Things become all the more weird when you consider that regulators and law enforcement do almost nothing to stop naked short selling, even though a growing number of prominent people – everyone from U.S. Senators to George Soros – insist that criminal naked short sellers helped take down Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and the American financial system. Then there’s the weird fact that anybody who tries to shed light on this weird state of affairs is quickly subjected to smear campaigns that are…weird.

Anyway, message to Matt Taibbi: Welcome to our world.

Taibbi, as many people know, is the star reporter who published a major expose about naked short selling in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine. In addition, he has published a few blogs providing more evidence to support his claim that illegal naked short selling is a big deal and it’s pretty “hilarious,” as he puts it, that the government hasn’t prosecuted the people who might have helped crash the financial system.

In one of his blogs (which you can read here), Taibbi posts a video that seems to show a day trader conducting a short sale of stock in an unnamed big bank through a brokerage called Penson Financial. The SEC says that short sellers have to have “reasonable grounds” that they can locate actual stock to deliver to their buyers. As Taibbi rightly points out, this is a “very  funny piece of regulatory policy – asking greedy ass financial companies to determine what to them is a ‘reasonable’ effort to follow the rules. “

At any rate, if you believe what you see in Taibbi’s video, Penson Financial gave that day trader a phony “locate” on quite a few of the unnamed big bank’s shares. In fact, the video seems to show Penson Financial confirming that it had “located” many billions of the unnamed big bank’s shares – altogether, five times as many shares as were then in circulation. In other words, it seems that if this trader had had the inclination and the funds, Penson would have accepted a massive naked short sale, helping the trader flood the market with billions upon billions of shares that simply did not exist.

This is rather important, because Deep Capture has reviewed evidence showing that little Penson Financial and one other relatively unknown firm were by far the biggest traders in financial stocks in the first nine months of last year, handling more than 80 percent of volume. To repeat, Penson Financial, a little firm in Dallas, Texas, and one other relatively small firm handled by far the biggest volume of trading in the stock of all those big banks that collapsed last year, leading to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. When it came to clearing trades in financial stocks, Penson was bigger than Goldman, bigger than Merrill, bigger than every major brokerage on Wall Street.

We do not know for certain that the trading through Penson was naked short selling. We know only that naked short selling accounted for much of the overall trading last fall in companies like Lehman Brothers. And we know that a preponderance of the overall trading went through Penson. Perhaps Penson carefully weeded out the naked short sellers, in which case it handled almost all of the trading in financial stocks except for naked short selling. But if Taibbi’s video is any indication, Penson was certainly willing to locate stock that did not exist.

If I have anything to add to Taibbi’s terrific reporting, it is this: Penson Financial’s vice president in charge of stock clearing (that is, the head of the division that appears to have located stock that did not exist) is a man named Christopher Sandel. From 1985 to 1995, Sandel was a top executive at Adler Coleman, best known for being the clearing firm to the Genovese Mafia family.

Adler Coleman famously went bust when its top customer, the Genovese-controlled brokerage Hanover Sterling, self-imploded in one of the greatest naked short selling scandals of all time. Several traders tied to the Gambino crime family were charged with naked short selling companies that were underwritten by Hanover. That the Genovese Mafia brokers at Hanover were not charged in this case seems odd, because the most likely scenario is that the Genovese underwrote hapless companies, pumped their stock prices, and then called in the Gambinos to vaporize the companies, with everybody profiting on the way down.

Anyway, when some of America’s biggest financial companies collapsed under a barrage of short selling last fall, an enormous chunk of that trading was being cleared by a fellow who used to work for a company that seemed to specialize in clearing trades for the Mafia. Should this concern us? Might the Mafia have played some role in the collapse of the financial system? If I were more heavily armed, I would venture an opinion.

Now, of course, there is a concerted effort to portray Taibbi as a sucker, and his video as a fake. One blogger who has suggested as much is Gary Weiss, a former BusinessWeek reporter. As we have documented elsewhere on Deep Capture, Gary Weiss is a corrupt pseudo-journalist whose sources have included naked short sellers with ties to the Mob. Among Gary’s favorite sources were John Fiero (fined $1 million in Hanover Sterling scandal), Anthony Elgindy (currently serving an 11 year prison sentence for short selling crimes and alleged to have had his finger sawed off by Russian mafiosi who were concerned that he would become a government informer), and Manuel Asensio (who once worked for a Mafia-controlled brokerage called First Hanover).

Weiss has reported extensively on the Mafia’s infiltration of Wall Street, but he has, for years, insisted that only conspiracy theorists believe naked short selling is problem. He wrote a great deal about Hanover Sterling, but not once did he mention that naked short selling was central to that case. In his book, “The Mob on Wall Street,” Weiss told the story of a Genovese Mafia broker, and mentioned that this Mafia broker claimed to clear his trades through none other than…Penson Financial.

But, of course, Gary insisted that the Mafia broker must have been lying, because Penson is a “legitimate firm.”

Meanwhile, a blog called ClusterStock has also suggested that Taibbi’s video is a “hoax.” Taibbi has written a fine rebuttal to that claim (which you can read here), so I have nothing to add, except that ClusterStock was founded by Henry Blodget, who was famously charged with securities fraud in 2002, and by the former co-owners of DoubleClick, a company that was once defrauded by the Colombo Mafia family. DoubleClick was never charged with any crimes, as it was, alas, the victim.  Such is the sad fate of many firms that  have business dealings with the Mafia (of course, this fate may be avoided by adhering to a simple dictum: “Avoid having dealings with the Mafia”).

I tell you this not because I think there is some kind of conspiracy, but  merely because I am fascinated by the always colorful biographies of people who attack those who seek to expose the crime of naked short selling. Blodget is, by all accounts, a reformed criminal, and I’m sure the other people at ClusterStock  are law-abiding people. Gary Weiss would be perfectly innocent, too — except that he’s an out-and-out fraud.

Recently, Deep Capture reporter Judd Bagley revealed that Weiss was the anonymous author of a blog on the popular website Daily Kos. This blog, of course, denied that naked short selling is a crime, while smearing those who said otherwise. To support its smears, the blog, written by the anonymous Gary Weiss, referred readers to another blog, written by none other than Gary Weiss.  Indeed, Gary Weiss has had a great many phony on-line aliases, and all of these Gary Weiss aliases proclaim that Gary Weiss is right and great.

In a variation of this on-line chicanery, ClusterStock’s writers littered the comments section of Taibbi’s blog with allegations that his video was a “hoax.” To support these allegations, the ClusterStock writers provided links to another blog…ClusterStock. Presumably, Gary Weiss will also provide links to ClusterStock. Oh wait, he already did that.

Meanwhile, Penson Financial, has written a letter to the SEC, suggesting that Taibbi’s video was (what else?)…”a hoax.”  In the letter, Penson Financial, which was fined in 2006 for naked short selling, promises that it does not engage in naked short selling.

The SEC no doubt believes this.

Taibbi writes:

“On Tuesday, March 11^th, 2008, somebody – nobody knows who – made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half of their value in nine days or less. It was madness – “like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets,” according to one financial analyst.”

Bear’s stock would have to drop by more than half in a matter of days for the mystery figure to make a profit. And that is what happened.

As Taibbi explains, “the very next day, March 12, Bear went into a free fall…Whoever bought those options on March 11^th woke up on the morning of March 17^th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or…Or what?”

Taibbi speculates (as has Deep Capture) that these options might have been purchased by somebody who was abusing the options market maker exemption to engage in illegal naked short selling. And Taibbi goes beyond speculation to state, as an obvious fact, that illegal naked short selling helped bring Bear Stearns to its knees.

Presumably operating under that assumption, the SEC issued more than 50 subpoenas to Wall Street firms in the wake of Bear’s collapse, but “it has yet to indentify the mysterious trader who somehow seemed to know in advance that one of the five largest investment banks in America was going to completely tank in matter of days.”

Taibbi continues: “The SEC’s halfhearted oversight didn’t go unnoticed by the market. Six months after Bear was eaten by predators, virtually the same scenario repeated itself in the case of Lehman Brothers – another top-five investment bank that in September 2008 was vaporized in an obvious case of [naked short sellers engaging in] market manipulation. From there, the financial crisis was on, and the global economy went into full-blow crater mode.”

Taibbi notes that there were many other factors that made the economy weak. But he says that naked short selling is what pushed Bear and Lehman over the edge. If it weren’t for naked short selling – a massive “counterfeiting scheme,” in Taibbi’s words — those banks would likely have survived, and we might have avoided an all-out financial catastrophe.

This cannot be stressed enough. Criminals deliberately destroyed two of America’s biggest investment banks, precipitating the greatest financial cataclysm since the Great Depression. And the government has done absolutely nothing to bring those criminals to justice. In fact, as Taibbi makes clear in his story and on his blog, the most likely culprits are feted by top government officials in closed door meetings.

I’d call this the biggest financial and political scandal in the history of this country.

Certainly, it is, as Taibbi writes, “one of the most blatant cases of stock manipulation in Wall Street history.” Certainly, it is, as Taibbi writes, “the two biggest murders in Wall Street history.” And, certainly, it is odd that this very big story has appeared in Rolling Stone, but has yet to be covered by a single mainstream news publication.

The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, BusinessWeek – they have all known about naked short selling since Deep Capture reporter Patrick Byrne began hollering about it in 2005. But none of them write about it. Instead, we find a competent financial journalist, and the only major story about one the greatest financial crimes of all time, published in a slightly alternative magazine about music.

I worry for the Republic.

* * * * * * * *

Too many stinging disappointments, I suppose.

Too many instances of people behaving badly, to be certain.

But as they say, there’s some value in expecting the worst…you’ll never be disappointed.

And so it was with today’s second and concluding session of the SEC’s roundtable on securities lending and short selling: I expected the absolute worst, but in the end was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t quite as bad as I feared.

That’s not the same as proclaiming it a good thing, because it was not. Indeed, I stick by yesterday’s characterization of the event as farce with a pre-determined outcome.

Having said that, I was deeply impressed by two surprises I clearly had not anticipated. And I’ll get to those in a moment.

But first, an overview.

There were two panels. The first examined proposed pre-borrow and hard locate requirements — keys to closing two of the most dangerous remaining loopholes in the US stock settlement system. The second panel examined proposals requiring enhanced disclosure of short selling data — a good idea but ultimately one that would be much less necessary were the proposals discussed in the first panel enacted.

I’ll start with the second panel, which surprised me by coming down overwhelmingly in favor of more transparency in short selling.

Georgetown University Professor James Angel pointed out that greater disclosure would essentially be doing legitimate short sellers a favor, by vindicating them in cases when they are incorrectly accused of manipulation in response to stocks dropping in value.

David Carruthers, of short selling analytics firm Data Explorers, supported greater transparency in short selling where the goal was to “prevent market abuse and prevent the development of a false market, or to prevent situations where market participants take advantage of a vulnerable company.”

Richard Gates, founder of short selling hedge fund TFS Capital, denied that shorting exacerbated the onset of the current financial crisis, but went on to concede that there should be greater disclosure parity on the short and long sides of market activity.

Michael Gitlin of investment manager T. Rowe Price echoed the position of Professor Angel in saying real time reporting of short versus long sales would result in the “demystification of short selling,” adding, “The ongoing debate of what caused an individual security to decline would largely disappear with this added level of transparency.”

As the lone issuer represented on the panel, Jesse Greene, Vice President of Financial Management at IBM, was enthusiastically in favor of a general overhaul of the SEC’s short selling regulatory framework, including public disclosure of short positions, in order to “improve market stability and restore investor confidence.”

Joseph Mecane, Executive VP at NYSE, noted that market fragmentation has made it more difficult to detect manipulation, requiring regulators have access to more short selling data in order to better conduct market surveillance.

In other words, the second panel was a slam dunk in the right direction.

The first and ultimately more meaningful panel, on the other hand, was the Yin to the second panel’s Yang.

Appropriately enough, Managing Director of the Equities Division at Goldman Sachs William Conley kicked things off, lamenting that “both the pre-borrow and hard locate requirement would require significant infrastructure builds on the part of the industry as well as its participants.”

By “infrastructure builds”, Conley is referring to the development of new software able to track down real shares for short sellers to borrow. He seems to have forgotten three things:

1. When there’s money to be made, Goldman Sachs has a rare talent for developing extremely complicated software. Could it be that Conley never met former co-worker Sergey Aleynikov?
2. LocateStock.com, then a bootstrapping startup, developed software that accomplishes precisely the same task Conley regards as so burdensome, on a shoestring budget.
3. If Goldman Sachs has enough cash on hand to spend nearly $12-billion in employee bonuses this year, it can probably set a couple hundred thousand aside to write some crumby software.

As I predicted yesterday, much of the balance of Conley’s mic time was spent echoing the anti-reform talking points currently being circulated on Capitol Hill by his employer’s army of lobbyists — in some cases, verbatim.

William Hodash, Managing Director at DTCC, took us on a trip to his organization’s mindset circa 2005 by pointing out that fails to deliver are not necessarily evidence of naked short selling. With one foot remaining firmly in 2005, another in 2009 and a third in a pile of his own illogic, Hodash then said that the reduction in fails observed before and after the SEC’s implementation of Rule 204 “may be relevant to the discussion of whether naked short selling remains a problem.”

No, you didn’t miss anything. That’s what he said, with all remaining panelists basically pleading some variation of the on his and Conley’s approaches.

With one very prominent exception: Dennis Nixon, Chairman of International BancShares Corporation (IBC).

Looking at the program, I had assumed that IBC’s role on the panel was that of a broker or other market intermediary. Well I was very wrong. IBC was there in the role of an issuer targeted by naked short sellers, and Nixon very poignantly expressed the anguish of someone in his position, after a 45-day long bear raid removed $1.2-billion in IBC shareholder value.

“And I think it was all attributed to this predator-type short selling that goes on in this market today that’s uncontrolled. It’s unbelievable,” Nixon said.

That was the first surprise.

The second surprise came from an even less likely source:Commissioner Elisse Walter.

Mostly silent throughout the previous day’s panels, today Walter made it clear that she’s not buying the excuses offered by industry representatives insisting this problem is too much for them to tackle.

“I’m sort of surprised that the industry hasn’t come up with a solution, particularly as this controversy has continued to swirl and does not go away,” Walter said, adding that by failing to address the issue, the industry is essentially passing the cost of non-compliance on to the SEC’s own Division of Enforcement.

I think she’d make a stronger case had the Enforcement Division brought more than two cases against naked short sellers in its entire history, but that’s a topic for another post.

The bottom line is, this panel was undeniably stacked against any additional meaningful steps to limit illegal naked short selling, but the contributions of Dennis Nixon and Elisse Walter were as welcomed as they were unanticipated.

The entire affair could have been much better, but also could have been much worse.

Deep Capture goes to Washington.

(Washington, DC) The SEC’s roundtable on securities lending and short selling got started today, and Deep Capture was there.

What follows is my assessment, based on my observations thus far.

In the simplest terms, I’d say the situation at the SEC is one of extreme disconnection. This is an agency that has completely lost track of its founding mission.

The day consisted of four panels, all dedicated to examining different aspects of securities lending. The panelists included one academic, one public employees’ pension fund manager, the CEO of FINRA, and 20 representatives of hedge funds and brokerages or companies that provide services to hedge funds and brokerages.

Not a single representative or advocate of retail investors had a voice on any panel, and the substance of the panelists’ comments was consistent with the thinking that obviously called them all together: the discussion never got beyond reforms to benefit the institutions that get rich from lending out the shares entrusted to them by the rest of us.

Nor did retail investors get any more than a passing reference in any other context. The industry was there to talk about the needs of industry. Period.

The result was eight hours of possibly the least interesting discussion I’ve voluntarily endured. In fact, it more resembled two dozen high school book reports on a handful of facets of a single industry, as the same thing was said over and over in the lest interesting way possible.

