evaporate because because you won't reign in these hedge funds.

July 16, 2008 Jim Cramer video on the subject.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/25704317/site/14081545/

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"...the SEC has zero tolerance for abusive naked short selling,"

Uh huh, and I have a bridge to sell you.

SEC Press Release on New Naked Short Selling Rules

Some questions for the SEC:

1. How will the SEC determine whether an institution is in compliance with this rule? The only way to determine compliance is through an SEC audit, something that could only occur months after the fact. In the case of a bear raid, that will be too late.

2. Where is the 'buy-in' requirement? Under the new SEC rules a crooked hedge fund can still naked short sell without settlement and keep that short open indefinitely. It appears that only future naked short sales will require a pre-borrow and that there is still no closeout requirement for failed trades.

3. What of manipulative day trading? Chairman Cox has admitted that the financial stocks did not have a significant level of naked shorts, but rather collapsed under day trading activities. The new rule fails to address this, the very activity that generated the need for the July 15, 2008 emergency order. The manipulative day trading short seller never has a position open for three days. However, under the new rules, he can still use a single locate multiple times to create the best leverage possible to drive natural investors out of the market.

4. Where are the penalties? Without meaningful penalties, these rules have no bite. The SEC needs to make sure that the rules are strictly and aggressively enforced -- both for failures to deliver that occur within the CNS system and outside the CNS system in ex-clearing trades, where, I suspect, there is naked shorting that makes the object of current SEC concerns look like small potatoes.

Patrick Byrne Comments on the SEC Naked Short Rule

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Hidden inside the AIG bailout funding package, surely hastily cobbled together, but carefully enough to include a totally corrupt clause, was a handy dandy clause that permits raids. The conglomerate financial firms are permitted at this point to use private individual brokerage account funds to relieve their own liquidity pressures. This represents unauthorized loans of your stock account assets. So next, if the conglomerate fails, your stock account is part of the bankruptcy process. Finally the corrupt USGovt and corrupt Wall Street houses are desperate enough to put into policy, stated by the US Federal Reserve, outlining the authorized raid of your money.

Panic, Consolidate, Game Over by Jim Willie

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Naked shorting and the biggest % decline in Wall Street history (including 1929)

The criminal code makes the conduct we have observed an act of sedition/treason. If DOJ wants to impress anyone, they better stick it to these syndicate operators who have ripped off Trillions of dollars from this Country.

I am on the Board of a British company, and I queried the CEO of that company about British laws in this identical space. No surprise, they are the same as here: If you engage in a "Conspiracy" to manipulate the financial assets of the UK, it is terrorism, just like here. It is right up there with killing policeman or commiting a violent act of terrorism, with the same penalties.

Read the US statutes: CJS 22, 22A, and 46. They classify acts of financial syndicalism as Insurrection and Sedition. Those are Class A Federal Felonies. Engage in a conspiracy to counterfeit by any means a commercial security (itself a Class B Felony), and you are commiting a Class A Felony.

Let's see a few people be sent to prison for life, and see how fast this mess is straightened out. It is either that or they should be put up against a Wall, and given a choice. Bring back your ill-gotten gains from offshore, or pay the ultimate price.

There are Congressmen, Senators, and Regulators who belong in this group for aiding and abetting these criminals, just like the felony murder rule.

Bud Burrell Interview with Jim Puplava

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Ted Butler weighs in on the massive silver short position

http://news.silverseek.com/TedButler/1223916524.php

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Short Seller Taken to Court

by Kris Sayce on November 7, 2008

We have no idea who Giovanni Spagnolo is. We don’t know whether he is a professional trader, a small investor, a fund manager or anything else.

But what we do know is the Australian Securities & Investment Commission (ASIC) has taken him to court for short selling. To be more precise, for naked short selling. You see, what Mr Spagnolo did was sell shares that he did not own. Furthermore, he didn’t borrow the stock from anyone in order to deliver it on settlement. That is what makes it a naked short sell.

We don’t know the full details of the case other than what is on the ASIC website:

“ASIC alleges that between 28 May and 24 October 2007, Mr Spagnolo sold shares and options that he did not own, contrary to Section 1020B(2) of the Corporations Act, in a practice known as ’short selling’… Mr Spagnolo applied for shares and options in capital raisings by the companies. Before they were issued, he agreed to sell them on the stock exchange. Mr Spagnolo failed to deliver the shares and options on the due date for settlement.”

