Bernard L. Madoff was once the chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He was one of the most important market makers on Wall Street. And he managed what was, by some estimates, the largest hedge fund on the planet.
Yes, Bernard Madoff was an impressive man. That much was clear even before we learned that his $50 billion Ponzi scheme may have been orchestrated in cahoots with the most powerful, sophisticated, and indiscriminately murderous organized crime syndicate the world has ever known.
Charles Gasparino (citing “speculation” from investigators) reported last week on CNBC that the Russian Mafia might have been partners in Madoff’s larcenous fund business. Or perhaps the Mob had an even greater interest in Madoff’s market making operation, as some of our sources have told us in recent weeks.
Either way, there is a certain cachet.
But it wasn’t just pierogies and pistol-packing wiseguys in purple suits. Mr. Madoff was also a dedicated public servant, volunteering countless hours at the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Indeed, Madoff seems to have helped write some of the SEC’s rules. For example, Madoff had a good deal of input an SEC rule that exempted market makers (i.e. Madoff) from various regulations governing short sellers (i.e. Madoff’s friends).
Madoff’s rule ensured that market makers (Madoff) could, among other things, engage in so-called “naked short selling.” To sell “naked” is to sell stock that one does not actually possess. That is “phantom stock,” according to the SEC Chairman and many others.
Sometimes, short sellers (who profit when shares lose value) offload massive amounts of phantom stock to drive down prices, destroy pubic companies, or even crash the market. That is why there used to be restrictions.
Madoff also obtained an exemption allowing market makers to sell short on a down tick, which made it easier for unscrupulous hedge funds to drive down stock prices.
At any rate, I don’t think Madoff had an office at the SEC. He certainly was not employed there. But the SEC was glad to have Madoff write a rule exempting Madoff from the rules. The SEC was so thankful that it named one of its rules after the great man himself.
The rule allowing market markers to sell on the downtick was called, “The Madoff Exception.”
After Madoff helped writet the rule, market makers (e.g., Madoff) proceeded to “rent” their exemptions to hedge funds (i.e. friends-of-Madoff).
It remained against the law for hedge funds to sell phantom stock to manipulate the markets. It was also against the law for market makers to help hedge funds orchestrate such schemes. But under the Madoff regulatory regime, unscrupulous short sellers (i.e. friends-of-Madoff) could engage in this illegal activity so long as they did so with the illegal connivance of a law-breaking market maker (i.e. Madoff).
A few months ago, this naked short selling was implicated–by numerous academics, the U.S. Chamber of Chamber of Commerce, the Secretary of the Treasury, the CEOs of Wall Street’s biggest banks, respected law firms, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and numerous congressmen – in the near total collapse of the American financial system.
The SEC has not prosecuted anybody for this. After all, there is an “exception.”
It is unclear whether the SEC will continue to name this “exception” after a man who might have absconded with 50 billion dollars (a sum that exceeds the gross domestic product of Pakistan) in league with the Russian Mob, an organization that is said to be in the market for a nuclear bomb – in addition to narcotics, sex slaves and, yes, phantom stock.
In any case, the major news organizations seem to have lost interest.
* * * * * * * *
Mark Mitchell is a reporter for DeepCapture.com. He previously worked as an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal in Europe, chief business correspondent for Time magazine in Asia, and as an assistant managing editor responsible for the Columbia Journalism Review’s online critique of business journalism. He holds an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
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IS THIS ALL ABOUT “CONVENIENCE”
Would it be “inconvenient” for the DTCC and the SEC to FORCE via mandated buy-ins these crooks to deploy the investors’ funds they stole back into the market to purchase and then finally deliver that which they sold even though it is now well past T+3? Is there something wrong with the concept of “better late than never”?
What would be the “inconvenience” experienced by the DTCC management or an SEC Commissioner or staff member that chooses to effect the only solution possible when the seller of shares absolutely refuses to deliver that which it sold i.e. forcibly buy-in the debt? Might any SEC Commissioner or staff member that stood up lose his shot at a much higher paying job on Wall Street after his stint with the SEC? Would it be more “convenient” for an SEC commissioner or staff member to just not “rock the boat” and let his successors do the right thing? Might a member of the DTCC or NSCC management that stood up and did the right thing risk incurring the wrath of the “participants” that that own the DTCC and that employ him?