For eight hours.

Meanwhile, the subject that really matters: illegal naked short selling, is scheduled for just three hours tomorrow (including a break!), with panelists hailing from four hedge funds, Goldman Sachs, DTCC, the Security Traders Association, NASDAQ, NYSE, one academic, and one fish-out-of-water from IBM.

Is there any question how those panels are going to come down on the issue?

This entire exercise, I’m nearly prepared to declare, is little more than a farce.

Lest I leave you with the impression that everything was devoid of meaning, allow me to recount one of those moments of cosmic synchronicity that make days like today all worthwhile.

It happened during the fourth panel. Specifically, during the opening remarks given by Leslie Nelson (yes, a male, but sadly no, not the guy from The Naked Gun movies), Managing Director of Global Securities Lending at Goldman Sachs.

Just as Mr. Leslie Nelson was beginning to talk, about 15 of you emailed me a link to Matt Taibbi’s recent post where he announced that naked shorting will be a major component of his upcoming piece in Rolling Stone.

Included in that post was a link to a pamphlet apparently being circulated broadly on Capitol Hill by Goldman Sachs lobbyists, intent on preserving the status quo with regard to loopholes permitting illegal naked short selling. Trusting my audio recorder not to miss anything, I decided to tune Mr. Nelson out slightly to read the words of his notorious employer.

In the Goldman pamphlet, the first sub-point of bullet point one reads:
“Rule 204 of Regulation SHO has been effective at reducing fails in the marketplace.”

At precisely the same time read that line, I heard Nelson read the following from his prepared statement (prefatory to what — consistent with the rest of the day’s panel — had nothing to do with delivery failures):
“Rule 204 has been undeniably effective at bringing US equities fails to levels that are truly de minimis.”

See…I read and heard those lines at precisely the same moment.

It was as though the Goldman Sachs government relations team had briefly hijacked my eyes and ears.

It’s also indicative of how very seriously Goldman is taking this challenge to what is likely one of that company’s most plumb sources of revenue.

Finally, I’d say it’s predictive of the message what we can expect to hear repeated over and over again as the issue makes its was earnestly through Congress and flaccidly through the SEC.

You know, I do not drink, but if I did, I’d suggest everybody take a shot whenever they hear that phrase repeated during the three short hours (including a break) of the roundtable’s second and final day. That might just make the thing tolerable.

The Bizarro World Code

Within minutes of my introduction to the world of short selling hedge funds, I encountered the analogy that remains the best suited to describe the truth to which they subscribe: Bizarro World.

A planet that appears from time to time in the DC Comics universe, Bizarro World is noteworthy for its utter opposition to everything associated with reality on Earth (in fact, another name for Bizarro World is Htrae – “Earth” spelled backwards).

Bizarro World made very infrequent appearances in the DC Comics universe; however what few insights we’ve been able to gain have been telling.

For one, we know that the residents of Bizarro World adhere to a simple moral code: “Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!”

Bizarro Superman

For another, consistent with its black-is-white nature, the alpha-superhero of Bizarro World – a Superman-like figure appropriately named ‘Bizarro’ – is in fact a super villain, and one of many.

Fortunately, or possibly unfortunately, the Bizarro World of short selling hedge funds sits side-by-side with our own. Yet, true insights into how it actually operates have been startlingly rare.

Possibly the best behind-the-curtains view came in December of 2006, with Jim Cramer’s infamous admission as to how short selling hedge funds do (and indeed, according to Cramer, “must”) operate, moving the Bizarro World citizenship of that group from theory to undeniable fact.

See for yourself:

Cramer: “You can’t foment. You can’t create yourself an impression that a stock’s down. But you do it anyway because the SEC doesn’t understand it. So that’s the only sense that I would say that it’s illegal.”

Bizarro translation: “Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us can break law to make money because regulator not understand regulations!”

Cramer: “Look what people can do. I mean that’s a fabulous thing! The great thing about the [stock] market is that is has nothing to do with the actual stocks. Look, over maybe two weeks from now the buyers will come to their senses and realize everything they heard was a lie…”

Bizarro translation: “Us hate beauty! Us pervert capital markets to make them hostile to small, promising businesses and technologies! Us stock market has nothing to do with actual stocks!”

Cramer: “These are all what’s really going on under the market that you don’t see. What’s important when you’re in that hedge fund mode is to not do anything remotely truthful – because the truth is so against your view, that it’s important to create a new truth to develop a fiction.”

Bizarro translation: “Us love ugliness! Us hate truth! Us prefer fiction!”

Cramer: “I think that it’s important for people to recognize the way that the market really works is to have that nexus of ‘hit the brokerage houses with a series of orders that can push it down’, then leak it to the press, and then get it on CNBC (that’s also very important), and then you have kind of a vicious cycle down. It’s a pretty good game.”

Bizarro translation: “Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World! Us make money by wrecking public companies! And here on Bizarro World, Jim Cramer not even pretend to be friend of small investor! Oh yeah…CNBC official network of Bizarro World!”

(Lest any suppose these clips have been taken out of context, I strongly encourage everybody to download and view the 10 minute conversation in its entirety.)

On Bizarro World, villains are treated like celebrities while the law-abiding are scorned and ostracized. So it should come as no surprise that on CNBC (the official network of Bizarro World), short selling hedge fund managers are called “titans” while those who question them are dismissed with a wink and a smirk.

Of course, this would seem consistent with the seemingly inverted reality that is short selling, where – as opposed to traditional investors who earn profits when they buy low and later sell high – shorts aspire to do the same by first selling high and then buying low.

While on the surface short selling might appear to have been invented on Bizarro World, that’s not true. Shorting is (as has been stated time and again on this blog) a healthy part of a normal market.

What was invented on Bizarro World, however, is shorting’s insidious doppelganger: naked short selling, which is a practice ripped straight from the Bizarro World welcome guide. Unlike legitimate short selling, which requires first borrowing the shares one sells short, naked shorting skips that step, allowing criminals to sell not only something they do not own, but something that does not even exist, except as a tradable electronic ledger entry which they themselves conspire with corrupt brokerages to create.

This, in turn has the effect of artificially increasing the supply of a company’s shares. In other words, on Earth, only companies get to issue stock, whereas on Bizarro World, it’s the naked short sellers that issue shares of a company’s stock, with impunity, sometimes in quantities rivaling the number of legitimate, company-issued shares in circulation (with the expected impact on share price).

Or, should I say, naked short sellers used to be able to do this.

The truth is, since shortly after the onset of the economic crisis naked short sellers themselves helped to spark, naked shorting has become an increasingly difficult crime to commit.

The result?

Despite the fact that we’re in the midst of an epic bear market – when one would normally expect short sellers to thrive – the biggest short selling hedge funds are getting hammered.

Today, Reuters business writer Svea Herbst-Bayliss has a shocking overview of the breadth of the situation, which she begins by comparing to Waterloo – the battle which forever put an end to Napoleon’s aspirations of world domination.

Based on insiders’ insights into forthcoming letters to investors explaining their performance over the first and second quarters of 2009, Herbst-Bayliss predicts that “To anyone considering hedge fund investments in the coming months, the data will illustrate that these managers who cashed in on last year’s financial markets crash now rank as the $1.4 trillion hedge fund industry’s worst performers.”

Specifically, Herbst-Bayliss notes, “In the first six months of 2009 [short selling hedge funds] lost 9.38 percent, compared with the 9.55 percent that other hedge funds gained.”

Most notably, the story quotes Brad Alford, a professional hedge fund advisor and investor, who says, “Every few years short-sellers have their day in the sun. Then things revert to normal where the markets rise and life becomes so difficult for them that many just go out of business,” he added.

In case you missed it, you might want to re-read Alford’s quote to make sure you catch what makes it so telling: that a rising market can be bad for short sellers.

But how can that be, given the recently-ended bull market – possibly the greatest in economic history – saw short selling hedge funds such as SAC Capital, Kynikos Associates and Third Point Capital experience mind-boggling growth, while a month-long rise in what is otherwise shaping up to be one of the greatest bear markets in economic history (when the shorts should be thriving) may prove to be their ultimate doom?

Talk about Bizarro World investing!

The difference, I suspect, is naked short selling: a crutch-like tool that allowed the shorts to defy gravity while the market soared, the effective removal of which has left them atrophied and uncoordinated when forced to fend for themselves in a market where capable, legitimate short sellers should thrive.

Blue vs. Green Kryptonite: Click to see full image

Or maybe a more apt metaphor is that of Kryptonite, the green version of which makes Superman weak and Bizarro strong, while the blue version has the opposite effect. For a long time, a captured media and SEC equipped short selling hedge funds with a big, fat slab of green Kryptonite, which their own hubris has caused to be replaced by a bit of the Bizarro-toxic blue stuff.

Will July of 2009 be the short sellers’ Waterloo?

Will short selling hedge funds’ greed simply assume another form?

Will the economy recover before it’s too late to matter?

Find out what happens in the next episode of Deep Capture!

In the end, we settled on the following:

“Entropy increases” and “The pendulum swings.”

The first sentence is a reference to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The second sentence is a reference to the fact that cultural trends will always increase in pervasiveness and acceptance until some limit is broached, at which time opposing forces will be applied that cause society to respond with increasing negativity toward that trend. And, as with an actual pendulum, the higher the upswing, the more forceful the push back will be.

How true both are.

I first encountered the market reform movement near the end of 2005. Over the months that followed, I witnessed the following:

1. An SEC staffer in San Francisco subpoenaed the communications of Jim Cramer, Herb Greenberg, Bethany McLean, Carol Remond and a handful of other “journalists” suspected of colluding with Gradient Analytics and short selling hedge fund Rocker Partners, only to have SEC Chairman Chris Cox personally sabotage the effort. This was followed up almost immediately by the SEC vindictively subpoenaing Patrick Byrne.
2. FOIA requests filed with the SEC intended to give some sense of the scope of the delivery failure problem were regularly denied or spitefully filled with minimal accompanying explanation.
3. Numerous brutal articles were published attacking opponents of naked short selling – Byrne primarily among them – under the bylines of (surprise) Jim Cramer, Herb Greenberg, Bethany McLean, Carol Remond, Joe Nocera, and Roddy Boyd.
4. Audio tape captured by a market reform operative who covertly accessed a panel discussion featuring Herb Greenberg, Joe Nocera and Dan Colarusso (then Roddy Boyd’s editor) hosted by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. The theme of the discussion was essentially “How do we deal with these lying anti-naked short selling bloggers who are so critical of us?” Among other things, the tape caught Joe Nocera saying (to loud applause) he felt life was too short to bother understanding whether naked shorting is actually a problem, and Dan Colarusso saying he and his newspaper had the capacity to “crush” Patrick Byrne.
5. An all-out PR offensive launched by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) attacking opponents of naked short selling.
6. The emergence of Gary Weiss, an ostensibly credible former business journalist and blogger, bursting onto the scene, proclaiming naked short selling beneficial and its opponents crazy.
7. The hijacking and distortion of the Wikipedia article on naked short selling by whom we would soon learn was none other than Gary Weiss. Given journalists’ well-documented over-reliance on Wikipedia, this was undoubtedly a key factor in our difficulty getting them to provide more balanced coverage of the issue.
8. A special session of the Utah Legislature which, catching the banks flat-footed, resulted in passage of a law requiring brokerages with operations in Utah to promptly disclose stock delivery failures. But before it could go into effect, and after the prime brokers managed to rally their armies of lobbyists, the law was handily repealed.
9. Unprecedented growth of companies on the Reg SHO Threshold Securities list, indicating that, contrary to the intended aim of Regulation SHO, naked shorting was becoming increasingly prevalent.

On balance, it was a very dark time for the market reform movement, as every charge was followed by a blistering counter-charge, and every lunge answered by a quick parry. More than once, I recall hearing even the staunchest market reformers openly question the capacity of a rag-tag band of revolutionaries to counter the enormous influence and resources brought to bear by the hedge funds and prime brokers who were getting rich from the practice of manipulative naked short selling, and I couldn’t help but wonder whether I’d picked the wrong battle.

That’s not to say I ever doubted the correctness of the cause – only the correctness of my decision to join a fight that sometimes seemed impossible to win and certain to result in damage to my reputation as it had to Patrick Byrne’s and so many others’.

But in those moments of doubt, I’d remind myself of an eternal truth: the pendulum swings.

In other words, as dark as those days were, there would invariably be restraining forces applied to help slow – and eventually stall and even reverse – the momentum built up by decades of Wall Street villainy and the deep regulatory capture of the institutions intended to counter it.

What we could not have realized – as such perspective only comes with time – is that we (meaning, you, me, and everybody else who’s taken steps to do something about illegal naked short selling) were in fact the very restraining forces so many of us were expecting to arrive, cavalry-like, from some unknown quarter, and that as dark as those days seemed, they appeared quite bright to those who had endured the 1990s and early part of the current decade, when the practice persisted, without restraint, like a drunken orgy.

Of course, the event that finally brought the pendulum to a decisive halt and reversal was the current economic crisis, which saw the term “naked short selling” dragged into the popular lexicon (as determined by Yahoo! listing it as one of its five most popular search terms in September of 2008).

Since then, as the link between naked short selling and the beginning of the crisis itself has been solidly established, valiant members of Congress – most notably Delaware Senator Ted Kaufman – have dragged the issue of naked short selling into the political lexicon, as well.

Where are we today?

1. The SEC recently enacted permanent restrictions on illegal naked short selling, which include greatly enhanced disclosure of delivery failures and shorting activity.
2. Today, the SEC brought its first enforcement cases against illegal naked short selling.
3. Also today, FINRA expelled a member firm for engaging in illegal short selling.
4. Jim Cramer has been deeply and publicly shamed. Herb Greenberg is now a ‘consultant’. Bethany McLean has left business journalism. Dan Colarusso continues looking for steady employment. Roddy Boyd, Carol Remond and Joe Nocera all retain their former positions, but seem to steer clear of anything resembling the issue of naked shorting.
5. The DTCC is mum on the issue as well.
6. Gary Weiss – since abashed and banned from Wikipedia – sinks ever deeper into obscure irrelevance while the Wikipedia article on naked short selling that he once controlled has been liberated and made to read nearly as it should.
7. Substantive legislation with the capacity to end illegal naked short selling and other short-side market abuses once and for all is currently working its way through Congress.
8. As of today, the Reg SHO Threshold Securities list is 23% shorter than it was on the day I met Patrick Byrne (and 90% smaller than it was at its height in July of 2008), and is nearly devoid of the kinds of promising, well-capitalized companies whose inclusion used to be a sure sign of an impending bear raid.

These are all developments that seemed impossible in the dark days of 2006.

But here we are.

Yes, the pendulum is now unambiguously swinging in our direction, but the job is not done. Indeed, we can only be assured of progress to the extent that we each recognize our responsibility to continue pushing.

What follows is PART 13 of a 15-PART series. The remaining installments will appear on Deep Capture in the coming days, after which point the story will be published in its entirety.

Click here to read PART 1

Click here to read PART 2

Click here to read PART 3

Click here to read PART 4

Click here to read PART 5

Click here to read PART 6

Click here to read PART 7

Click here to read PART 8

Click here to read PART 9

Click here to read PART 10

Click here to read PART 11

Click here to read PART 12

Where we left off, we had learned that on March 29, 2007, an FDA advisory panel overwhelmingly voted to approve Provenge, a vaccine Dendreon developed for prostate cancer. As a result, most financial analysts and investors believed that Dendreon had a promising future.  However, ten hedge funds (out of a universe of 11,500 hedge funds) held large numbers of Dendreon put options (bets against the company), suggesting they had expected that Dendreon would be derailed. At least seven of those hedge funds can be tied to Michael Milken or his close associates.

