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Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

Can any one of you name the company that is responsible for the most Naked Shorting on Wall Street or in the World for that matter? The market has gone down from a high of 14K to 7.5K as I write this post and this companies stock is almost @ a 52 week high. This company is never ,ever mentioned yet they are at the heart of our greatly discussed dilemna, Market Manipulation and Naked Shorting. All of the financials including the kingpin Gangbankster Goldman Saks have be humbled from a high of 257 to 48 now back to 88 and still this company is standing as strong as ever in the face of the most precipitous(sp) drop of the stock market in the last 50 years. Bear Stearns, Lehman and Merrill have gone to the wayside, Bank of America and Citi are soon to be on the Nationalization block and this company is wrong and strong. And strangely enough not even this site mentions them that much.
How powerful are these guys that even the invisible/almighty DTCC gets more notice than this publicly trade company. I don’t even think the SEC knows if these guys exist and if they did they would never investigate them.
The company I speak of is none other than Knight Trading(NITE) Comments are welcome, especially from Dr. Decosta. My question is WHY?

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

Bobo I think this is in line with Judds', Deepcaptures' and your efforts!!

How 9,000 Business Reporters Blew The Mother Of All Meltdowns
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-tucker/how-9000-business-reporte_b_167142.html

How 9,000 Business Reporters Blew The Mother Of All Meltdowns

Diane Tucker
Independent writer/producer/director

Posted February 15, 2009 | 10:31 PM (EST)

How could an army of business reporters blow the biggest story since The Great Depression? That's the musical question posed by former Wall Street Journal business and investigative reporter Dean Starkman, while he was doing a little freelancing this month for Mother Jones magazine.

Starkman said you may be surprised how many business editors blame you, dear reader.

"If we had written stories in late 2000 saying this whole thing's going to collapse," said Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer, "people would have said, 'Ha ha, maybe,' and gone about their business."


Ditto Marcus Brauchli, executive editor of the Washington Post: "I regret that when I was at the Wall Street Journal, we didn't keep the focus on some of these questions, including the possible moral hazard posed by the structure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But these are really difficult issues to convey to a popular audience."

Well, dudes, what did you offer us doofuses instead?

Edgy-yet-flattering profiles of Merrill Lynch's Stan O'Neal and Lehman Brothers' Dick Fuld...those pieces noting how Countrywide Financial's Angelo Mozilo liked to dress well...the Home Depot marketing stories...all the cheerleading and Flip That House fluff that diverted resources from the real task at hand.

Starkman took down Wall Street reporters for delivering personality-driven stories instead of deconstructing balance sheets or figuring out risk.

Coverage of Citigroup produced reams of profiles of its influential former chief, Sandy Weill, his successor, Chuck Prince, and his protege-turned-rival, Jaime Dimon, but precious little about Citigroup's role in bringing subprime lending from the mortgage industry's margins into the mainstream.

To be fair, the business press was stressed out by its own rounds of white-knuckle layoffs.

The disintegration of the financial media's own financial underpinnings could not have come at a worse time. Office politics became Byzantine, and productivity demands on the newsroom -- more, faster -- grew ever more pronounced. Time-consuming investigations were undertaken at the reporter's own risk. If a lead didn't pan out -- no matter why -- it hit your productivity numbers, putting your career in peril.

Okay, so dead-tree journalism was partly to blame. But didn't regulators also fail to do their jobs?

Back in the 1980s, a great deal of tough Wall Street coverage was driven by the aggressive work of prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission. But then came the Clinton-era push toward deregulation that reached its extreme during the Bush administration, as the federal government unceremoniously pulled the finance cops off the beat. For a time, Eliot Spitzer filled the void with his aggressive prosecution of Wall Street misdeeds, but for the most part, covering financial corruption without regulators was like trying to clap with one hand.

Let me get this straight. The only person patrolling Wall Street was Eliot Spitzer? But wasn't he preoccupied with another kind of street activity? And while we're on the subject of riveting television, I recall watching Lehman employees carrying out boxes of records, a spectacle that pushed Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil over the edge:

"Is there anybody left in the government with a pulse? Where's the yellow police tape? How about a cease-and-desist order to prevent document destruction? Can anyone give me a good reason why Lehman offices shouldn't be treated as a crime scene now?"

Can anyone give me a good reason why Bernie Madoff is still livin' la vida loca in a penthouse? Why Merill Lynch is getting away (so far) with secretly handing out bonuses?