How about the members of the congressional committees that oversee the SEC? Why do they refuse to pull the trigger on the only solution available? Do they think that people on Wall Street and at hedge funds “forget” to deliver that which they sell? You’ve noted the existence of a crime. The buy-in process will with 100% accuracy identify the perpetrators of the fraud and find and return the stolen money to the victims. What am I missing here? I just don’t get it!
Will there be a more “convenient” time later when the number of bogus “securities entitlements” hiding in the share structures of victimized corporations is ten times as large as it is now? Do the “systemic risk” or homeland security aspects of this crime wave concern you SROs and regulators at all? Help me out here, I just don’t get it! Is this really all about “convenience”?
Question.. It’s been reported that Madoff’s firm apparently HAD NOT TRADING FLOOR!!
Despite this, I know I saw his mmkr symbol active for a couple of days on level II for ABK (Ambac) back in Oct/November time frame. I looked it up because I was unfamiliar with the symbol.
So if he wasn’t trading, how could he have been a mmkr?
Secondly, if his niece, who’s married to the SEC official, was his firm’s compliance officer, she should be aware of whether the firm was trading or not. And if it wasn’t trading, why hasn’t she been arrested and jailed?
Hawk
The DTCC can be contacted toll free for questions regarding Clearance & Settlement here: 1.888.382.2721 (option 2)
There is not an email option that I could find:
http://www.dtcc.com/contact/cs/
On a side note, I read the document about BTIC submitted by Sean, and then looked up the company… and it is an absolutely fascinating and rediculously blatant example of criminal activity orchestrated to profiteer at the expense of bankrupting an individual company.
I sometimes feel as though those of us here are like soldiers huddled together in a foxhole, facing an overwhelming and entrenched foe with unlimited resources and manpower.
While every single one of us would love to jump up and charge the line with guns blazing; the reality is it would most likely cost you your life (not just in this analogy, but in the real world as well!).
I am mad as hell over these issues/events that I’ve taken the time to become educated about; but it seems that the more I learn about it, the more I find that is an incredibly widespread and systemic problem. The corruption is so deep and pervasive that as an individual I think there is REAL RISK to being a “squeaky wheel” and formally registering complaints with my name attached.
What are we to do?
Maybe when dealing with cretins and miscreants of the magnitude we are discussing here it is just simply ineffective and probably even dangerous to try effecting change through the traditional channels; channels which are corrupted and controlled by the very same self-perpetuating plutocracy we endeavor to replace.
In such situations guerilla tactics may be more appropriate.
Hawkmoon,
Some trades were going through Madoff’s brokerage, however, none of the trades going through were not his victims money via his fund. So in essence, he never made a trade of his funds through his own brokerage or any other brokerage for that matter is my underatanding. I hope this clears it up.
R101
Hawkmoon,
Let me clear up my post from the typo’s. Madoff never traded any funds of his victims through his own brokerage or any other brokerage for that matter. There were trades through his brokerage, just not his own investment funds that reaped him billions.
R101
Is it happening yet or they all still caught in the headlights?
Congrats on the Blog Prize.
Nurse Taylor
These corrupt pieces of chit keep spending our money and thumbing their noses up at us…here is our tax dollars at work and our corrupt officials just sit there doing nothing because they can, and we won’t.
http://kxmc.com/getArticle.asp?ArticleId=324557
And what does our new LEADER for the future say about this? Same thing our leader before him did I’ll bet….
NOTHING….Friggin’ NOTHING !
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/26/citi-jet-purchase-50-mill_n_160807.html
The SEC website is full of meetings with the Madoff’s, letters from them, etc.
Skip by the current stuff on the scandal and you find some real nuggets in a google search.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Asec.gov+madoff
The Madoffs also volunteered at the DTCC, FINRA, NASD, etc.
The original concept of the rule was that his computers couldn’t fill a buy order in 1/100th of a second without the ability to naked short and buy back in a second or two. Funny how quickly seconds can turn into years.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/taxonomy/term/73
It would seem that people have finally had enough!! Here not “Where” is the outrage tat we have been looking for!!!