We had also learned that Milken himself stood to profit if Dendreon were to experience unexpected problems receiving FDA approval. This is because Milken was the early financier and principal deal maker for ProQuest Investments, a fund that (along with an affiliate) controlled a company called Novacea, which was one of Dendreon’s competitors in the race to produce a new treatment for prostate cancer. Meanwhile, Lindsay Rosenwald (a Milken crony who once helped run a Mafia-linked brokerage called D.H. Blair, which specialized in pumping and dumping fake biotech companies) controlled Cougar Biotechnology, which was Dendreon’s second competitor in the race to develop a treatment for prostate cancer.

We had learned further that Milken’s “philanthropic” outfit, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, which appears to act in concert with Milken’s investment fund, ProQuest, had supported Novacea and Cougar, neither of which had shown that their treatments were safe or effective, while turning its back on Dendreon.

In addition, we had learned that in April, 2007, Dr. Howard Scher, who was an executive and director of ProQuest, and the chairman of the Prostate Cancer Foundation’s “Therapeutic Consortium”, spearheaded an unprecedented lobbying effort to convince the FDA to deny approval to Dendreon’s treatment – the first time in history that the FDA had gone against an advisory panel’s recommendation to approve a drug destined for dying patients.

In the days before and after the lobbying effort, Dendreon was subjected to a blistering attack by naked short sellers who illegally flooded the market with millions of phantom shares to help drive down the company’s stock price. This criminal naked short selling continued intermittently for much of the next two years, while other events conspired to hobble Dendreon, a company that had completed multiple clinical trials that strongly suggested that its product, Provenge, was capable of lengthening the lives of thousands of men with prostate cancer….

* * * * * * * *

In December 2007, three U.S. Congressmen — Mike Michaud (D-Maine), Dan Burton (R-Indiana) and Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) — called on the House Commerce Committee to investigate why the FDA failed to approve Dendreon’s treatment for prostate cancer. Referring to Dr. Scher and his ally, Dr. Hussain, the lawmakers said in a letter that “there are reasons to believe that serious ethics rules were violated by two FDA advisory panel members in their decision [to vote and lobby against Dendreon] and that these violations played a role in the subsequent FDA decision not to approve Provenge at this time.”

A bipartisan group of 12 additional Congressmen eventually signed on to the request for an investigation. And in February 2008, as outrage over this scandal spread through the medical community, a group of seven respected doctors, calling themselves “Physicians for Provenge” wrote a letter to the ranking members of the House Commerce Committee, suggesting that the investigation should urgently proceed.

“Please consider why our colleagues and we KNOW that Provenge works and why tens of thousands of men with late stage prostate cancer should be given access to it,” the physicians wrote. Noting the “egregious conflicts of interest” of Dr. Scher and Dr. Hussain, the “Physicians for Provenge” added that the “FDA should be carefully assessing risk versus reward for the treatment of terminally ill patients, rather than ‘gate keeping’ based on outdated statistics, reducing short-term health costs or backroom shenanigans.”

Nonetheless, Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell denied the requests for an investigation. To justify this decision, Dingell wrote in a letter to the committee that an “investigative hearing prior to an agency’s final decision runs the risk of interfering with the normal regulatory process.”

Apparently, it was fine if FDA-contracted doctors and government officials tied to Michael Milken corrupted the normal regulatory process by obfuscating approval standards (”substantial evidence” versus “proof”) and by drafting unsolicited post-vote letters with back-channel help from a government employee who was weeks away from taking a new job created by Michael Milken.  But investigating such improprieties would corrupt the regulatory process, in the eyes of Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell.

Dingell also pointed out that “a new law strengthening conflict of interest provisions now governs FDA panels.” Unfortunately, that law was passed in September 2007, some months after Milken’s conflicted allies derailed Dendreon’s application.

In any case, it is not clear that the old conflict of interest provisions were not violated in the Dendreon case. Dr. Scher received a conflict of interest waiver, but in his application for that waiver he did not mention his financial ties to Milken’s ProQuest Investments. There should have been an investigation into why that waiver was granted. And while he was at it, Representative Dingell should have investigated the illegal naked short selling of Dendreon and the “backroom shenanigans” of Milken’s captured officials at the FDA and the National Cancer Institute.

At any rate, while the congressional investigation was being stopped in its tracks, Milken’s Prostate Cancer Foundation was becoming more brazen.

In March 2008, for example, the Prostate Cancer Foundation sent out a peculiar mass mailing. Written by a cardiologist on Prostate Cancer Foundation letterhead, the mailing began, “I’ll never forget the day my 5-year-old son came home from school, worried. One of the other kids told him I was going to die.”

The letter went on to describe the horrors of being diagnosed with prostate cancer. So far, all kosher. But then came the strange part – the charity’s solicitation explicitly promoted a mostly untested experimental treatment that was being developed by a public company that was considered to be one of the few competitors to Dendreon. The treatment was called GVAX, and the company developing it was called Cell Genesys.

The author of the letter noted that during his treatment, he had “learned about some of the groundbreaking research projects supported by the Prostate Cancer Foundation, such as GVAX, a drug now in phase 3 clinical trials that boosts the immune system to fight off prostate cancer cells.”

Notice that the name of the drug – GVAX – was printed in boldface letters, so nobody could miss it. Notice, too, the underlining, which stressed that this treatment (as opposed to others, such as Dendreon’s) was endorsed and supported by the Prostate Cancer Foundation. And, finally, notice the unequivocal statement that GVAX works – that it “boosts the immune system” and is able to “fight off” cancer.

Lest there be any question that Milken was eager to promote GVAX, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, soon after, began distributing flyers at supermarkets and shopping malls with a similar message. “My 5-year-old didn’t want to lose his daddy,” read the flyers, which then proceeded to describe a “groundbreaking” new medicine – GVAX.

At the time, Cell Genesys was nowhere near bringing GVAX to market. It had just finished phase 2 clinical trials on a total of 65 patients. Lab results showed that GVAX might increase prostate cancer antibodies, but they did not show that the immune system was actually boosted in such a way as to better “fight off” cancer or improve survival. Phase 3 trials, which would determine whether GVAX actually improved the health of patients, had just begun.

But if you were an average Joe who read those flyers – or a wealthy Mary who received that solicitation in the mail – you’d be mighty convinced that Cell Genesys was the next big thing in cancer therapy. You might even be tempted to buy its stock.

* * * * * * * *

When Milken’s Prostate Cancer Foundation began distributing his fliers promoting GVAX, a number of hedge funds had accumulated large numbers of shares in Cell Genesys.

One of these was Millennium Management, the hedge fund that had been founded by the fellow who planned to murder Ivan Boesky when it seemed that Boesky might cooperate with the authorities in their case against Milken. Again, Millennium is one of those seven hedge funds that had the foresight to own put options in Dendreon back in March 2007, right before Dendreon’s treatment was unexpectedly scuttled by the FDA.

Another hedge fund with a big stake in Cell Genesys was Forest Investment Management, owned by Michael Boyd, the father of hedge fund shill Roddy Boyd, currently of Fortune Magazine.  Michael Boyd, remember, had previously been involved in two big ventures – one with a former Milken colleague from Drexel Burnham; the other with Santo Maggio, the convicted criminal CEO of Refco Securities.

Hedge fund Perceptive Advisors also held a moderately large stake in Cell Genesys. Recall that Perceptive was then run by Joseph Edelman, who was not only another one of those seven hedge fund managers who held put options in Dendreon, but was also simultaneously serving as a trader for Paramount Capital.

As you might recall, the vice president of Paramount Capital was a former employee of Milken crony Steve Cohen, who was also one of those seven hedge fund managers betting big against Dendreon. The owner of Paramount, of course, is Lindsay Rosenwald, who used to run the Mafia-controlled D.H. Blair with Milken’s former national sales manager, and controlled Cougar Biotechnology, another Dendreon competitor promoted by the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

Another big buyer of Cell Genesys shares was Mazama Capital, a hedge fund based in California. In December 2006, Mazama also owned 2.1 million shares of Dendreon. It dumped more than a million of those shares sometime before or immediately after the March advisory panel meeting, when it seemed certain that Dendreon would receive FDA approval.

Only one other hedge fund dumped similar quantities of Dendreon shares at that time. It was JL Advisors, which is controlled by the above-mentioned Steve Cohen. This dumping of shares contributed to the selling volume that was amplified by whoever was selling massive amounts of phantom stock in Dendreon.

Then there was Renaissance Technologies, which held 800,000 shares in Cell Genesys when Milken’s “philanthropy” began promoting the company.  The CFO of Renaissance is James Rowen, who was previously the chief financial officer of SAC Capital, the hedge fund run by the above-mentioned Steve Cohen, who is known to be maniacal about making sure that his former employees remain satellites of his trading empire.

Meanwhile, hedge funds Balyasny Asset Management and Visium Capital held a combined 12 million shares of Cell Genesys. Balyasny and Visium have overlapping ownership (Dmitry Balyasny is a partner in both hedge funds) though they don’t generally disclose that in their SEC filings.

Dimitry Balysasny is a close associate of Steve Cohen. He has employed some of those former SAC Capital traders and managers with whom Cohen maniacally maintains relationships. And he and Cohen have attacked the same companies.

As I mentioned, Balyasny was one of our seven hedge fund managers with large numbers of put options in Dendreon. I will return to him, because this enigmatic Russian might have more surprises in store for Dendreon.

* * * * * * * *

Three weeks after Milken’s Prostate Cancer Foundation began publicly promoting Cell Genesys’s virtually untested prostate cancer treatment, Cell Genesys announced that it had signed a gargantuan $320 million deal to develop and commercialize GVAX with Takeda Pharmaceutical, the Japanese biotech giant.

The press reported this deal dutifully and uncritically, making it sound like GVAX was the next big thing. The stock price soared, earning large profits for the Milken-network hedge funds that had invested in Cell Genesys.

But just as there was something fishy about the Milken-invested Novacea and its $500 million deal with Schering Plough, so too did the “$320 million” Cell Genesys deal deserve a hearty dose of skepticism.

For starters, only days before Cell Genesys announced the Takeda deal, Takeda had bought a company called Millennium Pharmaceuticals. Millennium had been transformed into Takeda Pharmaceutical Capital Ventures. It was Takeda Capital Ventures, not the Takeda parent company, that signed the deal with Cell Genesys.  In other words, it was almost certain that Millennium’s management, most of whom had been retained by Takeda Capital, orchestrated the whopping $320 million deal.

That was rather strange because Millennium had been founded by a man named Mark Levin. It was Levin who orchestrated Millennium’s merger with LeukoSite, the biotech company that belonged to Marty Peretz, the Boesky-Milken crony who founded TheStreet.com. And more important to this particular episode,  it was Levin who had founded Cell Genesys. He founded the company basically by investing in himself (just as Domain Associates had created the Milken-invested Novacea out of thin air).

So, assuming Levin still had influence over Millennium/Takeda, and assuming he was still invested in Cell Genesys, he had just orchestrated a deal to use other people’s money to invest $300 million in himself.

Or, at least Cell Genesys’s press release said that Takeda (which was, in fact, Millennium) was going to “pay Cell Genesys an upfront payment of $50 million and additional milestone payments totaling up to $270 million…Takeda [actually Millennium, now known as Takeda Capital Ventures] will pay Cell Genesys tiered, double-digit royalties based on net sales of GVAX immunotherapy for prostate cancer…”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Sounds like those “net sales” are imminent, right? In fact, just as the Milken-invested Novacea’s $500 million deal was dependent on clinical trials showing good results, so too was Cell Genesys’s big deal with itself dependent on the company producing some evidence that it’s drug actually worked. The operative phrase in that press release was “milestone payments totaling up to $270 million.”

Of course, just three months later, Cell Genesys announced that it had halted its trials of GVAX after its Independent Data Monitoring Committee, in a “routine safety review meeting,” observed “an imbalance of deaths…”  In other words, GVAX was not helping patients. It was killing them. And, of course, the $270 million worth of “milestone payments” announced with so much fanfare were unceremoniously canceled.

Either before this announcement, or immediately after, the big investors in Cell Genesys – Mazama, Balyasny, Millennium, Perceptive Advisors – all dumped their shares. Given the big boost those shares got from Milken’s Prostate Cancer Foundation promotions and the giddy announcement that Cell Genesys would receive $330 million, we can assume that those investors made a nice profit on their sales, just as Milken’s ProQuest and affiliated funds made nice profits on their sales of Novacea.

It seems to me that Cell Genesys, like Novacea, was a sophisticated pump and dump scam, aided by Michael Milken’s  “philanthropic” outfit, the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

Which brings us to Cougar Biotechnology, the third Dendreon “competitor” promoted by Milken’s Prostate Cancer Foundation.  Cougar Biotechnology, as we know, was controlled by Lindsay Rosenwald, who used to help run D.H. Blair, the Mafia-linked pump-and-dump shop whose two vice chairman pled guilty to securities crimes, and whose president was Milken’s former national sales manager.

D.H. Blair was indicted on 173 counts of securities fraud, and it was notorious for pumping and dumping biotech companies with no real medicine. But who knows? Maybe Cougar has a genuine product. It is hard to say at the moment, and will remain that way for years to come, because its prostate cancer treatment remains virtually untested.

In any case, just last month, Cougar, no doubt aided by the Prostate Cancer Foundation’s vigorous endorsements, wangled a $1 billion deal to merge with Johnson & Johnson, so Rosenwald and friends did quite well on their investments.

Remember that while Milken’s Prostate Cancer Foundation was using unwitting donors’ money to promote Novacea, Cougar Biotechnology, and Cell Genesys, its top officials, and perhaps Milken himself, were actively seeking to derail Dendreon, the one company that actually had a promising treatment for prostate cancer. This was certainly to the benefit of the short sellers (some of whom were illegally naked short selling) and the buyers of put options who were betting big against Dendreon

Meanwhile, it should be noted that Cougar Biotechnology experienced almost no naked short selling, according to SEC “failures to deliver” data. The Milken-invested Novacea also experienced virtually zero naked short selling, even after it announced that its treatment was killing people. The same goes for Cell Genesys — relatively little naked short selling, even when its treatment flopped.

The miscreant party line is that hedge funds do not engage in naked short selling to manufacture phantom stock. The party line is that most “failures to deliver” are the result of mechanical “errors.” It’s funny how those “errors” tend to occur when miscreants in a certain network are short a company. It’s also funny that those “errors” don’t happen to companies in which Milken and his cronies are invested.

If only there were a pattern.

* * * * * * * *

To be continued…Click here for Chapter 14.

What follows is PART 10 of a 15-PART series. The remaining installments will appear on Deep Capture in the coming days, after which point the story will be published in its entirety.

Click here to read PART 1

Click here to read PART 2

Click here to read PART 3

Click here to read PART 4

Click here to read PART 5

Click here to read PART 6

Click here to read PART 7

Click here to read PART 8

Click here to read Part 9

Where we left off, we had learned that on March 29, 2007, an FDA advisory panel had voted overwhelmingly that Dendreon’s promising treatment for prostate cancer should be approved. As a result, most financial analysts and investors were expecting that Dendreon would become a profitable company. However, ten hedge funds (out of a universe of 11,500 hedge funds) held large numbers of Dendreon put options (bets against the company), suggesting they had reason to believe that Dendreon would be derailed. At least seven of those hedge funds can be tied to Michael Milken or his close associates.