The problem as we see it is that Mr Spagnolo appears to have done exactly what large institutions do as a matter of course. The main difference is that the institutions are permitted to do so while the private investor is not.

The underwriter of a share issue can short sell stock in advance in order to reduce their exposure if they are left holding stock from a public offering or a placement. Yet it appears that private investors cannot do the same thing.

We wonder if this is the best way to tighten up the rules on short selling. We don’t think it is. There is a much simpler solution that could be easily implemented.

ASIC and the ASX should just follow the same system that operates in Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong investors must deliver stock to the exchange on the settlement day otherwise it triggers a ‘buy-in.’ That means if you want to short sell you must borrow the stock and deliver it to the exchange. If you don’t then the exchange automatically buys the stock back for you, thus closing out the trade.

It is a simple and effective way to almost eradicate naked short selling. It would not be difficult for the ASX to do the same here. It is just a case of whether they have the will to do so.

http://www.moneymorning.com.au/20081107 ... court.html

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Who is guarding your money? Naked short selling, lack of Canadian regulation.

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The Mitchell Report on the Deep Capture website:

A Ponzi Scheme that is Bigger than Bernie’s
December 13th, 2008 by Mark Mitchell

Bernard L. Madoff’s fraud is “stunning,” says the SEC. It is a crime of “epic proportions.” But, says the SEC, we have nothing to worry about. The SEC caught the bad guy. It “moved swiftly” to protect the integrity of the financial markets.

Nonsense.

The only thing “stunning” is that the SEC continues to condone and even fraternize with the organized mob of hedge fund miscreants who have destroyed hundreds of companies, wiped out the jobs of countless ordinary folks, and brought our financial system to the brink of ruin.

http://www.deepcapture.com/

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We are morally losing our leadership in the world...Jim Puplava

What have we witnessed this past year?

• Insider trading
• Corruption
• Naked Short Selling
• Over-Leverage
• Conflicts of Interest
• Concentration of Power without Oversight
• And most recently, "the largest Ponzi scheme in history"

Even Newt Gingrich is calling for the immediate resignation of Henry Paulson. Crime of the Century series continues in this excerpt from the FSN Newshour broadcast 3rd hour on December 19, 2008.



More here:

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=42

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David Mcalvany Interview With Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne




http://www.deepcapture.com/

http://www.mcalvany.com/

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The Big Takeover

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution




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.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/st ... g_takeover

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Daniel Hannan rips a new a'hole into PM Gordon Brown

Recall Gordon Brown sold 60% of England's gold supply at 20 year lows for $275.



More on Daniel Hannan, Conservative Member of European Parliament

Gary North: The Day the Bank of England Ran Gold Down to $256

What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it

http://baselinescenario.com/

Big and Small

Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Geithner presented an outline of his approach to regulating the financial system. The four pillars of that approach seem to be:

1. Increased power and regulatory centralization to deal with the problem of systemic risk


2. Increased protections for consumers and investors buying financial products


3. Closing regulatory gaps by shifting that organizes regulation based on financial functions, not types of financial institutions


4. International coordination among regulators

This all sounds good to me, and an improvement over where we are today. But reading Geithner’s discussion of systemic risk - the topic he focused on yesterday - I kept thinking it had been too long since he read Frog and Toad to his children.

http://baselinescenario.com/2009/03/27/ ... #more-3089

Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund during 2007 and 2008. He blogs about the financial crisis at baselinescenario.com, along with James Kwak, who also contributed to this essay.

"The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time."

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice

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Judd Bagley calls himself a journalist and hacker

His antisocialmedia.com site is a blog that is

An investigation into the use of blogs, wikis, and message boards to manipulate stock prices, public opinion, and the mass media.

We have the financial crime of the century being committed in real time and there is no outrage expressed by the general public. Judd Bagley also posts on the deepcapture.com web site.

Hedge Funds and the Global Economic Meltdown

More writings by Judd Bagley on akahele.org re: using wikipedia to manipulate public opinion.

Akahele contributor Judd Bagley’s direct involvement notwithstanding, he feels it’s both fair and accurate to say that the events surrounding the Gary Weiss/Mantanmoreland affair were among the strangest and most polarizing in Wikipedia’s history.

http://akahele.org/2009/03/weighing-the-options/

More on Gary Weiss and the DTCC (Depositary Trust Clearing Corporation)

Emmy Award-winning journalist Gary Matsumoto reported on the Bloomberg newswire last week that naked short selling is one of Wall Street’s “darkest arts” and contributed to the demise of both Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.