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1014363796&play=1
STUDYING THE COMMONALITIES BETWEEN THE VICTIMS OF MADOFF AND THOSE OF ABUSIVE NAKED SHORT SELLING (ANSS) FRAUDS
I am not doing any of the forensic work on the Madoff case so I am speaking as an outsider looking in. At the end of the day I believe this case will reveal a lot of the puzzle pieces that unconflicted SROs and unconflicted staff members and commissioners of the SEC can utilize to further their efforts towards providing “investor protection and market integrity” IF THEY ARE SO INCLINED.
The question I raise is what is held in common between the victims of the Madoff (alleged) fraud and the victims of naked short selling abuses. The answer I come up with is that both sets of victims got duped by month end brokerage statements that were then and are now very misleading. One could easily make the case that they have been made INTENTIONALLY misleading in both cases.
Both Bernie and Peter Madoff have attained a working knowledge of how our DTCC-administered clearance and settlement system works beyond compare. During the “comment period” for the proposed Reg SHO they filed a brilliant paper making their case for why market maker (MMs) should be gifted with special exemptions from the tenets of the proposed Reg SHO. They won their case and the exemption package became known as the “Madoff exception”.
In this paper they cited the now famous “Manning interpretation” as well as many of the aspects of the SEC’s and NASD’s “OHRs” or “Order Handling Rules”. They illustrated how when a buy order enters their brokerage side of the business they are willing to naked short sell into it within 1/100th of a second. They bragged of how they could “guarantee” that a client of theirs would get a “fill” on their order under various circumstances.
On the abusive naked short selling side of matters there is a small corporation with the symbol “BCTI” that has what appears at first glance to be credible evidence that at least 350 million naked short sold shares exist in their share structure with only 4.7 million shares legally “outstanding”. Their dealings with the DTCC are now famous to most pro-market reform advocates.
The investors in the $50 billion apparent “Ponzi” scheme run by Madoff led to believe that they were earning a healthy return of about 12% per annum and the purchasers of the naked short sold 350 million “shares/securities entitlements” led to believe that their brokerage firms were “holding long” these “securities were obviously hoodwinked by the monthly brokerage statements they were receiving. In the Madoff case it appears to have been grossly blatant but in the naked short selling case it was very cleverly concocted.
On a monthly brokerage statement the purchases made by an unknowing investor are referred to as “securities held long”. The first question that arises is are the mere “securities entitlements” resulting from the “failures to deliver” (FTDs) of those buying naked short sold shares actually “securities” because in reality in the “BCTI” case they could be more properly referred to as “evidences of fraud”. Unfortunately for investors much less financially sophisticated than the Madoffs of the world one definition of a “security” is an “evidence of indebtedness” which might indeed fit the bill for these “IOUs” we refer to as “securities entitlements”. Let’s put this into the “technically true but possibly misrepresentative” category.
The next question is are these incredibly damaging “securities entitlements” being “held long” by somebody and if so where are they being “held long”. One way to rephrase this question is can it be possible to “hold long” a “security” that doesn’t have a paper-certificated security in existence to justify its existence. Apparently in DTCC lingo “holding long” can be accomplished by issuing electronic book entry representations of failed delivery obligations with no paper-certificated representation whatsoever.
Thus “holding” might be representative of electrons flying through cyberspace as opposed to anything to do with being “held” in a vault somewhere as might be implied. Perhaps a less misrepresentative phraseology might be considered but then investors might start asking questions like what exactly did I get for my money. If they learned it was just a readily sellable and nonvoting “securities entitlement” that actually did damage to the prognosis for the investment made then the next question would obviously be then why did I pay the full retail price of a legitimate “share” with voting and other rights. A “securities entitlement” initially is basically an “accounting measure” denoting a failed delivery obligation. The original “contract” stated that I’ll deliver that which I’m selling by T+3 or “settlement date”.
Due to the existence of valid reasons for slight delays in making delivery an allowance had to be made for slightly delayed deliveries. After a certain period of time, however, these readily sellable “securities entitlements” become evidentiary of a fraud. This timeframe would correlate with when it becomes perfectly obvious that the seller had no intention whatsoever to deliver that which he sold under any supposed timeframe. Perhaps after 4 or 5 days past the previously agreed upon “settlement date” or “T+3” the entry on the brokerage statement should be converted to “incredibly damaging evidences of fraud flying through cyberspace that I got hoodwinked into paying too much for”.
Maybe the Madoff as well as the abusive naked short sellers’ “leg up” on their victims is the knowledge that investors never question the veracity of monthly brokerage statements with all of those official looking government logos and guarantees embossed.