We had also learned that Michael Milken himself stood to profit if Dendreon were to experience any unexpected problems receiving FDA approval. This is because Milken was the early financier and principal deal maker for ProQuest Investments, a fund that (along with an affiliate) controlled a company called Novacea, which was one of Dendreon’s competitors in the race to produce a new treatment for prostate cancer. Meanwhile, a Milken crony, Lindsay Rosenwald (who once helped run D.H. Blair, a Mafia-linked brokerage which specialized in pumping and dumping fake biotech companies) controlled Cougar Biotechnology, which was Dendreon’s second competitor in the race to develop a treatment for prostate cancer. In addition, we had learned that Milken’s “philanthropic” outfit, the Prostate Cancer Foundation, had supported Novacea and Cougar, while turning its back on Dendreon.

Finally, we had learned that on April 13, 2007, The Cancer Letter, a newsletter with a record of publishing information leaked from the FDA in the service of select Wall Street hedge funds, published another FDA leak. This leak was a letter written to the FDA from a doctor named Howard Scher, who was a board member and executive of ProQuest Investments and the chairman of the “Therapeutic Consortium” of Milken’s Prostate Cancer Foundation. In that letter (an unprecedented attempt to lobby the FDA after an advisory panel had already voted), Dr. Scher argued vehemently that Dendreon’s treatment should not be approved.

One of Dr. Scher’s principal arguments against Dendreon was that the FDA advisory panel had improperly “changed the question” regarding the efficacy of Dendreon’s treatment. As we saw in Chapter 9, that claim was false, and Dr. Scher’s other arguments were specious.

But Dendreon’s enemies continued to whisper in reporters’ ears about this issue of “the question,” and the unprecedented lobbying of the FDA continued.

Now we meet another conflicted doctor and the sixth of those seven hedge funds that bet big against Dendreon right before the lobbying began….

* * * * * * * *

On April 20, three weeks after the advisory panel vote, and one week after Dr. Scher’s missive appeared in The Cancer Letter, Forbes journalist Matthew Herper published a story arguing that there was a good chance the FDA would not approve Dendreon’s cancer treatment outright. “If the agency wants to ask Dendreon for more data, it certainly has some outs,” Herper wrote. “The FDA changed the wording of the question…”

Three days later, Dr. Maha Hussain, one of the panel doctors who had quickly voted “No” on the bogus question, wrote a letter to the FDA arguing that Dendreon’s treatment should not be approved. This letter, like Dr. Scher’s, was addressed to FDA commissioners and was presumably confidential. And this letter, like Dr. Sher’s, found its way to The Cancer Letter, which posted it for all to see just three days after it was written.

Dr. Hussain’s arguments were precisely the same as those employed by Dr. Scher and the whispering folks on Wall Street. “The recommendations for approval…are based on data that can only be characterized as best as ‘suggestive’ of possible benefit,” she wrote. “From the scientific and procedural aspects, in general, it would seem that at the end of the day what should determine a positive verdict in any therapeutic trial is the strength of the evidence as critically reviewed by an Advisory Committee…with clear guidance on the question posed to the committee within the framework of the regulatory guidelines and requirements of the FDA for approval.” [Italics mine]

That is, Dr. Hussain—like Dr. Scher, the singing Sendek, and whoever was feeding the journalist Matthew Herper–was suggesting that the FDA panel had voted on the “wrong question.”

Meanwhile, Jonathan Aschoff, the physician-impersonating financial analyst who’d set a target for Dendreon’s stock price to reach a mere $1.50, was telling journalists that the FDA panel would not have voted to approve Dendreon’s treatment if it weren’t for the “substantial” rewording of “the question.” On April 25, Aschoff issued another damaging report, this one asserting, once again, that the FDA would ignore its panel because the panel had voted on the “wrong  question.”

By this time Dendreon supporters were busily circulating transcripts showing that the FDA panelists had, in fact, voted on the legal question. The supporters had also discovered Dr. Scher’s ties to Novacea, Cougar Biotechnology, Proquest, and Michael Milken, and began explaining to all and sundry that ProQuest and Novacea would cash in if Dendreon were not approved. Moreover, the supporters had revealed that Dr. Hussain, the second letter writer, had also done work for the Milken-invested Novacea, and was a member of the “Therapeutic Consortium” of Milken’s Prostate Cancer Foundation.

On April 26, Matthew Herper of Forbes published another article – this one repeating the arguments in Dr. Hussain’s letter. Herper, who had been told about Scher’s conflicts of interest, had apparently decided to investigate. This investigation seemed to have involved nothing more than asking Dr. Scher if he had any conflicts of interest. In his April 26 article, Herper  reported that Scher’s spokesman said “that Scher had nothing to do with his letter leaking [and appearing in The Cancer Letter], and that he knew of no family members who would benefit financially either way if Provenge were approved.”

To reinforce Scher’s credibility, and to make Dendreon’s supporters look silly, Herper added that the supporters had alleged that “Scher’s wife works for a hedge fund that might be short Dendreon…This is not true. She works in human resources for a nursing home company that could not conceivably benefit materially from any news about Dendreon.”

Aside from ignoring Scher’s ties to Milken’s ProQuest Investments, which would profit handsomely if Dendreon were not approved, Herper misconstrued the information about Scher’s wife. The truth was, Dendreon’s supporters had revealed that Scher’s wife had a cousin, Barry Lafer, who was a hedge fund manager. Phone records legally obtained by Deep Capture show that Scher called Lafer, at his office, on April 23, while Herper’s article was in the works.

But the main point of Herper’s article was that “all this debate” (i.e. the Wall Street whispering and the conjectures of two conflicted doctors) made “Dendreon an even riskier stock than other biotechs.” Herper added that according to unnamed “others,” Dendreon’s “studies do not rise to the level usually required for approval.”

Besides being false, this was another way of suggesting that the FDA panelists, all experts in their field, voted in favor of Dendreon because they had misunderstood the standards for approval. They had been asked the “wrong question.”

On April 29, Bloomberg News reported that Dendreon’s shares were being sold at “a record pace” as investors “bet the company’s experimental prostate-cancer drug will fail to win approval from U.S. regulators.”

Then, on May 4, there was yet another letter.  This one was from a University of Washington biostatistician named Dr. Thomas Fleming. It is perhaps noteworthy that Fleming had done work for Gerson Lehrman, an outfit that is owned by former hedge fund managers.

Gerson Lehrman has a remarkable business model which can best be described as “institutionalized bribery.” Clients, mostly hedge funds, hire Gerson to put doctors and other experts on the payroll. In exchange for the payments, the doctors agree to provide hedge funds with “insight” (some say they provide inside information) about clinical trials of drugs that are marketed by public companies. The doctors also agree to talk to reporters (and perhaps also to the FDA) about these drugs. In at least one case it has been clearly established that these hired sources lied (which could well explain, of course, why they were hired).

Like the letters from Dr. Scher and Dr. Hussain, within days of its creation Dr. Fleming’s missive miraculously ended up in the hands of The Cancer Letter, which eagerly published it.

“Reportedly Scher felt motivated to write the letter after being kept awake the night following the [advisory panel],” wrote Dr. Fleming. “I also was kept awake the night following the panel.”

In addition to knowing about Dr. Scher’s sleeping habits, Dr. Fleming shared Dr. Scher’s concern that approving Dendron’s treatment might derail Asentar, the drug that was being developed by Milken’s Novacea. How “could one defend internal consistency at FDA if [Provenge] were to be approved before the [Asentar] trial?” Fleming asked.

By this time, Dendreon’s supporters (a rambunctious bunch) were screaming and howling about the dishonesty of those who had suggested that the advisory panel had been asked the “wrong question.” So the party line changed a bit. Now it was that the panelists who had voted in Dendreon’s favor must have been somehow confused. Dendreon trials did not “provide ‘substantial evidence of efficacy’, Dr. Fleming wrote. “Rather at best, these trials provide plausibility of efficacy…”

I’ll leave it to the reader to parse the difference between “plausibility” and “substantial evidence.” But clearly, this letter was yet another strange occurrence.

Four days later – May 8, 2007 — the FDA told Dendreon that it was rejecting the company’s application for Provenge, a paradigm-shattering vaccine for those terminally ill with prostate cancer.

* * * * * * * *

The SEC’s partial data shows that more than 12 million Dendreon shares “failed to deliver” on May 10, 2007.  Traders are given three days to produce stock before their trades are registered as “failures to deliver,” so it is clear that hedge funds had sold the 12 million shares of phantom stock on May 7 — the day before the FDA made its decision. This suggests that somebody was aware of this imminent decision. We don’t know who engaged in that naked short selling because, as far as the SEC is concerned, it’s a big secret.

But we do know that a mere 10 hedge funds held large numbers of put options (a bet that the stock price would fall) as of March 31, a few days after the advisory panel’s nearly unanimous vote in Dendreon’s favor. Obviously, these were hedge funds with remarkable foresight concerning a long-shot event (the FDA’s decision to go against the overwhelming recommendation of its advisory panel to approve a drug for terminally ill cancer patients). Seven of those hedge funds belong to a mischievous Wall Street network that is known for its foresight – and for attacking companies that, coincidentally, are victims of illegal naked short selling.

Five of these hedge funds I have already named. All have ties to Michael Milken or his close associates. Some have ties to the Mafia. They are: Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, Perceptive Advisors, Millennium Capital, Steve Cohen’s Sigma Capital, and Pequot Capital.

In preparation for naming the sixth, we need to hearken back to September 2001, when two airplanes crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, one crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth dove into a field in Pennsylvania. On the day before that attack, a short seller named Anthony Elgindy called his broker and ordered him to liquidate one of his accounts, giving the explanation that a big event was about to occur. Mr. Elgindy said that on the following day (that is, on September 11, 2001) the market was going to  lose two-thirds of its value.

After the 9-11 attacks, that broker notified the FBI of Elgindy’s eerie prediction, and the FBI launched an investigation. In the course of this investigation, the government learned  that Elgindy had sold massive amounts of phantom stock, and that he routinely blackmailed and threatened companies that he was selling short. The government also learned that Elgindy had ties to terrorist outfits in the Middle East, and for a time prosecutors argued in court that Elgindy had advance knowledge of the 9-11 disaster.

Ultimately, though, Elgindy was convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison for the more demonstrable crimes of stock manipulation and paying bribes to two FBI officials who fed him information from the FBI’s National Crime Information System (one of those FBI agents actually kept Elgindy informed of the progress of the investigation into Elgindy’s connection to the 9-11 attacks). In June, 2009, it was learned that the SEC’s inspector general had begun investigating SEC officials who are also alleged to have collaborated with Elgindy, either by providing inside information on commission investigations, or launching destructive, dead-end investigations of companies that Elgindy was selling short.

Elgindy, like Bernard Madoff  (the Dendreon short and Ponzi schemer who helped write the SEC’s rules on naked short selling), is believed to have ties to organized crime. He once worked for a now-defunct Mafia-connected brokerage called Blinder Robinson (known on the Street as Blind’em, Rob-em), and a source close to the Elgindy investigation has told Deep Capture that, shortly before Elgindy appeared for sentencing, Russian mobsters forced Elgindy to saw off the tip of one of his own fingers as a reminder not to squeal on other members of his network.

There is evidence – including transcripts of Elgindy’s private Internet message board – that shows that Elgindy routinely attacked public companies in collaboration with certain hedge fund managers. A significant number of these hedge fund managers were part of the Milken network.

One of them was Jeffery Thorp, whose father once worked with the Genovese organized crime family to develop a method for cheating Las Vegas casinos. The government’s investigation of Elgindy eventually led to Thorp, who was charged in 2006 with providing fraudulent “death spiral” PIPEs financing to 22 companies. The SEC’s case, one of the rare instances in which the commission has identified a naked short seller by name, makes it clear that Thorp sold massive amounts of phantom stock, ultimately destroying the 22 companies that had received his fraudulent PIPEs.

Recall that similar “death spiral” PIPEs were arranged by Carl Icahn’s Ladenburg Thalmann, ending in the phantom stock ruination of more than 20 companies. Icahn is the “prominent” investor who owes his status as a billionaire to Michael Milken and the Mafia-connected Zev Wolfson. Icahn is also the “prominent” investor who, along with Ziff Brothers and Steve Cohen, called ImClone immediately before The Cancer Letter published the “leaked” news of an FDA decision.  Icahn is also the “prominent” investor whose former employee was the last man to see Alain Chalem (a Mafia-connected naked short seller) before Chalem’s head was riddled with bullets by Russian mobsters.

Do you still not believe that this network has ties to the Mob? Consider that Thorp’s father, in addition to working for the Genovese organized crime family, was the single most important player in the stock manipulation network that Milken operated in the 1980s.

The father, Edward Thorp, ran a hedge fund called Princeton-Newport. The FBI eventually raided that operation, hauling away phone recordings and documents. Thorp was not ultimately charged, but the evidence that the FBI retrieved that day featured prominently in the prosecution’s 98-count indictment of Milken. Indeed, people who worked on the case say that the Princeton Newport evidence was far more important to the prosecution than the testimony of Milken’s more famous co-conspirator, Ivan Boesky.

Do you still not believe that people in this network employ precisely the same ruthless tactics? Consider that when the FBI investigated Elgindy, it also stumbled upon a hedge fund called Gryphon Partners. One of Gryphon’s portfolio managers, Jonathan Daws, was eventually charged with participating in various short selling schemes hatched by Elgindy and his bribed FBI agent. In pleading guilty, Daws said, “others at Gryphon made trades in some of the relevant stocks, independent of me, and not at my direction.” Daws was convicted.  No charges were immediately filed against Gryphon.

However, in 2006, the SEC sued Gryphon for providing fraudulent “death spiral” PIPEs financing to 35 companies. Like Thorp and the hedge funds introduced by Carl Icahn’s Ladenburg Thalmann, Gryphon provided its PIPEs financing knowing that it would cause stock prices to fall. The hedge fund then hammered the companies with naked short selling, sending their stocks into “death spirals.” Most of the 35 companies were destroyed.

So, at this point in the story, we have identified more than 70 companies that have been vaporized by “prominent” investors, all part of the same network.

At any rate, Gryphon Partners, the Elgindy-connected, PIPEs-financing, 35 company-destroying SEC-sued death spiral finance house, was founded by G. Stacy Smith and Reid S. Walker, two “prominent” investors who have since gone on to greater things. They now run a hedge fund called WS Ventures.

And WS Ventures is the sixth of our seven “colorful” hedge funds that had the foresight to own large numbers of put options in Dendreon at the end of March 2007, just after the seemingly fantastic news that the advisory panel had voted overwhelmingly in Dendreon’s favor, and during the period when Dendreon was awash in illegal naked short sales, and just before the disastrous news that the FDA had rejected the advice of its own advisory panel.

A few months later, Dendreon, on the verge of collapse and desperate for money to support its sabotaged prostate cancer treatment, went ahead and signed a deal to receive its first “death spiral” PIPEs finance.

* * * * * * * *

To be continued….Click here for Chapter 11.

If this article concerns you, and you wish to help, then:

1) email it to a dozen friends;

2) go here for additional suggestions: “So You Say You Want a Revolution?“

What follows is PART 6 of a 15-PART series. The remaining installments will appear on Deep Capture in the coming days, after which point the story will be published in its entirety.

Click here to read PART 1

Click here to read PART 2

Click here to read PART 3

Click here to read PART 4

Click here to read PART 5

Where we left off, we had learned that CNBC’s Jim Cramer had declared Dendreon to be a “battleground stock.” And we had learned that Dendreon subsequently came under attack by criminal naked short sellers, right at the time that its promising treatment for prostate cancer had been endorsed by an FDA expert advisory panel, and right before that treatment was to be derailed by some strange occurrences.

While it is impossible to know who was responsible for the illegal naked short selling (the SEC keeps that a big secret), we know that the people who orchestrated those strange occurrences (which I will describe in due course) and at least seven of the ten hedge fund managers who held large numbers of Dendreon put options (bets against the company) are tied to Michael Milken, the famous criminal who is now considered to be a “prominent philanthropist” with a special focus on prostate cancer.

