The academy is also going down the tubes.

As for the shortminded zombies, what does it take?

A stake in the heart(I know, hard to find)?
A .357 slug right in the cerebral cortex (I know, hard to find, again).

“Making short-selling potentially costly can reduce market liquidity,” as the market goes down the drain, along with our economic lives….

http://news.goldseek.com/GoldenJackass/1241103600.php

The government should nationalize the dirty brokerages and banks for a year or two, clean them up, then IPO out the new clean entities. The thieves need to be fired, then arrested.

By Liz Capo McCormick

April 30 (Bloomberg) — Just as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke revives credit markets, one of his remedies may reduce trading in Treasuries.

A Fed-endorsed industry recommendation will require traders to pay a three-percentage-point penalty on uncompleted trades, known as fails, starting tomorrow. That may reduce the number of bets on price declines, according to RBS Securities Inc. and Societe Generale SA.

While the new recommendations are meant to curb disruptions caused when traders fail to meet their obligations, some strategists are concerned it may do more harm than good in the $7 trillion-a-day repurchase market, where dealers finance their holdings. A reduction in trading would be a setback for the Fed as it seeks to lower borrowing costs by pumping cash into the banking system and purchasing as much as $1.75 trillion in Treasuries and mortgage securities.

“Making short-selling potentially costly can reduce market liquidity,” said Darrell Duffie, a Stanford University finance professor and member of the New York Fed’s Financial Advisory Roundtable. “Financial markets with relatively unencumbered short-selling perform better.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=auJxnhL3YKQg&refer=home

Repo Failure Remedy Drives Away Short Sellers In Treasuries

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local&id=6782403

Finra Oversees Auction-Rate Arbitrations After Exit (Update1)
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By Darrell Preston

April 29 (Bloomberg) — The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, supervising 344 investor arbitration cases over auction-rate bonds, skirted losses from the securities by selling its holdings months before the market collapsed.

Finra, responsible for educating and protecting investors, owned as much as $862.2 million of the debt before exiting the market in the spring of 2007, less than six months before auctions began to fail, according to spokesman Herb Perone. The Washington-based group is conducting arbitration hearings filed against banks by bondholders stuck in the $176 billion market.

Investors who were sold the securities as money-market alternatives say Finra, a non-profit corporation owned by banks that oversees 5,000 brokerage firms and 659,000 brokers, failed to protect them. The market froze in February 2008 when banks, which had supported the debt for two decades through periodic dealer-run auctions, stopped buying bonds that investors didn’t want as losses from subprime mortgages spread.
Click on link for rest of story.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601213&sid=agMSn6dueL3I&refer=home

http://www.sec.gov/rules/sro/34-47978.htm

It was replaced by an NASD rule that was starting to work in 2004, then the SEC banned that rule and replaced it with SHO.

Adding comic relief to the whole situation, meanwhile, are the naked shorting conspiracy types, most recently the wacko CEO of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne. They’ve put Dendreon on their lengthy list of victims of naked shorting. Forensic Tracy Coenen had a memorable fisking of a recent Byrne blog post the other day.

If the SEC statement that it considers Naked Shorting as illegal were its true position, then…

– WHY does the SEC HIDE the Fails to Deliver for 5.5 months? ( – Why HIDE what is illegal?)
– WHY does the SEC allow the Naked Shorts to HIDE the Fails to Deliver in outside the monitored DTCC system? ( – Why allow criminals to HIDE what is illegal?)

The ACTIONS of the SEC indicate that its true position on Naked Shorting is that it is LEGAL.

http://revolutionarypolitics.com/?p=474

The solution is to get assets in your own name. Pull your share certificate and buy hard assets with your money. Don’t trust the banks and brokerages or the deposit insurance ponzi schemes.

http://revolutionarypolitics.com/?p=474

If the clearing brokerages that net through the CNS also net 98%, then it wouldn’t be unreasonable to wonder if each CNS fail represented 50 x 50 or 2500 real shares.

HIGH PROBABILITY MASSIVE BEAR RAID 12 30 pm central today 28-Apr-09 11:22 am DNDN could easily drop 50 % on a massive bear raid its coming.. today @ 12 30 pm central

Sentiment : Strong Sell
Rating :
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monthaphumchareon

“It cannot be repeated too often: That is just the data coming from one crack in the system, the CNS [continuous net settlement system] bucket at the DTCC, and does not include any fails accumulating at the brokerages, or diverted by pre-netting, or masked by the Stock Borrow Program, or swept into the ex-clearing system, or stemming from offshore failures. So it is the tip of the iceberg (and perhaps, the tip of the tip of the iceberg).”

So it is clear the the Wall Street Counterfeit Machine is allowed by the SEC to HIDE most of its Fails to Deliver, since only the CNS [continuous net settlement system] bucket at the DTCC is reported 5.5 months later.

What is not clear to me is this….
Is there anyway to tell what the TOTAL NUMBER of Fails-to-Deliver in the CNS [continuous net settlement system] bucket at the DTC on any given day 5.5 months ago or longer?

I understanding is that the TOTAL NUMBER for ALL outstanding FTDs is not reported. Is this correct?

If I understand the DNDN chart above correctly, those numbers are totals on individual days, but NOT the total outstanding FTDs. Is this correct?

Posted at 08:33
Tuesday, April 28. 2009

It’s about damn time.

Sources say investigators are digging into whether Joseph Cassano, the former head of London-based AIG Financial Products, and two of his top deputies – Andrew Forster, an executive vice president, and Thomas Athan, a managing director – committed securities fraud and other federal crimes, reports CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian. http://tiny.cc/1lvVa

At issue: whether they intentionally provided false information about the size of AIG’s loses in the mortgage-backed securities market to the public and auditors.

Well that’s a start.