The correct symbol above is “BCIT” not “BCTI”.
Two Sets of Books?
Dr. Jim DeCosta,
In the case of BCIT, it seems to be that there are two sets of books.
One set of books is kept by the corporation BCIT and the other by DTCC.
BCIT’s books show how many shares have been officially and legally issued, and DTCC’s books can show us how many shares of BCIT have been sold.
When it comes to brokerage statements that us common people receive monthly, there seems to be something similar once again to the existence of two sets of books.
Our brokerage statements say we hold stocks xyz long, yet it is very possible that the DTCC has a second set of books that show xyz shares are merely an electronic marker, a “securities entitlements” that has NOT been delivered, and does NOT exist in the corporation’s books of legally issued shares.
Because the DTCC hides its second set of books showing how many shares of stock for each corporation have been SOLD, corporations are being lied to and we the common people are being lied to.
The whole system is corrupted, and the SEC has become the protector of the this corrupt system.
Just like the SEC,,,They always blame money or staff for what is their obvious protection of the crooks rather than regulation of…as if they were actually doing something.
R101
SEC Lacks Resources to Chase Tips, ‘Pursue Smoke,’ Thomsen Says
By Jesse Westbrook and David Scheer
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aFMSfS1k5IZs&refer=home#
Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) — A top U.S. securities regulator, facing congressional ire for failing to detect Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme, said federal investigators lack resources to pursue all leads.
“We use virtually all our resources to pursue fires,” the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement chief, Linda Thomsen, said in draft testimony obtained by Bloomberg for a Senate Banking Committee hearing today. “Additional resources would give us the capacity to pursue smoke before it becomes a fire.”
U.S. lawmakers will publicly grill securities watchdogs today for the first time since Madoff’s Dec. 11 arrest. The proceeding may shed light on the SEC’s fate, as lawmakers debate whether its investigators are overtaxed or ineffectual. Days after the arrest, then-SEC Chairman Christopher Cox faulted the agency’s staff for failing to act on “credible and specific allegations” about Madoff for at least a decade.
“I don’t know whether there will ever be enough resources until the SEC begins to act smarter,” said Peter Wallison, a former Treasury Department general counsel who is now a senior fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute. The group advocates limited financial regulation.
“There can’t be an excuse that they didn’t have enough people to look into something as precise as the allegations that were made against Madoff,” he said. “We hear this from the SEC every time they fail.”
SEC spokesman John Nester declined to comment on the draft remarks by the regulator’s staff. The testimony was subject to revision. Thomsen, 54, declined to comment on the draft.
Witnesses
Other witnesses include Lori Richards, who heads the SEC’s office inspecting brokerages and investment advisers, and Stephen Luparello, interim chief executive officer of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, an industry self-regulator that examined the Madoff brokerage business. Cox stepped down Jan. 20 and the Senate has confirmed his replacement, Mary Schapiro.
In her draft testimony, Thomsen said SEC investigators receive hundreds of thousands of tips every year, and the enforcement division’s 1,000 employees use “triage” to pursue the most promising leads. The staff opened an investigation of Madoff’s investment-advisory business in 2006 and closed the probe two years later without filing a claim.
In his statement last month, Cox said Madoff kept several sets of books and provided misinformation to regulators. The money-management business was audited by Friehling & Horowitz, a three-person firm in New City, New York.
Suggesting an Overhaul
To better detect misconduct, the U.S. should consider overhauling “balkanized” oversight of brokerages and investment advisers, Thomsen said. It should also consider forcing investment advisers to assign custody of customer assets to third parties, and requiring that auditing firms are large enough to oversee money-management clients.
The SEC’s inspections unit never examined Madoff’s money- management business after it registered with the regulator in September 2006. It did inspect his brokerage operations in 1999, 2004 and 2005.
Senate Banking Committee members Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Richard Shelby, a Alabama Republican, want to provide $110 million in federal money to boost the investigative staffs at the SEC, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department. Legislation proposed by the lawmakers Jan. 22 would allow the SEC to hire 100 new employees in its enforcement division.
Congress
Congress already doubled the SEC budget this decade by approving the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002. The law, a response to accounting scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc., allowed the SEC to hire more enforcement attorneys, examiners and accountants. The SEC currently has an annual budget of about $900 million and about 3,500 full-time employees.