Now we learn a bit more about this network and the attack on Dendreon, a company with a promising treatment for prostate cancer…

* * * * * * * *

When the FDA’s advisory panel voted in favor of Provenge, most Wall Street research analysts were predicting a bright future for Dendreon. But as naked short sellers piled on with ever increasing gusto, hedge fund managers continued to whisper in reporters’ ears. And two Wall Street analysts did more than whisper – they shouted, day after day, that Dendreon’s treatment for prostate cancer was doomed.

One of these analysts is named Jonathan Aschoff, and he works for a financial research outfit called Brean Murray Carret & Co.  The day after the advisory panel vote, in an interview with Reuters, Aschoff made the long-shot prediction that the FDA would not approve Provenge, but would instead ask Dendreon to supply additional data showing that the treatment was safe and effective–a process that could take years. Soon after, Aschoff told other media outlets that the FDA would set a “dangerous double standard” by approving Provenge because the treatment “did not meet its primary goal in two Phase III trials.”

During the first days of April 2007, Aschoff was everywhere, continuously repeating this notion that the FDA would set a “dangerous double standard” by approving Provenge.  On April 9, Aschoff reiterated his “sell” rating for Dendreon, setting a target for the stock at a mere $1.50, which implied that the stock would lose more than 90 percent of its value by the end of the year. Reuters, Associated Press, CNBC and other media dutifully reported Aschoff’s comments as though they shed  light on the merits of Dendreon’s prostate cancer treatment.

Aschoff’s performance raises a few basic questions. The first is, how did a Wall Street analyst know that it would be “dangerous” to approve a medical treatment? It is an odd day, indeed, when the media turns to Wall Street for wisdom on matters of science and health.

The second question is, why was Aschoff so confident that the FDA would not approve Provenge? Given that the FDA had followed its advisory panels’ decisions in 97% of cases, and in 100% of cases involving drugs for dying patients, Aschoff’s prediction seemed rather far out. What did he know that the rest of the world did not know?

The third question is, who is Jonathan Aschoff?

* * * * * * * *

In 2003 – back when journalists still occasionally investigated stories, rather than parroting whatever hedge funds and Wall Street analysts whispered in their ears – The Wall Street Journal won a Pulitzer Prize for a story that nailed Jonathan Aschoff for being a fraud.

According to the Journal, Aschoff often impersonated doctors in order to acquire inside information on the status of drug trials underway at his target companies. A certain Dr. Cunningham, who worked at a cancer center in Dallas, told the Journal that he initially believed that Aschoff was a doctor. But he discovered that he was dealing with a fraud when he mentioned to Aschoff that an experimental treatment had caused some reduction of the “lymphadenopathy.”

“What’s that?” asked Aschoff.  He didn’t have a clue, even though “lymphadenopathy” is a  common medical term. It means, “swollen lymph nodes.”

Nonetheless, some years later, the Associated Press, Reuters, and other media outfits were willing to believe that Aschoff knew enough about medicine to be quoted as a reliable source – a source who had, for some reason, concluded that Dendreon’s treatment for prostate cancer was “dangerous.”

What reason did Aschoff have for reaching that conclusion?

* * * * * * * *

One more question: Which hedge funds were paying Aschoff’s bills?

There is one particular network of hedge fund managers that is known to pay “independent” financial research shops to publish biased or false negative reports on companies that they are selling short.

Former employees of “independent” financial research firm Gradient Analytics have provided sworn affidavits that hedge fund manager David Rocker–once the largest outside shareholder of TheStreet.com; former employee of  Milken-Boesky crony Michael Steinhardt (who is the son of “the biggest Mafia fence in America) and Steve Cohen–now “the most powerful trader on Wall Street;” reportedly once investigated by the SEC for trading on inside information provided to him by Milken’s shop Drexel Burnham–heavily influenced, edited, dictated, and in some cases actually wrote Gradient’s false, negative research about public companies. That means, of course, that Cohen and Rocker had copies of “Gradient’s” research before it was published, which is also highly improper.

And emails acquired by Deep Capture show that Cohen and hedge fund manager Jim Chanos, among others in their network, received and traded ahead of biased reports published by a research outfit called Morgan Keegan. After Deep Capture reporter Judd Bagley broke this story, the SEC began (but will probably never conclude) an investigation into the matter.

Were hedge funds in this network dictating Aschoff’s research, too? I don’t know the answer to that question, but it is worth noting that after the SEC sanctioned Aschoff for impersonating doctors, he went to work for an outfit called Sturza’s Institutional Research, which was owned by a fellow named Evan Sturza.

The SEC has launched (but of course never completed) multiple investigations of Sturza’s companies, which catered to a particular network of short sellers by publishing negative commentary on biotech companies. For example, in 1996, the SEC began (but has never completed) an investigation into whether Sturza conspired with the above-mentioned Michael Steinhardt and a firm called Gilford Securities to take down the stock of a biotech company called Organogenesis.

In the 1980s, Gilford Securities employed Jim Chanos (the above-mentioned fellow who is now under SEC investigation for trading ahead of biased research reports). Chanos manages a few hedge funds, the most famous of which is called Kynikos Associates. He is also the head of the short seller lobby in Washington, and a much favored source of information for the New York financial press.

In 1985 – back when Chanos was still at Gilford; back when journalists did investigations rather than parrot whatever Jim Chanos whispered in their ears – way back then is when The Wall Street Journal published a front page story about a “network” of short sellers said to include Jim Chanos and Michael Steinhardt. The story suggested that this network destroyed public companies for profit and described some of the more egregious tactics – espionage; impersonating journalists to get inside information; conspiring to cut off companies’ access to credit; spreading dubious information – that were employed by Chanos and others in his network.

At the time, Chanos made some effort to publicly distance himself from Michael Milken. And he recently told one reporter that lawyers threatened him in the 1980s because he was selling short companies that had been financed by Milken’s junk bonds. However, the truth is that Chanos’s short selling in the 1980s tended to support Milken’s machinations, and in later years Chanos remained very much a part of the old Milken network.

Chanos got his big break in the 1980s by short selling and ultimately destroying a company called Baldwin United. As part of this effort, Chanos and his colleagues at Gilford Securities went so far as to meet with Baldwin United’s bankers, and (through all manner of horror stories) convinced the bankers to cut off Baldwin’s access to credit. Soon enough, the company went bankrupt, and Michael Milken quickly got himself hired as advisor to the bankruptcy.

According to a well-known businessman who was involved in the bankruptcy proceedings, Milken abused his advisory position, handing out confidential information to his network, which ended up owning much of Baldwin’s assets.

As the story goes, Chanos’s take down of Baldwin impressed Michael Steinhardt (the short-seller whose father was the “biggest Mafia fence in America”) and Steinhardt introduced Chanos to his key limited partners – including Ivan Boesky (later indicted for manipulating stocks with Milken) and Marty Peretz (a Milken and Boesky crony who would later co-found TheStreet.com, along with Boesky crony Jim Cramer and a few hedge funds in this network).

Peretz, an aristocrat who has long been a part-time professor at Harvard, introduced Chanos to one of his former students, Dirk Ziff, who manages a hedge fund called Ziff Brothers Investments. The emails cited above show that Ziff Brothers, like Chanos and Steve Cohen, was receiving advance copies of those Morgan Keegan reports.

Dirk Ziff is part of the network of which I write. Indeed, Chanos launched his first hedge fund out of Dirk Ziff’s offices. This was a few years after Chanos left his position at Gilford Securities, which had a few key clients, one of whom was Michael Steinhardt, son of “the biggest Mafia fence in America.”

In the 1990s, five Gilford Securities traders–Chester Chicosky, Todd M. Nejaime, Lawrence Choiniere, Kevin P. Radigan, and William P. Burke – were arrested as part of Operation Uptick, the biggest Mafia bust in FBI history. Although some of these traders had left Gilford by the time they were indicted, they were charged with crimes allegedly committed while they were still working for Gilford. Specifically, the Gilford traders were charged with accepting bribes from a Mob-run brokerage called DMN Capital, and for helping to manipulate stocks with a cast of characters that included ten Mafia soldiers and a former New York police detective.

I asked H. Robert Holmes, who was Chanos’s boss at Gilford, whether he had any comment on the  Mafia’s infiltration of his firm. He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about? This is bullshit.” He also said he was completely unaware that any Gilford traders had been arrested for accepting bribes and manipulating stocks with a large cast of Mafia goons and Mafia associates. That is, he claimed to be unaware of an event in his company that had been vigorously publicized by the FBI and the SEC.

By the time of Operation Uptick, of course, Chanos was no longer with Gilford. He was then a “prominent investor” – a member of the world’s most powerful network of financial operators, a network whose members are portrayed by the press as geniuses and heroes, never mind that this is the very network that has been destroying companies since 1980s – the very network that is (as should by now be apparent) comprised of the criminal mastermind Michael Milken and his Mafia-connected cronies.

As a member of this network, Chanos is, of course, on close terms with Jim Cramer, the CNBC personality who once planned to run his hedge fund out of Milken co-conspirator Ivan Boesky’s offices. It was owing to Cramer that Chanos became the largest donor to the political campaigns of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who was Cramer’s best friend and former college roommate. When Spitzer was caught with a hooker and forced to resign, it emerged that the hooker, “Ashlee Dupre”, had been living rent-free in Chanos’s beachside villa. Ashlee called Chanos “Uncle Jim.”

I tell you all this only to show the relationships that bind some particularly destructive short sellers and miscreants. It is this network that attacked the big banks last year, helping trigger the collapse of the financial system. And members of this network are the most “prominent” players in the biotech space.

One of those players is Jonathan Aschoff, the doctor-impersonating fraud who was, in the Spring of 2007, making the long-shot prediction that the FDA would not approve Dendreon’s “dangerous” treatment for prostate cancer. As we know, Aschoff previously worked for Sturza’s Institutional Research, run by a fellow who faced multiple SEC investigations (none of which led to any action) for allegedly publishing false information to help short sellers (such as Michael Steinhardt) manipulate stocks.

Under the strain of those investigations, Sturza shut his operation down. Now Sturza helps manage a hedge fund called Ursus. Ursus is owned by Jim Chanos, the Steinhardt protégé who housed the hooker of Cramer’s former college roommate, Eliot Spitzer.

Ursus specializes in shorting biotech stocks. There are Wall Street brokers who say that Ursus was short selling Dendreon while Sturza’s disciple, Jonathan Aschoff, was bashing the company and others in this network were looking to cash in.

But it is difficult to know for sure whether Ursus was selling short. It is difficult to know who was responsible for flooding the market with at least 9 million (and maybe tens of millions of) phantom Dendreon shares. It is difficult to know because the SEC does not require hedge funds to disclose their short positions, and does not release information on who is selling stock and failing to deliver it.

As far as the SEC is concerned, it’s all a big secret.

But we do know that Aschoff was predicting that Dendreon’s stock would sink to $1.50 right after Dendreon received an overwhelmingly positive vote from the FDA’s advisory panel, and right before Dendreon was derailed by some singularly strange occurrences. In addition, we know that at this time only ten hedge funds on the planet held large numbers of Dendreon put options (bets against the company), and that at least seven of those hedge funds can be tied to the famous criminal Michael Milken or his close associates.

Michael Milken, of course, is not just a criminal, but also a “prominent philanthropist” whose Prostate Cancer Foundation has received much acclaim from the world at large. But, as we will see, it was not just those seven hedge funds, but Michael Milken himself, who stood to earn a tidy profit from the strange occurrences that were to derail Dendreon, a company with a promising treatment for prostate cancer.

* * * * * * * *

To be continued…Click here for Chapter 7.

If this article concerns you, and you wish to help, then:
1) email it to a dozen friends;
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For recently retired SEC Enforcement Director Linda Thomsen, however, I’ll make an exception. (As Mr. Buffett says, “There are times when a man has to rise above his principles.”)

The first story I would like to tell about this Enforcement Director concerns an investigation that the SEC’s San Francisco office was conducting a few years into collusion among short-sellers and crooked journalists who shilled for them using ammunition provided by “research shops” which were fed their material by those same hedge funds, in a kind of “serpent-eating-its-tail” of financial hooliganism. It was a hard scheme to miss: any company shorted by Stevie Cohen (SAC), David Einhorn (Greenlight), Dan Loeb (Third Point), David Rocker, or a handful of others, could count on coming under the “where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire” journalistic scrutiny of such worthies as Jim Cramer and Dave Kansas, Gary “Scaramouche” Weiss, Bethany “Long, Slow Thing” McLean and Roddy Boyd (both of Fortune Magazine), Carol Remond and Karen Richardson (both of DowJones), Floyd Norris and Joe Nocera, (both of the New York Times), and Herb Greenberg (MarketWatch), that “smoke” often being supplied by research shops of which those same hedge funds were clients. Invariably they’d be naked shorted as well, and show up on the Reg SHO Threshold List, and anyone noticing this constellation of facts occurring over and over with complete regularity could be counted on to be declared “wacky” by these same journalists.

I learned about this investigation because I was invited to a meeting by the SEC investigators conducting it. I’m pretty sure that “invitation” came in the form of a federal subpoena, but I am not completely clear on that, having over the last few years received enough such paperwork to wallpaper my bedroom. In any case, I arrived at the appointed hour, and was sworn in. My deposition was conducted by a man named “Mark” and overseen by his boss, Tracy, both of whose last names I see no reason to reveal. They both were the kind of federal employees that make one swell with pride: They displayed neither favor nor enmity, but simply, white collar professionalism such as has largely been lost in Corporate America. They were prompt, prepared, and business-like, and, without being rude, challenged me fairly aggressively while revealing to me as little as they could.

That said, try as they did, it was impossible for them to be as blank to me as they wished. After all, if someone asks, “What do you know about the possibility that Colonel  Mustard killed his victim in the library with a rope?”, then it is resonable to infor that the utterer suspects that Colonel Mustard may have indeed killed someone in the library with a rope. In this fashion, I became reasonably confident that while the New York financial press was bleating about how wacky I must be to notice patterns that many sane observers had noticed, those same patterns had been noticed by others better placed to do something about them than I. (Incidentally, normally I would be loathe to reveal the contents of such a deposition, but given that this is all moot now, yet tied to today’s news, and the bad guys are using FOIA requests to get this stuff anyway, it seems like the right thing to do.)

Somewhere around this time, Jim Cramer and others of the journalists mentioned above  received their own subpoenas. All hell broke loose, because they made it break loose (see for example “Herb Greenberg, The Worst Business Journalist in America, on the Conspiracy“). Of course, in a world where editors still had integrity, it would have been considered somewhat unseamly to have journalists reporting on an investigation of which they, themselves, had become the targets (I’m not sure why I mention that: I suppose it seems like it should be germane or something). But as a result, that investigation was promptly shit-canned. There’s no other way to describe it: the investigators were summoned to Washington, publicly crapped upon from a great height by SEC Chairman Chris Cox, the Enforcement Director who signed those subpoenas stood by idly while this happened to her staff, and we returned to our regularly scheduled programming of Muzak and bromide business reporting interrupted occasionally by B-list actors pitching Grandmother-Safe financial products and narcissistic hustlers promising that this time they really wanted to make you money, Mad Money!

Interestingly, not all the press backed up their brethren: editorials by Loren Steffy of the Houston Chronicle spring to mind in this regard. But by and large, the profession of business journalism stood mute while the reporting on a federal investigation was dominated by folks who were themselves the targets of that investigation.