"It's true the federal regulators disappeared. But there were lots of state regulators who were going after this in a big way, lots of people on the ground, lawyers, consumer advocates, scholars, who saw what was happening, and the press didn't give them much attention," said former WSJ reporter Michael Hudson. Hudson is now with the Center for Responsible Lending.

Some Mother Jones readers included Starkman on their dishonor roll:

How could you possibly write a story about MSM reporters who missed the big collapse, and ignore all the bloggers that warned repeatedly about the coming misadventures in real estate, credit, derivatives, and finance? That's the real takeaway from this era -- traditional journalism left a vacuum, one that was quickly filled.

-- Barry Ritholtz, 2/11/2009, 5:53 PM

What Dean [Starkman] forgets is that he blew it as well. A few of us did write tough stories about Wall Street. I was there, and I can tell you Dean wasn't one of them.

-- Charles Gasparino, 2/11/2009, 8:38 PM

Some Mother Jones readers accused MSM business writers of now acting as apologists for the culprits:

I've lost track of the articles I've read attempting to "explain" how so many bright people made such a bad mistake. The upshot is that since everybody was doing it, and nobody wanted to get left behind, it was all perfectly normal, and nobody should be held accountable. Except that people's retirement accounts were wiped out. People are losing their homes, and now their jobs.

-- Paul (no last name provided), 2/12/2009, 1:31 PM

To read Dean Starkman's full story in Mother Jones, click here.

To read in-depth reporting on the pros and cons of the new economic stimulus package designed to fix this mess, click....er....click...

Who am I kidding? I can't think anyone in the MSM who is on top of this story, can you

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

I feel like I am hogging up the blog, but the news is coming out fast and furious and I can't stop spreading it!!

Looks like the rats are starting to desert thse sinking ships!!!

Recs: 0 Goldman Sachs President Winkelried to retire
Goldman Sachs President, co-Chief Operating Officer Jon Winkelried to retire as of March 31
Tuesday February 17, 2009, 5:00 pm EST
NEW YORK (AP) -- Goldman Sachs says its president and co-chief operating officer Jon Winkelried will retire on March 31.

Winkelried, 49, has been a Goldman employee since 1982 and headed the firm's investment banking division before becoming president and co-COO in June 2006.

New York-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said Winkelried is also leaving its board, and will be given the honorary title of senior director. That title carries no voting or decision making power.

Winkelried was one of seven Goldman executives who did not receive cash or stock bonuses for 2008. He received a total of about $71.5 million in salary, bonus and stock and option awards in 2007, according to a regulatory filing.

The announcement came after the market closed. Stocks saw a widespread sell-off on the session, and Goldman closed down $10.74, or 11 percent, at $85.71.

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

I didn't think that Markopolos was abrasive or arrogant. After 10 years of hammering on the door, he had every right to call it like he saw it. He was disappointed because much of the loss could have been stopped early. Markopolos had a functioning brain and ethics and drive. To tell you how bad it was at the SEC, one of his contacts was encouraging him because he knew nothing would be done by the regulators. The coup is that they kept trying and exposed the SEC for what it is.

What I saw as abrasive and arrogant were the regulators. Stonewalling, CYA bureaucrats. Linda is gone... but the damage she did to the agency by letting the Pequot investigation die is not forgotten. Contact between former regultors and the agency has to be curtailed. They can't serve two masters at once.. This attitude of protecting biggies for fear it will destroy confidence is behind the destruction of the market. The corruption is there and everyone knows it. 5 years ago something could have been salvaged, but instead the SEC let the IB's leverage, didn't enforce delivery of shares, and they tried to mask the problems with grandfathering.

Moving much of the FBI resources to terrorism opened the floodgates for white collar crime. One would think that the transfer of assets would be at the top of the list for the FBI, but they rely on the banks for reports and the banks aren't telling. If you read the list of sanctions and fines for UBS for the last 10 years, they are a criminal enterprise. Helping people to evade taxes is a tip of the iceberg.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS Under "Controversies"... destroying documents about accounts, sending money to Iran, and refusing to help find Tax dodgers when they want to do business in the U.S.

To hell with Swiss bank secrecy laws. If they don't want to play by our rules, then they can't play in our ballpark. Without the black banks, most of the corruption could be uncovered. Singapore is the biggest shareholder. I'm surprised that they don't make UBS come clean.