On Jan. 5, as the House subcommittee overseeing capital markets heard from one of Madoff’s alleged victims, panel members including Texas Republican Ron Paul said the SEC’s performance shows it should be scaled back or eliminated.
Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, and Shelby, the panel’s top Republican, have asked the SEC for all complaints it received about Madoff, reports on its investigations and internal agency e-mails that mentioned his firm. The lawmakers are also scrutinizing Finra.
To contact the reporter on this story: Jesse Westbrook in Washington at jwestbrook1@bloomberg.net; David Scheer in New York at dscheer@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: January 27, 2009 00:00 EST
Look at how many times Madoff contributed to Charles Schumer:
http://www.newsmeat.com/fec/bystate_detail.php?last=Madoff&first=Bernard
Now look at Charles Shumer’s statements today regarding the hearing on the Madoff Case: I guess he forgot all about those contributions Madoff made to him? The question is, what did Madoff get in return?
10:27 a.m. | Elephant in the room: Senator Charles E. Schumer calls the fraud “a punch in the gut” to the financial system and castigates the S.E.C. for its failure to uncover the scheme. He likens the actions to a giant elephant standing in a small room next to the S.E.C. for decades and “not only did they not see the elephant, they didn’t even smell the peanuts on his breath,” Mr. Schumer says.
http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/live-blogging-the-senates-madoff-hearing/?ref=business
R101
I stand up,
It gets a little more complex than that and the more complex it gets the easier it is to obfuscate the fraud. Let’s say a failure to deliver of 1 million shares of “Acme” occurs at the NSCC. The NSCC reaches into the “Automated Stock Borrow Program” (SBP) “lending pool” of securities and they grab 1 million shares of “Acme” and electronically transfer it to the “participants share account” of the buying party broker “B”. The FTD is “cured”.
They then debit the 1 million shares from the “participant shares account” of the loaner broker “L” that “donated” the shares into the lending pool at the SBP. They then credit broker L’s cash account with the cash value of the 1 million shares. He makes out nice because he just converted an electronic book entry gathering dust into cash that counts towards his net capital reserves and earns interest. Now you can see why everybody wants to donate their client’s shares into the SBP.
So “L” loses 1 million shares in his share account but gains the cash equivalent in his cash account. OK, so far so good. Since “L” can theoretically at any time can call back in that loan from the selling firm the NSCC deems it proper to credit “L” with a “long position” in a special NSCC “C” sub account. Thus a “long” position is created out of thin air and a “long” position at the NSCC now becomes equivalent to a mere “right to demand loaned shares back”. The “long position” awarded to the buying firm “B” represented real shares with a paper certificate in existence in a DTC vault. So all “long positions” are not alike at the NSCC.
The loaning broker “L” will never voluntarily call in that loan because he’d rather have the cash equivalent of those shares to make interest off of. So now a “long position” at the NSCC becomes “the right to demand back loaned shares which will never get voluntarily exercised” or maybe it represents a real share of Acme. We’re not allowed to learn which it is on any particular investor’s month end statement. Both will be represented on Acme’s shareholders’ monthly brokerage statements as “securities held long”, however. You can sense the bogus nature of “C” sub account “long positions” as an Acme shareholder would never in their wildest dreams that they paid full retail value for one of these.
If Acme used to have 100 million shares at the NSCC being held in “street name” they now have 101 million there but an investor or a corporation can never learn what is held in the “C” sub accounts pertaining to Acme so when asked they’ll say that there are 100 million shares held in “street name”. Apparently it’s none of our business because it’s a debt between 2 parties that deserves secrecy and it might reveal some “proprietary trading methodologies” of a hedge fund or market maker.
Above and beyond these shenanigans and of much greater importance is what goes on in “ex-clearing arrangements”. That term “arrangements” even sounds crooked. The NSCC does not know nor do they want to know about the massive amounts of FTDs housed there. It’s “none of their business” they say yet as an SRO or self-regulatory organization they are mandated to monitor the “business conduct of its participants” wherever it is being “conducted”. The SEC tells us that the SROs are the first line of defense against abusive naked short selling frauds. Yeah right, hand me my blindfold so I can stand guard on behalf of the investing public.