The second story I would like to tell about this SEC Enforcement Director concerns some comments she made in 2008 in a keynote address before the United States Chamber of Commerce. In a pattern that observers of this issue have seen before, when asked about naked short selling, the Enforcement Director avoided the question by simply talking about the virtues of short selling, an issue which is not in contention. This pattern of avoiding the subject of naked short selling has been used time and time again by apologists for the practice (imagine someone being asked about sexual harassment, and answering with a response about the virtues of sex). Unfortunately for the Enforcement Director, her interlocutor, who was standing in the front row, directly in front of her podium, using a microphone that broadcast his voice loudly to the whole room (and you will see in a moment why that is relevant) pressed her on the distinction in a way that we would never see happen in any of the captured business media such as CNBC, New York Times, or Fortune.  The Enforcement Director’s subsequent answer (she blamed the victim companies and excused the crime) is instructive because it confirmed, as though further confirmation were necessary, that there are in fact two and only two plays in the apologists’ playbook: first, conflate naked short selling with short selling and discuss the benefits of short selling; second, blame the victim companies and excuse the crime.

3:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.
Regulatory Keynote Address: A View from the Division of Enforcement: Perspectives and Priorities
Linda C. Thomsen, Director of the Division of Enforcement, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Introduced and moderated by: Michael J. Ryan, Senior Vice President and Executive Director, Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness

AUDIENCE MEMBER: “You spent a lot of time talking about insider trading and penny stock fraud, but you failed to mention an issue that’s of great concern to the Chamber, and that is naked short selling and the unsettled trades that can result from that. How can the Commission claim that it is serious about enforcement when millions of trades fail to settle every day and companies remain on Reg SHO Threshold Lists for years and years? And, second part of the question, why is the new rule 10b-21 necessary when, as Commissioner Casey pointed out, it makes illegal activity that is already illegal?;

SEC ENFORCEMENT DIRECTOR: “Um… I didn’t hear all of it, unfortunately, but as to the issue of short selling, we recognize that short selling is -”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: “My question was not about short selling. We all know that short selling is legal, and a necessary and efficient part of the market process. I’m talking about naked short selling-the selling of shares one does not have in inventory and probably has no intention of locating or borrowing.”

SEC ENFORCEMENT DIRECTOR: “As to naked short selling, and more generally market manipulation generally (sic), it is an area we are focused on. We have seen fewer cases in that arena because, often times, this is not necessarily with respect to naked shorts, but shorting or market manipulation more generally, because often the components of something that might look to be manipulative are all legal trades as you point out. So it’s a hard case to bring, which is not to say that it isn’t something that we don’t investigate, because we do. So I .. hear and understand the frustration of many on the subject of short selling generally. When we hear complaints about short selling-and, frankly, it is both short and naked short, it is a combination of both-we routinely hear from companies who’ve come in, who worry that they’re being shorted in an illegal way. We routinely take all that information in and look into it. And often times, as I think many defense counsel would be happy to tell you, when we dig in, what we find is that some of the information that has caused people to be shorting is actually true as to the company, and we may very well be confronted with two issues, one on the company and its disclosure side as well as on the trading side. But they’re very difficult cases, which is not to say that we aren’t focused on them and interested in them and indeed this new focus that we have on some smaller companies and smaller issuers will wrap some of those concerns into their focus as well.”

As you may have gathered, that SEC Enforcement Director was Linda Thomsen.

That would be the same Linda Thomsen who, for the entire 14 year duration of her service in the Enforcement Division of the SEC (the last four as Director), missed the $67-billion-and-counting walking Ponzi scheme/human brown stain known as Bernie Madoff, though concerned citizen Harry Markopolis not only did the work for the Enforcement Division, he all but spray-painted his findings on the lovely Italian marble of the SEC’s posh new DC headquarters.

That would also be the Linda Thomsen who, regarding Mr. Markopolis, acquitted herself so handily in this now-famous exchange with New York Democratic Congressman Gary Ackerman.

That would be the same Linda Thomsen against whom the SEC’s Office of the Inspector General recommended disciplanary action for her role in hanging out to dry SEC Senior Investigator Gary Aguirre, due to his impertinence in trying to subpoena Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack simply because a trail of clues in “the most important insider trading case in 30 years” led directly to him.  Aguirre had failed to regonize that the law of the land does not apply to Mr. Mack because he has too much “juice“, as Aguirre’s boss Robert Hanson put it while shutting down the investigation. According to a subsequent report of the United State Senate Judiciary Comittee, by “juice” Hanson meant, “meaning they could directly contact the Director or an Associate Director of Enforcement. That Director was, again, Linda Thomsen, and the Associate Director was Paul Berger, who was, at the time of these events, negotiating for a job with Mr. Mack’s law firm, Debevoise Plimpton, a job which Mr. Berger ultimately took. That report by the US Senate Judiciary Committee summarized the culture of Enforcement Division under Director Linda Thomsen:

“Staff Attorney Gary Aguirre said that his supervisor warned him that it would be difficult to obtain approval for a subpoena of John Mack due to his ‘very powerful political connections.’ Aguirre’s claim is corroborated by internal SEC emails, including one from his supervisor, Robert Hanson. Hanson also told Aguirre that Mack’s counsel would have ‘juice,’ meaning they could directly contact the Director or an Associate Director of Enforcement.

“SEC management delayed Mack’s testimony for over a year, until days after the statute of limitations expired. After Aguirre complained about his supervisor’s reference to Mack’s ‘political clout,’ SEC management offered conflicting and shifting explanations.

“The SEC fired Gary Aguirre after he reported his supervisor’s comments about Mack’s ‘political connections,’ despite positive performance reviews and a merit pay raise.

“After being contacted by a friend in early September 2005, Associate Director Paul Berger authorized the friend to mention his interest in a job with Debevoise & Plimpton. Although that was the same firm that contacted the SEC for information about John Mack’s exposure in the Pequot investigation, Berger did not immediately recuse himself from the Pequot probe. Berger ultimately left the SEC to join Debevoise & Plimpton. When initially questioned, Berger’s answers concerning his employment search were less than forthcoming.

“The SEC’s Office of Inspector General failed to conduct a serious, credible investigation of Aguirre’s claims.”

That would be the same Enforcement Director to whom the SEC’s new Inspector General was obliquely referring, in page after page, for 55 pages, in a report explaining how three well-organized  6th graders could have handled the nation’s naked shorting complaints better than did the SEC Director Linda Thomsen’s Enforcement Division.

That Linda Thomsen is the same one whose resumption of employment with white-shoe law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell (I say “resumption” because Ms. Thomsen worked at Davis Polk until she joined the SEC in 1995) was announced today in this gem (”SEC Enforcement Chief Joins Davis Polk“) from the Blog of Legal Times (”Law and Lobbying in the Nation’s Capital”).

The announcement reads, with no detectable irony:

Linda Thomsen, who headed the SEC’s enforcement division until February, is starting as a partner in the firm’s white-collar defense and government investigations and enforcement practices in June. She will be joining former SEC commissioner Annette Nazareth, who started at Davis Polk last year, and Robert Colby, who joined the D.C. office this year after serving as deputy director of the SEC’s trading and markets division…

Thomsen practiced in Davis Polk’s New York office before joining the SEC in 1995. She started at the commission as assistant chief litigation counsel and went on to become head of enforcement in 2005. After leaving the SEC earlier this year, Thomsen says, “I had no preconceived ideas about where I was going to go, or what I was going to do.” – Translation: “I swear, it never occurred to me to go work for the law firm defending wealthy clients against whom I was overseeing cases until weeks ago.”

At the firm, Thomsen will advise clients on internal investigations and defend them against SEC probes. – Comment: Probes such as those ones she was overseeing weeks ago.

After serving at the agency for 14 years, Thomsen says she understands the kind of questions clients should be asking themselves to stay out of trouble with the commission. “I think I know and can see the kind of issues that get people into trouble, and the kinds of processes that cause them to, perhaps, ignore warning signs,” says Thomsen. - Comment: Yes, I am sure Ms. Thomsen is one of the world’s most recognized experts on the subject of processes that cause people to ignore warning signs.

Thomsen headed the enforcement division as it came under fire for failing to catch Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, as well as problems that contributed to the meltdown on Wall Street. In response to critics, Thomsen vehemently defends her former division. “I think the professionalism in the division of enforcement is really unparalleled,” she says. ‘If you look at the totality of the enforcement efforts…it’s really a record that I know I’m proud of.”

Considering the world-historic implosion of the US capital market occurring to vamp-til-ready accompaniment of Ms. Thomsen’s blind-piano-player-in-the-cathouse Enforcement Division,  I’m at something of a loss for words with which to comment upon Ms. Thomsen’s “pride”.

But it is nice she landed on her feet.

This is the first anniversary of the destruction of Bear Stearns.

For a while there, just after it happened, everybody was talking about the role of short selling, both legal and illegal, in Bear’s rather violent passing.

Since then, the big question has gone from “who the hell set this fire?” to “how did this place devolve into such a firetrap, anyway?” and “how the hell do we get out of this burning building?”

Finding answers to all three questions is vitally important. Yet, I’m a little bothered by the fact that these days, so little attention is being focused on the first.

And so, exactly one year after criminal arsonists set a match to the over-leveraged heap of oily rags that was Bear Stearns, I offer up this video examination of that event, and those that would follow.

While I hope you will all enjoy and help circulate it, I should point out that this video was not primarily made for the frequent readers of DeepCapture.com (as everything in it has already been examined in these pages). Instead, it’s for those who’ve yet to understand why they should be outraged at what’s going on.

In other words, it’s primarily for future readers of DeepCapture.com.

Yet, I need you regulars to take a look, and then help get this out there. Plus, the music is pretty cool, so it’ll be worth your time to watch anyway.

Download:
Windows Media (85 mb).
Ipod compliant .mv4

Last Tuesday, February 24, 2009, the Congressional Research Service published a 40 page report, “Who Regulates Whom? An Overview of U.S. Financial Supervision” (Mark Jickling, Edward Murphy, CRS, February 24, 2009)  As the title suggests, the report is a primer on the parts of the US financial system, and who regulates which part.  As the Summary section puts it:

“This report provides an overview of current U.S. financial regulation: which agencies are responsible for which institutions and markets, and what kinds of authority they have….This report does not attempt to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. regulatory system. Rather, it provides a description of the current system, to aid in the evaluation of reform proposals.” (Page 2)

And in the Introduction:

“A number of studies and reports have already proposed broad changes to the division of supervisory authority among the various federal agencies and in the tools and authorities available to individual regulators. This report provides a basis for evaluating and comparing such proposals by setting out the basic structure of federal financial regulation as it stood at the beginning of the 111th Congress.” (Page 5)

And describe the basic structure of the the financial system, its regulators, and their regulatory principles, it does, thoroughly, in 35 more pages of clear and informative, if not exactly gripping, prose. It covers US banking regulation and federal securities regulation, the regulation of derivative trading and of GSE’s such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and the non-regulation of foreign exchange and US Treasuries, nonbank lenders, hedge funds and venture capitalists. I confess it answered every question I could think to ask regarding the parts of the US financial system and which office of government regulates each part. I commend Messiers Jickling and Murphy for so thorough and well-organized a review of that subject.

There’s just one thing: it does not mention the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation. In fact, it does not mention securities settlement.

Does that seem strange?

Consider this: The regulatory structure of the US capital market was set in the Secuties Exchange Act of 1934. It devoted a section (immediately after the section on Directors, Officers, and Principle Shareholders, and the section establishing the need to keep records), to describing the need for a “National System for Clearance and Settlement of Securities Transactions” (Section 17a). Its opening is instructive:

“a. Congressional findings; facilitating establishment of system

“1. The Congress finds that–

“A. The prompt and accurate clearance and settlement of securities transactions, including the transfer of record ownership and the safeguarding of securities and funds related thereto, are necessary for the protection of investors and persons facilitating transactions by and acting on behalf of investors.

“B. Inefficient procedures for clearance and settlement impose unnecessary costs on investors and persons facilitating transactions by and acting on behalf of investors.

“C. New data processing and communications techniques create the opportunity for more efficient, effective, and safe procedures for clearance and settlement.

“D. The linking of all clearance and settlement facilities and the development of uniform standards and procedures for clearance and settlement will reduce unnecessary costs and increase the protection of investors and persons facilitating transactions by and acting on behalf of investors.”

It seems that in 1934 Congress thought having securities transactions clear and settle promptly was pretty important.

Which makes it especially odd that in 2009, in the Congressional Research Service’s admirably thorough report on the parts of the US financial system and the regulators who oversee them, no mention is made of that “”National System for Clearance and Settlement of Securities Transactions”  whose establishment Congress in 1934 found “necessary for the protection of investors.”

I am reminded of an event from early 2005. It was the early days of the Mitzvah. I was having trouble synthesizing the data. It would be more honest of me to say: the data suggested that our settlement system was Swiss Cheese, an enormous derivative risk was building up that no one understood, the same SEC to which I had spent a lifetime looking up in awe and fear was actually lapdog to a tight circle of Wall Street crooks, the savings of America were being looted, and it was all going to end in systemic collapse.  But clearly, I thought, that’s crazy. So I was having trouble forming a hypothesis to fit the data, other than a crazy one.

I decided to find out who regulated the DTCC. Listen to what they had to say. No doubt I’d learn some piece of the puzzle that I was missing, something that would cause the light bulb to go on and me to say, “Oh, that’s where this is coming from. Oh, I see, there’s nothing to worry about after all.”

The problem was, I could not find out who regulated the DTCC. It was not on their website. I couldn’t find any government agency that claimed to regulate the DTCC, or any news story that mentioned the subject of DTCC regulation. A core finding of Congress in 1934, in the foundational document of modern regulation, established that something had to be done, but 71 years later I could find no evidence that it was the job of anyone in the federal government to do it. And that’s odd because usually government agencies fight turf wars over who gets to regulate this or that. But here was a great vital section of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, authorizing the establishment of a crucial component of the system, yet no one seemed to be doing it.

That can’t be right, I thought. Clearly just another moment of bad craziness.

So I went to see two securities lawyers whom I knew socially. I asked them if they would research something for me, that I would be willing to pay them for their time, and that they did not have to worry about writing anything formal. I just needed from them one simple sentence of the form, “The DTCC is regulated by _____ .” They agreed to produce it.

A week later I went to visit them. For some time they sat hemming and hawing and scratching their heads, until finally they told me: “We can’t seem to find anything that establishes who regulates the DTCC, or even if it is regulated. We found one mention of the subject, in a footnote in a GAO report from a couple years ago. They say they think the SEC regulates the DTCC, but they don’t sound very sure.”

From the looks of it, neither is the Congressional Research Service.

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A few years ago, a clique of influential journalists went to extraordinary lengths to cover up the problem of illegal short selling. In the face of indisputable data and evidence, the journalists insisted, over and over, that “naked” short selling (hedge funds manipulating stock prices by flooding the market with phantom stock) rarely occurred. And they said short sellers (who profit from falling stock prices) don’t set out to destroy public companies.

Moreover, if a person were to criticize illegal short selling, the reporters would smear that person’s reputation with a savagery that was almost without parallel in contemporary journalism.

At the time, these journalists were working at major news organizations like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CNBC, but most shared a common history: they had been founding editors or top employees of TheStreet.com, a financial news website. The few who had not worked for TheStreet.com were close colleagues of TheStreet.com’s owner, Jim Cramer, who is best known as the eccentric host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” program.

Having studied more than 1,000 stories by these journalists, I can assure the reader that nearly every one of them was sourced from a tight network of hedge fund managers, and that a great many of the stories were false or misleading. Moreover, most of the people in this network (including Jim Cramer himself) are tied in important ways to two famous criminals from the 1980s – Ivan Boesky and “junk bond king” Michael Milken.

And though I realize that is hard for some people to absorb this, I will continue to provide evidence that a surprising number of the “prominent investors” in this network have had dealings with associates of organized crime – the Mafia.

* * * * * * * *

Last spring, we published “The Story of Deep Capture,” which sought to explain the origins of the Deep Capture website (mission: “to bypass the ‘captured’ institutions mediating our nation’s discourse”) by way of exposing the machinations of the Cramer clique of journalists and their short selling sources.