Now go find the “side letters” and start busting people up and down the line, including all their damn counterparties!

And while you’re at it, make sure you include people like Bernanke, Paulson and Geithner in the list of people who get their asses hauled in front of a Grand Jury.

Oh, and if you think these clowns don’t have gall, or actually are a bit sheepish these days? You’d be dead wrong.

And now CBS News has learned that Athan and Forster pocketed bonuses paid out by AIG just two months ago – in the midst of a federal investigation. Sources say they are now negotiating a way to pay them back.

Is there something wrong with a check – or wire transfer?

Nor is the storm letting up. In fact, if anything, when it comes to Lewis its headed for Cat 5 territory:

Both Bernanke and Paulson in mid-December knew Bank of America was obliged by statute to publicly disclose the huge losses Merrill Lynch & Co. had racked up that month. You don’t get to be chairman of the Federal Reserve or, in Paulson’s case, secretary of the Treasury or head of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. without learning this basic tenet of U.S. securities laws. Instead of making sure the public was fully informed of the losses before Bank of America completed its purchase of Merrill on Jan. 1, they did all they could to keep the secret safe.

Neither Bernanke nor Paulson told the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to the letter Cuomo wrote to lawmakers and regulators. They didn’t tell Lewis or anyone else at Bank of America to do the right thing and obey the law. And while they promised Bank of America lots of money to keep it from calling off the deal, they were careful not to commit any of their agreements to writing for fear this would bind the government into disclosing them itself.

It didn’t matter that investors were buying and selling billions of the banks’ shares without a clue that Merrill had lost more than $12 billion during the fourth quarter. Bernanke and Paulson had a singular objective — to get the Merrill deal done, on time — even if that meant duping the stock market and threatening to fire Lewis as chief executive officer, along with the company’s board. http://tiny.cc/KWPUZ

Bingo.

Millions of Americans got bent over the table by men who, it is alleged, actively conspired to knowingly break the law.

That’s exactly what Ken Lewis alleged in his conversations with Attorney General Cuomo; he said there was an explicit conversation related to avoiding a “reportable event” (a letter from the government), meaning that everyone involved knew that under the law this was supposed to be disclosed and put specific effort and intent into hiding it.

It doesn’t stop here either. As I have repeatedly pointed out The Fed is not empowered to buy any sort of financial instrument unless it carries the full faith and credit of the government.

FANNIE AND FREDDIE DO NOT, EVEN TODAY, CARRY THAT GUARANTEE.

The Fed has purchased billions upon billions of dollars in securities from Fannie and Freddie and unless you can show me some section of the law I have missed I see nothing allowing them to do so, nor to take equity in the Bear Stearns and AIG bailouts.

WHY, IN ALL THE TIMES THAT BERNANKE HAS BEEN ON CAPITOL HILL SINCE THIS NONSENSE STARTED, HAS NOT ONE REPRESENTATIVE OR SENATOR ASKED HIM WHERE HE GETS THE LEGAL AUTHORITY TO PURCHASE ASSETS NOT GUARANTEED WITH FULL FAITH AND CREDIT OF THE US GOVERNMENT, WHEN THE VERY STATUTE CITED ON THE FEDERAL RESERVE’S OWN WEB SITE MAKES CLEAR THAT THEY CAN’T BUY ANYTHING THAT LACKS THAT GUARANTEE?

The Italians are getting into the act:

With municipal bond investigations spreading to Europe from the United States, Italian authorities have seized about $300 million in assets of four global banks — JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, UBS and Depfa — whose officials have been accused of fraud.

The Guardia di Finanza in Milan, the financial police of Italy, took over real estate properties, bank accounts and stock holdings on Monday to assure it could collect from the banks if their officials were found guilty and the banks were held responsible. http://tiny.cc/RkEFO

Dozens of state and local governments in the United States have been victimized by these “deals” in the United States as well, yet Italy is the first to bring an actual enforcement action and seize assets? Why?

Lawless behavior by both Wall Street executives and government officials appears to have been pervasive, it is outrageous, and hundreds of billions (if not trillions) of dollars has been stolen from the taxpayer as a direct result.

The people involved appear to have known full well they were doing something wrong at the time as they have made every attempt to hide their actions and refuse to ask the tough questions; if you’re not slithering around with the intent of a viper there is no reason not to act in the light of day!

Those alleged to be involved must be investigated, indicted, tried, and if found guilty imprisoned with their assets subject to fine and forfeiture, no matter who they are.

WHERE ARE ALL THE DAMN COPS?

http://market-ticker.org/archives/992-Now-Were-Cooking!.html

Dendreon announces PROVENGE extended median survival by 4.1 months compared to placebo (25.8 months versus 21.7 months)Font size: A | A | A2:00 PM ET 4/28/09 | Briefing.com
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1:27 PM ET 4/28/09
Symbol Last % Chg
DNDN 11.81 -45.20%
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Co announces its pivotal Phase 3 IMPACT study of PROVENGE in men with advanced prostate cancer met its primary endpoint of significantly improving overall survival compared to placebo. The data were presented at the American Urological Association Annual Meeting. The intent-to-treat analysis demonstrated that: PROVENGE extended median survival by 4.1 months compared to placebo (25.8 months versus 21.7 months); PROVENGE improved 3-year survival by 38% compared to placebo (31.7% versus 23.0%); The IMPACT study achieved a p-value of 0.032, successfully exceeding the pre-specified level of statistical significance defined by the study’s design (p-value less than 0.043), and PROVENGE reduced the risk of death by 22.5% compared to placebo; and PROVENGE exhibited a favorable safety profile consistent with prior trials. Co says “With these data, we will advance through the clearly defined regulatory process with the FDA to seek licensure of PROVENGE to fulfill our mission of serving these critically ill patients who currently have few appealing treatment options.”