“The OIG has opened an investigation into complaints from an investor alleging that the SEC failed to investigate instances of market manipulation and other misconduct in connection with the review, and eventual non-approval, of a developmental drug. The investor also has alleged that the SEC failed to investigate a recent bear raid on the stock of the company that developed the drug, causing a severe plunge in the stock price. The OIG has reviewed several hundred pages of documents, including numerous emails and attachments provided by the complainant. The OIG expects to complete its investigation and issue a report of investigation in the next reporting period.”
“The OIG continued its investigation of an allegation that SEC staff engaged in retaliation against a company after it publicly complained about naked short selling in the company’s stock. During this reporting period, the OIG took the sworn testimony of the staff attorney who worked on the matter and reviewed numerous relevant documents. The OIG has completed its investigative work and plans to issue its report of investigation prior to the end of the next semiannual reporting period.”
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"Alan Greenspan believed fraud should not be regulated."
"Greenspan did not believe fraud was something that should be regulated."
AMERICANS should boycott the stock market.
No, I'm not kidding. And this isn't going to be one of those funny columns.
In fact, I'm deadly serious that investors shouldn't risk any more of their money until there are promises of a thorough investigation of Goldman Sachs.
"There are three major tripwires strung across our landscape, any of which could rather suddenly change the game, if triggered. One is a sudden rush into material goods and commodities, that might occur if (or when) the truly wealthy ever catch on that paper wealth is a doomed concept. A second would occur if (or when) the largest and most dangerous bubble of them all, government debt, finally bursts. And the third concerns the dollar itself. This report explores the relationship between those last two tripwires, government debt and the dollar."
Legislators will correctly perceive that either raising taxes or cutting expenditures will threaten their re-election. To avoid this fate, they can opt for high rates of inflation, which never require a recorded vote and cannot be attributed to a specific action that any elected official takes. In fact, John Maynard Keynes long ago laid out a road map for political survival amid an economic disaster of just this sort: “By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.... The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
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Naked short selling - redefining systemic risk from Judd Bagley on Vimeo.
Given that, one may then ask of those journalists who defend the right of hedge funds to destroy firms they wish to destroy, that is to say, of DowJones’ Carol Remond and Karen Richardson, of Fortune Magazine’s Roddy Boyd and Bethany McLean (now at Vanity Fair), of New York Times’ Floyd Norris and Joe Nocera, of Herb Greenberg hiding behind vapid emails and Dave Kansas hiding under his desk, of NY Post/Portfolio Magazine’s Dan “Crusher” Colarusso and CNBC’s Jim Cramer the Crook: Do you get it now? Do you understand why illegal stock manipulation is wrong, and can impose costs on society it was your duty as journalists to explore? You purveyors of reportorial Velveeta, you lazy and captured, half-educated and dim-witted, snarky, insufferable, conformist and indolent pseudo-intellectual lickspittles, do you get it now? You are sell-out journalists who grovelled to your sources, missed the story of your careers, and in the eyes of an increasing fraction of the public, rank just below pedophile priests.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.
When a company makes a profit, it is a signal that it is taking resources and increasing their value while controlling costs. When a company operates at a loss, it is a signal that it is decreasing the value of its resources or letting out-of-control costs outstrip any value it has created. A company operating at a loss is therefore an engine of wealth destruction. Bankruptcies are a net positive for the economy because more productive competitors are rewarded by opportunities to buy up remaining assets at bargain prices to strengthen their operations. In an economy that allows this kind of growth and change, any jobs lost by bankruptcy are soon replaced by new ones as the most efficiently managed businesses gain access to more assets and expand. Bankruptcy was the stimulus that we needed in the case of AIG. More bankruptcies would clean out malinvested resources and enable economic growth again. AIG, by losing money and maneuvering their operations to the brink of bankruptcy, was telling us that they were inefficient. So what did we do? We forced the taxpayer to assume the losses, and now we are supposed to be shocked that it is not working out. Had AIG gone bankrupt, it would have been impossible to hand out these bonuses. The taxpayer would have been fleeced for $170 billion less last year. Had they gone bankrupt, the world would not have come to an end, it would just continue on with one less engine of wealth destruction.A recession should be a time of strengthening and regrouping for an economy. But as long as the government insists on maintaining the status quo by propping up failed institutions, we will continue to dig a bigger hole for ourselves.
Marc Faber, Gloom, Boom & Doom Report
Even in the 19th century, under the gold standard, from time-to-time investment manias and bubbles developed in railroads and in canals and in real estate, just to name a few. Under a fixed monetary, or gold, standard, where the quantity of money cannot be increased indefinitely, there is a natural limit to the scale of the crisis. Usually when there’s a boom in one sector of the economy, you have some kind of deflation somewhere else; that was also the case in the 1970s. We had a boom in commodities, but bond prices collapsed. What Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Bernanke have achieved is historically quite unique. They have managed to create a bubble in everything, everywhere in the world: in real estate, equities, commodities, art, worthless collectibles; even bond prices continued to rise as interest rates fell due to loose monetary policy. Since 2007 and 2008, everything has collapsed. But government bond prices continue to rise, and went ballistic between November 2008 and December 2008, when 10- and 30-year Treasury yields collapsed. So my view would be that this was the last bubble they managed to inflate. From here on, the government bond market will fall. In other worlds, the trend will be for interest rates to actually go up.
By embracing the “global plan for recovery and reform,” which is how it was officially described, Obama explicitly endorsed International Monetary Fund (IMF) surveillance of the U.S. economy, creation of a global “Financial Stability Board,” the expanded use of a new global currency called Special Drawing Rights, a new global warming treaty, and costly fulfillment of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This is in addition to the explicit and reported commitment of over $1 trillion in additional taxpayer money to the IMF and the World Bank. ...
The document includes the statement that “we reaffirm our historic commitment to meeting the Millennium Development Goals…” This is, in fact, a disguised attempt to make then-Senator Obama’s Global Poverty Act the law of the land through executive action. This measure alone has been estimated to cost $845 billion and it was never passed by Congress because of public opposition.
“We will support, now and in the future, to candid, even-handed, and independent IMF surveillance of our economies and financial sectors, of the impact of our policies on others, and of risks facing the global economy,” the document states. There is no exception for the U.S. Hence, the IMF will now be in a position to officially monitor and pass judgment on U.S. economic policies. We have become like any other second- or third-rate power in need of global oversight and supervision.
The proposed “new Financial Stability Board (FSB)” will have a “strengthened mandate” and work with the IMF to “reshape our regulatory systems.” Among other things, its mission is to “assess vulnerabilities affecting the financial system, identify and oversee action needed to address them,” “promote co-ordination and information exchange among authorities responsible for financial stability,” and “monitor and advise on market developments and their implications for regulatory policy.”
The Financial Stability Board is the new name for a more powerful and expanded Financial Stability Forum, a body originally designed to “promote international financial stability through information exchange and international co-operation in financial supervision and surveillance.” Members of the group include the central banks of various nations, international financial institutions, and supervisors in important financial centers.
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