One day after we published our story, Cramer had some kind of awakening. Whereas he had previously sought to whitewash short seller crimes, he now suddenly repeated our assertion that illegal short selling was a big problem – the same problem that precipitated the great stock market crash of 1929.

A few months later, abusive short selling was implicated by U.S. Senators, CEOs of major banks, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, respected academics, prominent law firms, current and past chairmen of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in the near total collapse of our financial system.

Nowadays, Cramer is even more adamant. He says he knows a lot of short sellers. He says that short sellers are destroying public companies. He says they crushed the markets and they’re going to crush America too.

These short sellers, Cramer hollers, are downright “diabolical.”

* * * * * * * *

If you have not done so, please read Deep Capture reporter Patrick Byrne’s primer on naked short selling. Please read “The Story of Deep Capture.”

Think about what Cramer has said.

And then have a look at the following email.

= = = = =Begin Message= = = = =

Message # : 727

Message Sent: 02/22/2006 08:57:48

From: AHELLER3@bloomberg.net|ANDY HELLER|EXIS CAPITAL MANAGEM

To: JONKALIKOW@bloomberg.net|JONATHAN KALIKOW|STANFIELD CAPITAL

Subject: CNBC – FAIRFAX

Reply:

He did this one time before, and the stock went down 3 on the open, then closed up 1. the way to get this thing down is to get them where they eat, like the credit analysts and holders. we’re taking this baby down for the count. ads and I are going to toronto in 2 weeks for a group lunch. J

= = = = =End Message= = = = =

* * * * * * * *

That email was authored by a top employee of Exis Capital, which is an offshoot of SAC Capital — said by some to be the most powerful hedge fund on Wall Street. We can’t be certain who, aside from the email’s author and “ads” (Adam D. Sender, head of Exis), attended that “group lunch.” But from other emails we know that a particular “group” of hedge fund managers did, indeed, intend to take “this baby down for the count.”

The “baby” was Fairfax Financial, a major, publicly listed insurance and financial firm.

The above email (acquired through discovery in Fairfax’s lawsuit against some members of the “group”) makes reference in the first line to journalist Herb Greenberg, who bashed Fairfax on CNBC, apparently causing the stock to go “down 3 on the open.” Other emails in our collection (we’ll publish a couple more of them) suggest that Herb’s reporting involved nothing more than contacting the “group” to find out what he was supposed to say.

* * * * * * * *

Herb took Fairfax “down 3 at the open” in February 2006, right at the time that Herb, a founding editor of TheStreet.com, received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission. TheStreet.com also got a subpoena. So did Jim Cramer, the owner of TheStreet.com. Short seller David Rocker, a member of the “group” and then the largest outside shareholder of TheStreet.com, got a subpoena too.

At the time, the commission had opened a formal investigation into Gradient Analytics, a financial research firm that stood accused by multiple former employees of manufacturing false “independent” research reports in cahoots with short sellers (namely, the “group”) and letting the short sellers trade ahead of the reports’ publication.

The “group” – which also included “prominent investor” Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates – had a similar scam going with “independent research” firm Morgan Keegan. Deep Capture reporter Judd Bagley broke that story more than a month ago. Bloomberg News, which seems to be the only major media outfit willing to write critically about these “prominent investors,” picked the story up last week.

The Wall Street Journal published a major, front-page article that exposed the dubious tactics that Jim Chanos and affiliated short sellers used to demolish public companies.

But that article was published more than twenty years ago — in 1985.

Since then, the Journal has not published a single negative story about Chanos and his friends. It has not published a single investigative story about abusive short selling.

When David Kansas, a founding editor of TheStreet.com, was running The Wall Street Journal “Money & Investing” section, that part of the paper served as little more than a mouthpiece for Rocker, Cohen, Chanos and affiliated “prominent investors.”

But last week, even The Wall Street Journal had to acknowledge that Chanos is now the target of an SEC investigation.

* * * * * * * *

When the SEC issued subpoenas in the Gradient investigation, one former Gradient employee provided a sworn affidavit stating that Herb Greenberg held his negative stories so that David Rocker could establish short positions that would make money when Herb’s stories caused stocks to do such things as go “down 3 at the open.”

At the time, Jon Markman, a founding editor of TheStreet.com and later managing editor of MSN Money was running a hedge fund out of Gradient’s back office. Former Gradient employees said that Markman was also trading ahead of Herb’s negative stories and Gradient’s false negative information. If true, this would likely be illegal.

But SEC officials say that the investigation in February 2006 was aimed at bigger prey than just Gradient and a few journalists. The commission was aware that some “prominent investors” were, in the words of our email author, taking companies “down for the count.” Good people at the SEC (the rank and file) hoped to put a stop to this.

But when the subpoenas were issued, Herb, Cramer and others in their media clique went berserk. They said journalists don’t have special relationships with short sellers. They said short sellers don’t destroy companies. Cramer famously vandalized his government subpoena – live on CNBC.

Under this “media” pressure, the SEC chairman announced that it would not enforce the subpoenas. Later, the SEC dropped its investigation altogether.

In an interview with Bloomberg News about the decision not to enforce the subpoenas, SEC attorney Kathleen Bisaccia said this: “To have the chairman publicly slap us in the face for doing our jobs – that really crushed the spirit of a lot of people for a long time.”

Indeed, former SEC officials say that this was a pivotal moment in SEC history. With morale sapped, the commission all but ceased to function.

Certainly, it did not stop the short sellers who would soon begin efforts to take some of Wall Street’s biggest financial institutions “down for the count.”

* * * * * * * *

Herb Greenberg, the journalist who took Fairfax “down 3 at the open,” and who was alleged to have allowed at least one short seller in the “group” to trade ahead of his stories, now runs an “independent” financial research firm that advertises itself as “bridging financial journalism and forensic analysis.”

We believe that Herb receives the bulk of his income from the above-mentioned “group” and affiliated “prominent investors.”

* * * * * * * *

From the above email it is evident that in addition to working with corrupt journalists, the “group” sought to destroy Fairfax Financial by getting “them where they eat.” That is, the hedge funds sought to “take this baby down for the count” by cutting off the company’s access to capital.

Sometimes “prominent investors” will merely dish dirt to a company’s lenders. Other times, the schemes are more complicated, with investors in their network actually financing the company. This gives them access to inside information and (in the case of convertible debentures) to stock that can be lent to affiliated short sellers.

In other cases, “prominent investors” will buy the company’s debt, package it into “collateralized debt obligations” (financial weapons of mass destruction that were pioneered by Michael Milken’s team at Drexel Burnham Lambert), and then trade it in such a way as to make it seem as if the company is in trouble.

When the time is right, the “prominent investors” fob off the debt to some witless or compliant pension fund. Then they tell people that they’re no longer financing the company – the company’s been “cut off.”

Meanwhile, the company will be subjected to unbridled “naked” short selling – hedge funds illegally selling stock that they do not actually possess (phantom stock) to manipulate down the share price. (By way of example: when the above email was written, SEC data showed that millions of phantom Fairfax shares had been “failing to deliver” on a daily basis.

What usually happens is that legitimate lenders see the plummeting stock price. They see a supposed “financial partner” yanking credit. They see the negative media. They see the debt trading at disturbing prices. They have short sellers feeding them horrible news about the company.

The legitimate lenders know the news is false. They know the company is credit worthy. But the negativity itself becomes a liability. The falling stock price is a liability. The legitimate lenders get worried. They raise their cost of capital, or cut if off altogether.

And so the “baby” goes “down for the count.”

* * * * * * * *

Fairfax survived this onslaught. Other companies were not so lucky.

Last year, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and dozens of other companies all went bust in a similar pattern — waves of naked short selling slightly preceding false stories planted in the media and then, suddenly, a financial “partner” cutting off a source of capital.

That is, short sellers got these companies “where they eat.”

Did the short sellers “cause” these companies to collapse? If a sniper shoots at a man who is swimming in a dangerous ocean current, and the man drowns, we cannot say for sure that the sniper “caused” the man’s death. But we can say that shooting at struggling swimmers is a crime.

Which short sellers committed the crimes? Only the SEC and the FBI can tell us for sure.

But we know which “group” attacked Fairfax Financial. We know that this same “group” and affiliated “prominent investors” attacked the big financial companies that collapsed last year. And we know that the people in this “group” are not passive investors.

Rather, when they attack a “baby,” they seek to take it “down for the count.”

Given that the collapse of the financial companies caused an economic catastrophe that will wipe out the jobs and savings accounts of millions of Americans, it seems that the “group” and affiliated “prominent investors” warrant further attention.

* * * * * * * *

One “prominent investor” is Adam Sender, proprietor of Exis Capital, the hedge fund that employs the author of the above email. As you will recall, Exis is an offshoot of SAC Capital, which is managed by Steve Cohen – described by BusinessWeek magazine as “the most powerful trader on the Street.”

As I noted in my previous piece, a former Mafia soldier turned private investigator offered to have one of Sender’s business partners buried in the Nevada desert. Sender claims to have declined this offer, but an FBI recording (hear it again here) suggests that Sender paid more than $200,000 to that former Mafia soldier and that Sender intended to “fix” his business partner and somehow bring about a “doomsday.”

Sender also hired a thug named Spyro Contogouris to harass and threaten executives of Fairfax Financial – part of the “group” effort to take that “baby down for the count.” In upcoming stories, I will publish some of Spyro’s shocking emails. In one, he told an FBI agent that somebody was threatening his life. He claimed that it was lawyers working for Fairfax Financial.

But that claim seems somewhat absurd. Fairfax Financial is a Canadian insurance company run by a mild-mannered immigrant from India named Prem Watsa, who is known as “the Warren Buffett of Canada.”

Given that Spyro wrote his email shortly before he was arrested by the FBI agent, and given that this FBI agent was investigating the “group,” it is possible that Spyro either made up the story to solicit sympathy, or the “group” was threatening Spyro’s life to prevent him from testifying.

Either way, it says something about the state of the American media that this intrigue, involving a major financial firm and some of the nation’s most “prominent investors,” is not front page news.

* * * * * * * *

The recipient of the email promising to take Fairfax “down for the count” was Jonathan Kalikow of Stanfield Capital, a hedge fund specialized in the trading of collateralized debt obligations.

Jonathan is a member of the mighty Kalikow family. The patriarch of this family is “prominent investor” Peter Kalikow, who was one of the largest financial backers of the stock manipulation firm run by Ivan Boesky, the famous criminal from the 1980s.

But Peter Kalikow is perhaps best known as the former owner of The New York Post.

When Kalikow owned the Post, the newspaper’s fleet of delivery trucks was handed over to members of New York’s five organized crime families. With Bonanno Mafia soldier Richard “Shellack-head” Cantarella presiding over the delivery bay, guns and drugs were loaded into the Post’s newspaper trucks and transported throughout the city.

Indeed, the New York Post became one of La Cosa Nostra’s principal smuggling operations.

* * * * * * * *

The other members of the “group” — David Rocker, Steve Cohen of SAC Capital, Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates, and Dan Loeb of Third Point – have been discussed at length on this website. In upcoming installments, I will tell you more about them and others in their network.

They are all “prominent investors.”

To be continued…

* * * * * * * *

Mark Mitchell is a reporter for DeepCapture.com. He previously worked as an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal in Europe, a 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. Email: mitch0033@gmail.com

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Bernard L. Madoff’s fraud is “stunning,” says the SEC. It is a crime of “epic proportions.” But, says the SEC, we have nothing to worry about. The SEC caught the bad guy. It “moved swiftly” to protect the integrity of the financial markets.

Nonsense.

The only thing “stunning” is that the SEC continues to condone and even fraternize with the organized mob of hedge fund miscreants who have destroyed hundreds of companies, wiped out the jobs of countless ordinary folks, and brought our financial system to the brink of ruin.

The Madoff case may one day prove to be “epic,” but right now it can best be described as “pathetic” – or just plain “weird.”

Apparently, the SEC began receiving tips from Madoff’s enemies (rival brokerages, private investigators working for rival hedge funds, etc.) several years ago. The commission made inquiries, but took no action.

Then, earlier this week, Madoff purportedly had some kind of nervous breakdown, announcing to his sons that he was a criminal.

If we can believe the news reports, the sons then called the FBI, which dispatched an agent to Madoff’s apartment.

Madoff, dressed in a baby blue bathrobe and slippers, opened the door, and said, “I know why you are here.”

With that, the agent arrested Madoff, and within a few hours the FBI and the SEC had whipped out cases accusing Madoff of wrong-doing, but providing few details.

Indeed, it is clear from reading these cases that the FBI and the SEC know nothing about Madoff’s market making and hedge fund firm except that two employees (Madoff’s two sons) have made the vague claim that Madoff told them, vaguely, that his hedge fund was “a giant Ponzi scheme.”

Madoff’s lawyer says his client has admitted to no such crime.

Children do not usually turn in their fathers to the FBI unless they bear other grudges. And it is standard operating procedure for shady high-finance predators to sniff out and prey on feuding relatives who are in business together.

This in no way suggests that Madoff is clean, but it raises the possibility that even dirtier people orchestrated the demise of Madoff and his hedge fund in order to absorb his more lucrative (and crooked?) market making operation.

An alternative explanation comes from Bill Cara, one of the nation’s more perceptive business writers. He concludes that Madoff “is just the beginning. I don’t know, of course, more than you, but…I think he has in fact indicted himself to cause prosecutors to investigate the entire corrupt system.”

Whatever the real story, it is clear that market makers are accessories to a scheme that is much, much bigger than Madoff.

The key players in this scheme are 20 or so mega-billionaire hedge fund managers, who operate with a supporting cast that includes not just market makers, but also smaller hedge funds, rogue prime brokerages, corrupt lawyers, dishonest journalists, bogus one-man credit rating agencies, dubious index trackers, bribed “experts,” skalawag statisticians, compromised professors, private investigators, crooked financial researchers, captured government regulators, hustlers, felons, thugs and mafiosi.

The mega-billionaires masterminded their scheme in the 1980s, and ever since, they and their progeny have been working together – raiding and destroying public companies for profit. In the rubble of these attacks (there are hundreds of examples) one can almost always find evidence of unrestrained naked short selling (people selling things that they do not possess – phantom stock, phantom bonds, phantom mortgage backed securities, phantom CDOs, all manner of phantom derivatives).

This is the organized exploitation of our national clearing and settlement system – a system that fails utterly to ensure that traders actually deliver that which they have sold. If the SEC and FBI are looking for a “Ponzi scheme” of “epic proportions” – this is it.

Mr. Madoff surely knows something about this scheme. Market makers (Madoff’s operation was among the better known) are exempt from rules prohibiting naked short selling. They can sell stock that they have not yet borrowed or purchased, so long as they are legitimately “making a market” (i.e. maintaining liquidity) — and only if they intend to settle the trade soon after. In practice, however, billionaire hedge fund managers have rented market makers’ exemptions to manipulate markets with phantom securities – a blatant crime that is rarely prosecuted.

While Mr. Madoff is talking to the SEC and the FBI, I am going to begin telling you more about the scheme that is bigger than Bernie. Soon, I will name those 20 mega-billionaires, their supporting cast — and the man who is their guru. The evidence is pouring in – there is much to reveal.

But for now, let me leave you with a quotation from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s “Notice 93-77.” Published in 1993, it reads:

Shortly after the market crash of 1987, “then Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady referred to the clearance and settlement system as the weakest link in the nation’s financial system…Gerald Corrigan, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York noted: ‘The greatest threat to the stability of the financial system as a whole was the danger of a major default in one of these clearing and settlement systems…”

“The connection between a crisis in the clearance and settlement system and the financial industry was highlighted by the bankruptcy in 1990 of Drexel Burnham Lambert Group…As described in the [SEC’s] testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, near gridlock developed in the mortgage-backed securities market and in the corporate debt and equity markets where Drexel was an active participant.”

