My argument, which I have been making publicly since 2005, has been widely misreported. Therefore I am stating it here, in Deep Capture, as nine straightforward claims that will be difficult to misunderstand or misconstrue. I have grouped these claims so as to describe two Perfect Storms that are colliding over Wall Street, and the result, a third, a Mega-Storm, unlike anything in living memory.

 

Chapters 1-3: The First Perfect Storm - The Setting

1. Over the last twenty years Wall Street has come to be dominated by a group of players who first pushed the laws to their limits, then openly flouted them until they became blurred beyond the possibility of enforcement.

2. Over the last fifteen years the standards of professional journalism have been eroded by a group of reporters who have tried to appear as players, but have become pawns. We have reached a point where a significant fraction of the financial press, especially journalists on the hedge fund beat, have become the shills of a handful of hedge funds.

3. The Securities & Exchange Commission, regulator of our nation’s capital markets, has been captured by financial elites to the point that it favors Wall Street over Main Street.

 

Chapters 4-7: The Second Perfect Storm - The Crime and Its Effects

4. A crime is routinely occurring in our capital markets. Small loopholes created to provide “fault tolerance” in our nation’s stock settlement system are being exploited by Wall Street brokerages and their hedge fund clients to steal billions of dollars. This crime has created side-effects for the rest of our economy.

5. One side effect of this crime is that corporate governance in America has been shattered.

6. Another side effect of this crime is that many companies (often innovative tech and biotech companies) have been damaged or destroyed, while the Americans who invested in them were robbed, generally with no awareness on their part beyond the loss of their savings in the stockmarket.

7. A third side effect of this crime is that it has created in our country’s financial system a crack so deep it could trigger a systemic collapse.

 

Chapters 8 and 9: The Mega-Storm

8. The financial media are incapable of bringing a critical mindset to this issue because of their too-cozy relationship with Wall Street (several financial journalists actually seem to be engaged in blue-smoke-and-mirror attempts to obfuscate issues on behalf of the financial elites who turn up wherever this crime is occurring). As a result, the crack in our financial system has reached catastrophic proportions.

9. Within “social media” (blogs, message boards, and wikis) evidence for the preceding points has been pieced together, but there is a campaign to hijack the social media discourse, organized by the same people who are profiting from the crime.

 

To many, the preceding will appear a bald and unconvincing tale, too fantastic for even the loopiest Hollywood thriller. When I first began discussing these claims, the New York Post ran a photo-shopped picture of me with a flying saucer coming out of my head. For two years the profession of financial journalism has demonstrated that in its view there are, in fact, two subjects beyond critical examination: Wall Street, and the profession of financial journalism.

In the chapters of Deep Capture that follow I will examine evidence that has emerged over the last two years and the degree to which it confirms or falsifies these claims.

 

I thank you for the courtesy of your visit and the gift of your attention.

 

Respectfully,

 

Patrick M. Byrne, Ph.D.