steve dekorte

2012 05 16

Goldman's Mass Illegal Naked Short Selling

If this sounds complicated, just focus on this: naked short selling, in essence, is selling stock you do not have. If you don't have to actually locate and borrow stock before you short it, you're creating an artificial supply of stock shares.

In this case, that resulted in absurdities like the following disclosure in this document, in which a Goldman executive admits in a 2006 email that just a little bit too much trading in Overstock was going on: "Two months ago 107% of the floating was short!"

In other words, 107% of all Overstock shares available for trade were short - a physical impossibility, unless someone was somehow creating artificial supply in the stock...

How they did this is ingenious, elaborate, and complex, and we'll get into it more at a later date. In the meantime, this document all by itself shows numerous executives from companies like Goldman Sachs Execution and Clearing (GSEC) and Merrill Pro talking about a conscious strategy of "failing" trades - in other words, not bothering to locate, borrow, and deliver stock within the time alotted for legal settlement.

Link

Most people would call selling what you don't own fraud (e.g. the canonical Brooklyn Bridge salesman). Add this to front running and it's other crimes and one wonders if the company's continued existence has anything to do with it's former employees being in most of the government's top financial regulation positions. If so, is our government effectively being run by criminal organizations?

2012 05 16 The Interminable Equation
But there are still those dreams which are waiting for others to come along whose terms and conditions will cancel them out. These are the leftover dreams, our dark days, which have yet to fall victim to mathematics, and they are the only ones that count for anything. And it is the same with our waking days. Only a few of those escape nullification by contradiction, that process of cancellation which is going on all the time.
In any case, neither dreams nor days ever survive long before their counterparts annihilate them. It is quite possible that, in our last moments, there will be nothing left which we might look back on as a lifetime.
But will this nothingness itself endure, or will it too be canceled out by some inviolable and unsuspected form of being, terminating at last in a kind of double oblivion?
- Thomas Ligotti

2012 05 14 Quote of the Day
‎"If we are searching for an aggressive nuclear regime, determined to wage war despite standards of constitutional restraint, democratic principles, and international law, we have two possible candidates that fit the bill. Iran is not one of them."
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2012 05 07 Individualism
This is the fundamental fact on which the whole philosophy of individualism is based. It does not assume, as is often asserted, that man is egoistic or selfish or ought to be.
It merely starts from the indisputable fact that the limits of our powers of imagination make it impossible to include in our scale of values more than a sector of the needs of the whole society, and that, since, strictly speaking, scales of value can exist only in individual minds, nothing but partial scales of values exist - scales which are inevitably different and often inconsistent with each other. It is this recognition of the individual as the ultimate judge of his ends, the belief that as far as possible his own views ought to govern his actions, that forms the essence of the individualist position.
- Friedrich Hayek, The Road To Serfdom

2012 05 07 Jefferson on Debt
We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt... If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds... [we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers...
And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for [another ]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.
- Thomas Jefferson

2012 05 03 Quote of the Day
The problem is if Obama wins he'll bail out banksters & drop bombs but if Romney wins he'll bail out banksters & drop bombs.
- Garikai Chengu

2012 04 30 Glycine
Dietary glycine supplementation mimics lifespan extension by dietary methionine restriction in Fisher 344 rats.
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