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

Bobo, you've been on this for years and deserve kudos along with those who have supported and contributed. However, the one tiny detail that appears to be missing is ACTION. it would appear to this individual that there was a time period where so many had impunity as they did the usual as they went after the OVERSTOCK and similar. Yet this past two years the attacks have been eye opening. So where are the perp walks? The attacks are so flagrant that what seems to be missing is no one is doing anything.It doesn't take a genious to see what happened to BSC/LEH/MS/WB/WM or what has been happening to a LVS,SNDK, GE, GE is the poster child as OREILLY has been front running negativity for a year. How's he getting away with such? UNTIL someone simply takes one of these, ties the selling to x/y/z and then has the names and faces all over the screens, all that is happening is we are preaching to the choir. We KNOW what is going on. Can we now move forward and put those responsible in JAIL. I've passed information along for YEARS. That's nice but until someone DOES something it's similar to passing along good information to a bad representative. There IS motvivation for some crusader to do something. The nation has just experienced an example of financial terroism and the majority have been and are beign affected. Time for someone who does have the talent to use it as a PATRIOT. Thanks for your efforts.

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

Connsistency at its best!!!

Recs: 7 SEC whipped and flogged again.

All we need now is for them to be cast from the land.



February 23, 2009

Regulator Faces Fresh Scrutiny Over Trading Inquiry at Lehman

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON
The Securities and Exchange Commission, under fire for failing to heed warnings about the Ponzi scheme that was apparently run by Bernard L. Madoff and lasted for decades, is now under scrutiny for its handling of insider-trading accusations involving former executives at Lehman Brothers.

In a letter sent to the commission last Thursday, Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, asked Mary L. Schapiro, the chairwoman of the S.E.C., whether it had followed up on allegations that were brought to its attention last spring involving a unit at Lehman Brothers. Employees in the unit, known as the Product Management Group, appear to have tipped off clients and traders about the content of the firm’s research reports before they were released, a former Lehman analyst said.

The letter does not disclose who might have received the tips, if they were made.

The insider trading allegations, and more than 4,000 e-mail messages relating to them, were presented to Linda Thomsen, the former director of enforcement at the S.E.C. last April by Ted Parmigiani, a former analyst at Lehman who followed the semiconductor industry. According to Mr. Grassley’s letter, Mr. Parmigiani spoke with high-level enforcement officials several times both on the phone and in person. An in-person meeting on April 30, 2008, lasted for six hours, the letter said.

Mr. Parmigiani, who was dismissed by the firm in June 2005 for what it said were performance issues, declined to comment. John Nester, a spokesman for the S.E.C., said he would not discuss whether Ms. Schapiro had responded to Mr. Grassley’s letter or the allegations made by the former analyst. But he said in a statement: “We certainly share the senator’s interest in vigorous enforcement against illegal insider trading.”

Mr. Grassley noted in his letter that his staff had examined the materials given to S.E.C. enforcement lawyers by Mr. Parmigiani and that “there are many documents that raise suspicions of insider trading.” The e-mail messages and other documents appeared to provide “ample detail to assist in launching an investigation,” Mr. Grassley wrote.

But the matter appears to have gone nowhere within the S.E.C, the senator contends. “It is unclear whether the S.E.C. has issued a formal order authorizing the enforcement staff to subpoena records and take sworn testimony,” Mr. Grassley wrote. “In light of the S.E.C.’s failure to follow up on repeated warnings about the Madoff Ponzi scheme, I must inquire as to whether these allegations are being acted upon.”

Mr. Grassley has asked that the S.E.C. brief him privately by the end of this week on any actions it has taken to investigate the analyst’s allegations.

According to the letter, the documents provided by Mr. Parmigiani indicate that officials in Lehman’s Product Management Group routinely received research reports before they were made public. The case also raises questions of whether the content or gist of the reports was disseminated to select traders in advance.

When they are published, Wall Street research reports often cause a stock or sector to rise or fall. The Lehman group was in charge of coordinating and broadcasting calls that disclosed new research reports and changes in coverage or analysts’ opinions.

Tipping off traders to nonpublic information is illegal. And regulatory rules governing securities firms forbid employees who are not directly involved in the compilation of research reports, other than legal or compliance officials, to review them before publication.

One example cited by Mr. Grassley in his letter involved a company called Amkor Technology, a semiconductor concern followed by Mr. Parmigiani. A series of e-mail messages from June 2005 indicated that in the hours after he submitted a bullish report on Amkor to the Product Management Group, but before the report was made public, the company’s stock began actively trading and rose 12 percent.