SEC data shows that an astounding 32.8 million shares of Lehman were sold and not delivered to buyers as of last September 11, days before the company declared bankruptcy.

The collapse of Lehman, of course, triggered the near-total implosion of our financial system.

How could this have been allowed to happen?

One answer lies within that black box – the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation. The DTCC is a quasi-private, Wall Street owned and operated organization that is charged by Congress and the SEC with ensuring that securities trades are cleared and settled. As is evident from the cases of Lehman, Bear, and hundreds of other companies, however, the DTCC often fails to do its job.

While enabling hedge funds and brokers to engage in their dark art, the DTCC also goes to lengths to deny that illegal naked short selling occurs and to smear the reputations of people who say otherwise. It has orchestrated this vicious public relations campaign in cahoots with a crooked Portfolio magazine reporter named Gary Weiss, who has worked closely with a motley cast of Mafia-connected hedge fund managers and convicted criminals.

There is indisputable evidence showing that Weiss, while posing as a journalist, not only worked inside the DTCC’s offices, but also went so far as to seize total control of the Wikipedia entries on “naked short selling” and “Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation.” Yet, to this day, Weiss flat-out denies that he has ever worked with the DTCC and insists that he has never edited any Wikipedia page, much less the fabulously distorted entries dealing with naked short selling.

That the DTCC facilitates and seeks to cover up naked short selling is not surprising given that it is owned by the very brokerages who profit from catering to hedge funds who commit the crime. The DTCC’s board of directors has included several market makers – including Peter Madoff, brother of Bernard Madoff, the $50 billion Ponzi schemer with ties to the Mafia — who made a tidy profit from naked short selling.

From deepcapture.com, Our Watchdogs and the Financial Scandal of the Century

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The financial industry brought the economy to its knees,

but how did they get away with it? With the nation wondering how to hold the bankers accountable, Bill Moyers sits down with William K. Black, the former senior regulator who cracked down on banks during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. Black offers his analysis of what went wrong and his critique of the bailout. Thanks for the heads-up by dlry at Anse Intendance.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/watch.html

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Geithner's Stress Test "A Complete Sham,"

“There is no real purpose [of the stress test] other than to fool us. To make us chumps,” Black says. Noting policymakers have long stated the problem is a lack of confidence, Black says Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is now essentially saying: “’If we lie and they believe us, all will be well.’ It’s Orwellian."

The former regulator is extremely critical of Geithner, calling him a “failed regulator” now “adding to failed policy” by not allowing “banks that really need desperately to be closed” to fail. (On Saturday, Geithner said on Face the Nation, if banks need "exceptional assistance" in the future "then we'll make sure that assistance comes with conditions," including potentially changing management and the board, but did not say they'd be shut down.)

Black says the stress test must also be viewed in the context of Geithner’s toxic debt plan, which he calls “an enormous taxpayer subsidy for people who caused the problem.” The fact bank stocks have been rising since Geithner unveiled his plan is “bad news for taxpayers,” he says. “It’s the subsidy of all history."

Aaron Task Interviews William Black, Former S&L Regulator

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Did the ECB Save COMEX from Gold Default?

Avery Goodman Part 1

Avery Goodman Part 2

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Dylan Ratigan Interview (Host of Fast Money on CNBC)

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You can fool most of the people all of the time




William Black on the Big Lie behind stress Test Optimism

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Meredith Gets It

Interview with Maria Bartiromo on the banks earnings, government intervention, the stress test and other lies.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1120084432&play=1

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Andrew Maguire & Adrian Douglas: Discuss What Could Be the Largest Fraud in History

Andrew is an independent metals trader turned whistleblower at the center of a storm for exposing what could be the largest fraud in history involving countries, banks and government leaders. Adrian Douglas Board of Director from GATA, the man who Andrew reached out to joins in this interview where they discuss a fraud so extraordinary and so unimaginable that it is the kind of thing that only happens in hollywood thrillers. They also discuss the CFTC sponsored meeting on metals which was an unmitigated disaster because it additionally exposed the fraud on a grander scale.




King World News Interview on March 30, 2010