When you take into account all of the hiding places for FTDs on Wall Street you can see why the SEC admitted that the number of FTDs and the “securities entitlements’ they have procreated is too large to address with buy-ins lest there be issues with “market volatility”. That’s Latin for “short squeezes”. Yet to this day the DTCC insists that 99% of all trades “settle” on time and that the majority of the other 1% “settle” within 5 days. Yeah, that’s why BCIT has 4.7 million real “shares” outstanding and 350 million “securities entitlements” poisoning their share structure.
I stand up,
You can see the bogus nature of these “long positions” generated by the NSCC’s SBP. Now you have to keep in mind that after the buying broker “B” receives the electronic transmission of the shares donated to the SBP by “L” he is allowed by NSCC policies to place the same parcel of shares used to “cure” the FTD to place them right back into the same lending pool from whence they just came as if they never left in the first place. It’s a self-replenishing counterfeiting machine.
Not only can a certain parcel of shares generate these bogus “long positions” but any particular parcel of shares can generate dozens of them if they keep getting selected time after time to “cure” different delivery failures. But wait it gets even worse. Theoretically only shares held in margin accounts wherein the owner has signed a margin agreement to allow the “hypothecation” (loaning) of their shares but the NSCC refuses to monitor for the types of shares that are being “donated” into their SBP despite the huge financial temptation to cheat and put any old shares into these lending pools whether they be qualified retirement plan shares of type 1 cash account shares. Instead the NSCC puts all of their participants on the “honor system” in this regard. Once again this theoretical “first line of defense” against ANSS frauds says pass me the blindfold so that I can monitor my participant’s “business conduct”.
To top off all of this the SEC that had to approve of the SBP before it went into effect to this day refuses to make the NSCC change despite what it has morphed into over the years. When we’ve asked the NSCC to get rid of its corrupt counterfeiting nature they have four comments. Firstly, they can’t change it because the system is “automated”. Secondly, they say that they can’t change it because they have no “discretion” in the matter (even though they designed it and administer it). Thirdly, they remind us that the SEC signed off on it a couple of decades ago. Fourthly, they say that if anything were wrong with it then the SEC would make us shut it down and they haven’t told us to so we won’t. Hopefully the first job on Mary Schapiro’s task list is to get rid of that and many other counterfeiting programs. Keep in mind that for every single bogus “long position” they park in their “C” sub accounts since they procreate readily sellable “securities entitlements” that’s that many more “securities” they can buy and sell and earn commissions and fees off of.
Dr. Jim DeCosta,
We need a pictorial illustration of this COUNTERFEIT MACHINE you just described to educate Congress and the public!!!
Do you have the ability to this or have someone that can do this for you?
This illustration should entitled:
WALL STREET’S COUNTERFEIT MACHINE
BY ANY OTHER NAME, THIS IS DISRESPECT AND ABUSE, OF TAXPAYERS AND SHAREHOLDERS
–
http://pacificgatepost.blogspot.com/2009/01/disrespecting-taxpayers-shareholders.html
–
The White House and Congress continue with misguided policies, and sloppy distribution of taxpayer money.
Is anyone detecting any creativity coming out of the new administration?
Any at all? Maybe a new approach to taxes, to oversight, to attaching contracts to bailout money bags, to …. anything? Anything at all?
Every member of Congress who took money from Madoff should be forced to return it to the investors who lost all this money. They want a claw back – start by clawing back all the campaign contributions into these members of congress.
Dr. DeCosta, I’m afraid I did not make my major point clear. Okay, the “heat-seeking” missile targets those most responsible, but what happens when those perps cannot make good. I.e., the massive buy-ins push prices of affected stocks higher, but those who drove them down have long ago disgorged their profits. The owners of DTCC are currently on life support from the TARP, courtesy of their co-perpetrator Henry Paulson, and now, perhaps, his acolyte Mr. Geithner. We all know we cannot size this scam, but it could be so big as to overwhelm those who would be forced to pay. What then?
I note that this site has been vandalized. My previous response was a follow up to an exchange between DeCosta and myself. Those posts and a number of others disappeared while I was composing my previous post and those links to spammer’s sites just preceding appeared. Hope this can be recovered…
I think the site has been hijacked….
The capitalistic system is only effective when greed is not part of the equation. Business schools do not preach that greed is bad. Perhaps we should look more at the root, than the flower. When will universities be held accountable?