A second case mentioned in the letter involved an e-mail message from a sales executive indicating that he had advance knowledge of a change in another analyst’s rating on a separate company. The sales executive advised Mr. Parmigiani in the message dated March 2005 that he could not attend a meeting because of a “big ratings change looming.” Later that day, Lehman downgraded Commodity Chemicals, a supplier and exporter of basic chemicals.

The e-mail, Mr. Grassley wrote, seems to demonstrate that this particular executive may have illegally obtained prior knowledge of the Commodity Chemicals downgrade and had acted upon it.

Ms. Thomsen, who received Mr. Parmigiani’s materials and discussed their content with him, left the S.E.C. this month after being criticized for failing to pursue enforcement cases and tips assiduously. Robert Khuzami, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, was appointed to succeed her as director of enforcement last week. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in mid-September, a victim of the credit crisis.

Mr. Grassley has been frustrated by the S.E.C.’s response to insider trading allegations before. In 2006, investigators for Mr. Grassley aggressively pursued accusations made by Gary Aguirre, a former staff lawyer at the S.E.C., that his superiors had thwarted his attempts to investigate possible insider trading at Pequot Capital Management, a major hedge fund, and then fired him when he complained.

The S.E.C.’s investigation into Pequot was closed in 2006 without any actions taken. But a 108-page report issued by the Senate Finance and Judiciary Committees in 2007 found that agency officials had bungled the Pequot investigation by delaying it, by disclosing case information to lawyers for those under scrutiny in the case and other missteps.

The office of the inspector general at the agency also investigated Mr. Aguirre’s allegations. In a report issued last year, it concluded that enforcement officials involved in the matter “conducted themselves in a manner that raised serious questions about the impartiality and fairness of the insider trading investigation.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/business/23hedge.html?_r=1&ref=business

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

http://www.foxbusiness.com/video/index.html?

I think this says it all!

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

bobo - for some reason or other I can't bud's blog to display correctly. Is it on your end or mine ? d

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

If what I am reading is correct madoff did not buy any of the securitys he told his investors he was buying with their money.
For more than ten years he 'desked' every trade through his firm and no one noticed.
What exactly are the authoritys doing to protect investors if this big of a scam did not get noticed?
We can't deposit more then 10 thousand dollars in our own bank accounts without a flag being raised and the government being alerted how could this guy get away with a fraud of millions for ten plus years?
I want to know how and why this did not get noticed by several agencys who are supposed to protect not only the investors but the country as well.
Don't you?

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

Read Bud Burrell's last blog and attach this video to it and watch it before they get rid of it.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1047490447&play=1

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

Bobo.

Why do the banks want to mark down their assets? It is the capitall requirements. Reduce their assets and the capital requirements go down because compliance is based on a percentage. There is no point in marking up assets that are illiquid and force them to raise more capital. If these banks were forced to repatriate the money held in offshore accounts, they would need even more capital.

Look up Cohen who is saying this. This guy has been in the middle of every big banking deal since forever. He is the big negotiator. It isn't the big liabilities that are hidden, its the assets. The billions in individual accounts at UBS are chicken scratch. The banks have to stop dividends to accumulate capital to keep them in compliance when they are forced to repatriate the SPE's they have offshore and start paying taxes on the profits.

Marking all the assets down helps disguise the addition of these accounts to the balance sheet.

Why Spitzer was outed... http://www.jonentine.com/ethical_edge/2004_02_Eliot_Spitzer.htm

"The real fear of the plutocracy is that Spitzer will unleash—or horror of all horrors, politically lead as a future presidential candidate—an assault on the virtually untaxable offshore money pot made possible by slippery auditing and accounting standards.

Spitzer clearly has the financial community sweating bullets. All told, as much as $5 trillion of U.S. corporate assets are sheltered offshore, $3 trillion of which is in foreign bank deposits, much of it in "special purpose entities" (SPEs) and other tax avoidance structures. "If even a relatively small fraction of these SPEs are required to be returned to the balance sheet, the required additional capital will be in the many billions of dollars," says H. Rodgin Cohen, the chairman and president of Sullivan & Cromwell, a noted Wall Street legal firm. We're talking about real money here. It's estimated that the U.S. loses as much as $70 billion every year in revenue to this sort of tax evasion.

Spitzer makes corporate insiders so nervous because, unlike Washington regulators whose response to corporate malfeasance has traditionally been to shrug their collective shoulders (Republicans) or over-regulate (Democrats), he has recognized that the issue is not the law but the will. An economist at ASB Capital Management in Maryland (which has not been charged with any crime) accuses him of launching "a regulatory reign of terror" on the financial services communities.

It's painfully clear that Washington will not try to reign in this corruption. Let's hope Spitzer and the new breed of aggressive state attorney generals that are emulating him have the vision and chutzpah to use the full powers of the law to step in where the American federal government has failed so miserably."

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

bbhindyou.

The SEC turned a blind eye. They didn't even look. How could it be missed? Madoff was a broker. He did zillions of trades... It is like running a flower shop which is a legitimate business and a Ponzi scheme. Flowers come and go, people come and go, but who's counting? The SEC could have turned it over to the FBI and they could have issued supoenas for all the trade data. I would love to see what notes there were attached to Markopolos' contributions. There should have been a sizeable file just from his repeated submissions.

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

If they can do it why can't we? This collapse is intentional..No 2 ways about it..see Deepcaptures' Latest blog!!!


Emerging Asian markets better prepared for the meltdown
3 March 2009 | by Amal Awad

Emerging Asian markets have not needed to ban short-selling during the financial meltdown, as has been the case in the US, UK and Australia, because they were better prepared to deal with the downturn following the Asian crisis.

Speaking in a panel discussion on the “new global financial architecture” at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) summer school in Sydney, Zarinah Anwar, chairman of Malaysia’s Securities Commission, said Asian emerging markets learnt lessons from the Asian crisis, during which short-selling had been banned.

Following the Asian crisis, short-selling was reintroduced to the markets but with heavier regulation, she said, including the imposition of the uptick rule and a ban on naked short-selling.

As a result, Anwar said, these markets were better equipped to deal with the current downturn in the market on the short-selling front and a ban was not necessary.

Anwar also discussed the notion of global regulation, arguing that implementation of global standards was an issue because laws and guidelines at a national level in individual jurisdictions would be impacted. She also noted the varying levels of development among different jurisdictions, asking to what extent jurisdictions can accept and impose standards in markets, “taking into account the level of maturity and sophistication” in those markets.

Anwar was critical of what she termed “regulatory capture”, whereby regulators trying to discharge their roles and responsibilities were being subject to political and institutional influence on decision making.

Regulators have to be more vigilant about influences on regulations, she told the conference, and avoid this kind of capture, particularly from politicians and large institutions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/business/worldbusiness/03biotech.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

There's no question so many have failed to do their jobs. And that faliure has affected a nation and millions within. I read the names mentioned in some of these post and cringe. This has become like some bad movie where there's a few law enforcement officers who were hired to protect/serve and enforce and they stand by and witness 8 thugs overpowering an innocent individual because the thugs want what that person has. Yet those law enforcement officers do NOTHING. They could. It's there job but they do NOTHING. So the question begs why? Well if someone can do something and doesn't do such then one could conclude they INTENTIONALLY didn't do their JOB. And that is where we are. A PLETHORA of individuals NOT doing their jobs. We don't need small examples of the attacks as with Overstock. Heck on can go back to BSC or a LEH or what is being done to GE. Yet all we hear is SILENCE. NO one DOES ANYTHING. MSM including names mentioned here are an embarassment to themselves, their parents and this great nation. Will many be punished? Not as many as should be. However, those who attempt to hide behind excuses are going to learn a hard lesson. For all that ARE doing their jobs, STAY FOCUSSED and stay on TARGET. PUT THE CROOKS IN JAIL and THRU away the keys!

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

Sometimes things are so BLATANT it's embrassing. I'd post this over to deepcapture but the comments aren't working for the latest but somewhere there has to be SOMEONE that DOES their job as we are watching them attempt to DESTROY GE. They did that with BSC and the majority allowed it. NOW don't you think it's about time someone DO SOMETHING. CMON.someone use some stroke and ARREST the crooks.

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

bobo - long but worth the read as it is very accurate.
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http://www.wallstreetwatch.org/soldoutreport.htm
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6 SOLD OUT

Re: The Entire NSS Mess Explained In One Hour - A Primer

Sadly

I read Burell's blog and then I watched the clip provided by Sean.

The spokeswoman didn't act like she made a gaffe. She acted like she was dictating rules and the Connecticut AG kowtowed.

So even though we now have a clear statement as to what that industry doesn't want to give up - I don't see what good it is to us.

Even after the destruction of WS - these assholes don't want us to know who is shorting what and when.

Nothing has changed.