Now that our financial system has come to a screeching halt, read those words for clues as to how much worse things can get – and whom we need to stop to prevent that from happening.

* * * * * * * *

Mark Mitchell is a reporter for DeepCapture.com. He previously worked at the Wall Street Journal editorial page in Europe, Time magazine Asia, the Far Eastern Economic Review, and the Columbia Journalism Review. Email: mitch0033@gmail.com

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But it’s a start. Given that the CNS system is the one place the SEC can look, and might be able to do something about, it is instructive to see how well they are cleaning up unsettled trades there.  Towards that end, DeepCapture has analyzed the data that the SEC released last week. These graphs show their fine progress in that regard.

============================================================================
Any questions?

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The answer is: I don’t know, and I think no one knows. I suspect no one agent has the full picture of what is going on across all of these cracks. In fact, I suspect some of these cracks are so obscure no one has a clear picture of what is going on in them individually, let alone collectively.

To some degree this is knowable a priori. We have a system that is shielded from scrutiny of every type. State regulators cannot successfully subpoena it (as various state regulators have told me) because the DTCC argues it is shielded by federal regulation. Yet when Feds try to look inside it they are simply rebuffed, and are helpless to assert themselves (as a high-level SEC official told some colleagues of mine). The Feds do not understand it (as a former DTCC employee and various Feds have told me). On those occasions that the Feds do get to look inside the system,  they get shined-on (as a former DTCC official tells me and a former SEC official confirms).  In fact, four years ago when I began this quest, the first thing I tried to do was to find out who regulated the DTCC, and quickly discovered that, other than a brief mention in an obscure GAO report, even the Feds are not sure if they regulate it.  And yet, through this opaque system the treasure of the ages passes every week. Such system-design is a recipe for disaster.

To a lesser degree this is knowable a posteriori, though getting data about the system from the system is an exercise in Kafkaesque futility. There are endless anecdotes of trades that won’t settle, of course. There is also the partial information expressed by the Reg SHO list.  There are various FOIA responses which have been pried from the SEC. And for the true aficionados, there are, lately, data files that the SEC periodically releases to the public regarding failures in one of the cracks mentioned, the CNS. Making use of these files is impractical for any members of the general public who do not employ an economist, statistician, and database expert to work the data.

Fortunately, DeepCapture employs an economist, a statistician, and a database expert to work the data. In the following series of posts I am going to reveal their output, stressing again that the failures I will be disclosing are not the totality of failures, but simply a fraction of the total, residing in just one of the cracks (the CNS) into which our federal regulator is permitted to peer.

Here is a chart showing the CNS failures from 2004, the year Reg SHO was adopted, through Q1, 2008:

Here is the same data with some key Reg SHO dates noted:

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The first category is comprised of a very small number of journalists who have deliberately whitewashed the dubious activities of their short selling sources. These journalists–such as Herb Greenberg (whose stories for MarketWatch.com invariably served the interests of the same short sellers who are now paying Herb’s salary), and former BusinessWeek reporter Gary Weiss (who works with a cast of convicted criminals and flimflammers to smear the reputations of people who are critical of short selling crimes)–are, at some level, corrupt.

The second, larger category is comprised of journalists who gorge on the junk food fed to them by the hedge fund lobby, subsequently farting out the predictable fog – “short sellers are vital to the markets;” “short sellers are vital media sources;” “short sellers were right about company X because company X is now bankrupt.” To which you say, yeah, but some of those short sellers commit crimes that destroy companies – and the journalists say, yeah, that might be, but it’s hard to prove a crime, deadlines loom, and sloth has its appeal, so “fart, fart, fart.”

The third category is comprised of the small but growing number of journalists who have actually spent some time chewing on the data and the evidence – and are now digesting this nourishing roughage into something a bit more solid – something like stories that show that short selling shenanigans just might have contributed to the near total collapse of the American financial system.

As evidence that the latter sort of journalists do, indeed, exist, consider that no less than five Wall Street Journal reporters spent several weeks working together on an investigative story about how short selling might have helped fuel the panic that nearly took down Morgan Stanley in September.

The result, published yesterday, revealed that:

• Hedge fund managers Dan Loeb and Israel Englander pulled their money out of Morgan after taking large short positions in the company. Jim Chanos, head of the short seller lobby, also yanked his money, though he claims not to have been short Morgan. (The unstated suggestion is that the shorts might have worked together – simultaneously pulling their billions in order to create the illusion of a run on the bank.)

• At the same time that the hedge funds were yanking their money and taking big short positions, somebody bombarded the market with false rumors about Morgan losing access to credit. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and the Securities and Exchange Commission are looking into whether short sellers were responsible for these rumors.

• While the false rumors circulated, the price of Morgan Stanley credit default swaps soared. The New York AG and the SEC are examining “whether traders bought swaps at high prices to spark fear about Morgan’s stability in order to profit on other trading positions [short sales], and whether trading involved bogus price quotes and sham trades.”

• This “pattern of trading, which previously had battered securities firms Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman, now is dogging Citigroup, whose stock fell 60% last week to a 16-year low.” (The unstated suggestion, contrary to what the Journal used to tell us all the time, is that it is not just “bad management” that causes stock prices to lose half their value in a few days.)

The Journal might have done one better by noting that Loeb, Englander, and Chanos are part of a tight clique of hedge fund managers who tend to attack the same companies.

The Journal might also have pointed out that when these hedge fund managers attack, they often “share ideas” (ie., spout the same false information and distorted analysis about their victim companies, sometimes anonymously on Internet message boards).

And it would have been worth noting that the companies targeted by these hedge fund managers are invariably victimized by naked short selling. That is, whenever these particular hedge funds are swarming, somebody is selling a lot of stock that they do not possess, and therefore failing to deliver the stock on time.

The SEC’s “failure to deliver” data for September will become public in a couple of weeks. If the data shows, as I suspect it will, that Morgan Stanley was targeted by illegal naked short selling, then maybe The Wall Street Journal will do a follow-up report.

Before that, The Journal’s reporters could take a look at the data through June, which shows quite clearly that in addition to the “pattern of trading” cited in yesterday’s story, Bear Stearns was buried under waves of naked short selling, beginning in January. On the day that CNBC’s David Faber reported the false news (fed to him by a hedge fund “I have known for twenty years”) that Goldman Sachs had cut off Bear’s access to credit, more than a million shares of Bear Stearns were sold naked, failing to be delivered within the allotted three days. Most of those shares – and another 10 million Bear Stearns shares sold short in March – have, to this day, never been delivered.

Then there is the data that shows that, market wide, “failures to deliver” doubled between 2007 and 2008, and peaked at 2 billion shares at the end of June – just before the SEC issued its July 15 “emergency order” protecting 19 big financial institutions from naked short selling.

While the “emergency order” was in place, stock prices increased dramatically. Within weeks after the “emergency order” was lifted, a number of those 19 protected companies – including Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac – saw their stocks plunge to crisis levels, and were then vaporized, nationalized, or bailed out.

The data through June shows that nearly all of those companies had been hit with massive levels of naked short selling, with between one million and 12 million shares failing to deliver in multiple spurts of several days. Washington Mutual, IndyMac, and a few dozen other now-defunct financial companies were clobbered with even higher levels of fails — day after day for weeks on end. Many non-financial companies have been hit even harder.

In fact, the available data understates the problem. There could be ten, 100, or many more times as many failures to deliver, but we cannot know for sure because that black-box Wall Street outfit called the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation refuses to release more complete data. It also refuses to reveal which criminal hedge funds are engaged in naked short selling.

Meanwhile, the DTTC vehemently denies that naked short selling is a problem and attacks journalists, critics, and former DTTC employees who say otherwise – all part of a disinformation campaign orchestrated with help from the corrupt former BusinessWeek reporter Gary Weiss and his criminal accomplices, some of whom are paid by Dan Loeb, the hedge fund manager who features in yesterday’s Journal story.

Gary has gone so far as to hijack Wikipedia in cahoots with a Wikipedia administrator and former MI6 agent named Linda Mack. Anybody is supposed to be able to edit the online encyclopedia, but until recently only Gary and Linda Mack could touch the entry on “naked short selling” (which of course said there is no such crime). Gary flat out denies working with the DTCC and says that if somebody saw him go into the DTTC’s office, it was to “use an ATM machine.” He also continues to flat-out deny that he has ever edited Wikipedia, even though he has been exposed by The Register, a respected British publication.

After The Wall Street Journal figures out why the DTTC is protecting criminals, it could investigate why the SEC has never prosecuted a hedge fund for naked short selling, and why the Wall Street cronies who run the commission quashed at least two major investigations into suspected short selling crimes.

One of those investigations (targeting research firm Gradient Analytics, but meant to be the beginning of larger inquiry into the activities of Gradient’s short selling clients, was shut down under pressure from the aforementioned corrupt journalists, several of whom (Herb Greenberg, Jim Cramer, and Carol Remond of Dow Jones Newswires) had received government subpoenas because of their unusually close ties to Gradient and the aforementioned clique of short sellers.

Another investigation (into suspected naked short selling that SEC whistleblower Gary Aguirre described in a letter to the U.S. Congress as having the potential to “seriously injure the financial markets”) was shut down under pressure from Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, who apparently had “juice” at the SEC. (For details see the U.S. Senate’s 700 page report on the matter. When the Senate refers to “market manipulation,” it is describing naked short selling.)

In yesterday’s story, The Journal notes that “sales of credit-default swaps were a profit gold mine for Wall Street. But, ironically, during those tumultuous few days in mid-September, the swaps market turned on Morgan Stanley like a financial Frankenstein.”

The Journal should have noted that naked short selling, too, was a gold mine for Morgan Stanley, and that given Mack’s role in shutting down the SEC investigation, it is kind of ironic that the Morgan CEO later found himself complaining to the SEC that short sellers had illegally manipulated his stock to single digits. Indeed, this was a stunning admission that a crime long denied by Wall Street does, in fact, occur.

The Journal could also investigate why the aforementioned corrupt journalists smeared Gary Aguirre, circulating the story (completely false, according to the U.S. Senate and the SEC inspector general, and all available evidence) that the SEC whistleblower had been fired for poor performance. There is also the question as to why these journalists, most of whom have yet to publish a story that was not sourced from the aforementioned clique of hedge funds, went to such lengths to smear other critics of naked short selling – everybody from Deep Capture reporter Patrick Byrne to the blogger who calls himself the Easter Bunny. .

The Journal might also be interested to know that one of those short selling hedge funds, Kingsford Capital (managed by corrupt journalist Herb Greenberg’s former co-editor at TheStreet.com) announced that it would begin paying my salary at the Columbia Journalism Review (where I was then an editor), just before CJR was going to publish a story about naked short sellers (including Kingsford Capital) and captured journalists (including Herb). Indeed, three of the four journalists who have begun work on major stories about naked short selling have ended up shelving or watering down their stories, not long before receiving funding or salaries from this same clique of hedge funds (more on this in a coming dispatch).

Perhaps a shifty hedge fund will offer jobs to the Journal’s hard-working reporters, too. Either that, or they will get smeared as “conspiracy theorists” or “knuckleheads who don’t understand markets and were fired from their previous jobs.” Maybe the hard-working reporters will give up.

Or maybe they’ll keep chewing on the facts and publish a story about how captured regulators, corrupt journalists, a colorful cast of convicted criminals, the black box DTTC, and the aforementioned clique of hedge funds all sought to cover-up a crime that is now implicated in the greatest market cataclysm since 1929.

Now, that would be some good shit.

* * * * * * * *

Tipsters, crusaders, and thinkers — feel free to contact me at mitch0033@gmail.com. Same goes for journalists wishing to obtain data and evidence — free of charge, of course.

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At 9:30 pm, CNBC broadcasted these words: “naked short selling is what’s causing a lot of the problems in the market.”

The words came from former SEC Chairman Harvey Pitt, who added that “there’s a very simple solution…if you want to sell a stock short, you have to have a legally enforceable rule to produce that stock on settlement day. That’s all it takes.”

Force hedge funds to actually deliver the shares that they sell. Force them to actually purchase or borrow real stock before they sell it. If market manipulators sell what they do not possess, put them in jail.

Yes, that’s “all it takes.” It really is that simple.

But until last night, we’d never heard it on CNBC.

If the SEC completely stops naked short selling, then demand will more closely reflect the supply of real stock. Prices could get a boost, as they did last summer, when the SEC issued an “emergency order” temporarily cracking down on naked short selling of stock in 19 big financial companies. And the massacres of public companies would stop.

Of course, it might be too late. A sinking economy can’t revive a sinking market – no matter who threw us down the well. The criminals should have been stopped before they put us in here.

It says something awful about the state of the nation that we began having a half-conversation about this issue only after CEOs of big Wall Street banks – the very banks whose prime brokerages happily profited from the naked short selling of their hedge fund clients – found themselves looking down the gun barrels of their former partners in crime.

A few quivering Mafiosi pee in their pants, and now we wonder whether one Mob boss should be protected from another Mob boss. Not a word about the hundreds of smaller, innocent companies that have been brutalized by these goons.

How sad that when CNBC airs a simple truth – “naked short selling is what’s causing a lot of the problems in the market” – we have to call it “history.” How sad that this “history” took place at 9:30 pm, when nobody was watching. How sad that it took place only because the CEO of Citigroup has been begging for an ill-advised, outright ban on short selling.

Sure, Jim Cramer has been ranting about “diabolical” naked short sellers on “Mad Money.” Tonight he said (with some justification) that naked short selling was destroying capitalism. But never on CNBC proper. Never in the segments that CNBC portrays as “news” — as opposed to the loony rantings of a bald sociopath.

I am reminded of Russia, where the television news stations are tools of the government-mafia oligarchy, but make sure to air the occasional late-night interview with some dissident – carefully selected for his squirrely appearance and checkered background. The illusion of “balance” makes the propaganda all the more insidious.

America is not yet Russia. But with its ransacked financial system, its billionaire cronies, its captured regulators, and media like CNBC, our nation is not quite “America” either.

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Yeah? Well, read this:

That is an email to Paul Berger, then the associate director of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The author, a Washington lawyer, is referring to Ralph Ferrara, a former SEC lawyer who apparently managed to parlay his government service into mansions, maids and millions – by way of a plum position at a law firm called Debevoise & Plimpton.

As you can see, the email was sent in January 2005, soon after the SEC had launched an investigation into alleged naked short selling, insider trading and other misconduct at Pequot Capital, a powerful hedge fund. That same month, the SEC’s lead investigator in the case, Gary Aguirre, was shut out of meetings in which the Commission’s top officials gave Pequot’s lawyers privileged information about the investigation.

By the summer of 2005, some of the SEC’s top officials, including Paul Berger, were maneuvering to have the Pequot investigation whitewashed. When Aguirre tried to interview John Mack, formerly chairman of Pequot and then CEO of Morgan Stanley, he was told to lay off because Mack’s lawyers had “juice” with Berger and SEC Director of Enforcement Linda Thomsen.

Aguirre complained about this in a formal letter to Berger. In response, Berger arranged for Aguirre to be fired – never mind that the SEC had just commended Aguirre for his “unmatched dedication.” At precisely the same time, Berger told Mack’s law firm that he was quite ready to leave public service, and that what he’d really like is to have a job at Mack’s law firm. The name of Mack’s law firm (the law firm with “juice”) was Debevoise & Plimpton – i.e., the same law firm whose multi-million dollar paychecks to former SEC officials had inspired that salivating email.

Perhaps the lawyer who sent that email was merely updating Berger on his colleague’s career trajectory. I have no evidence that the lawyer was trying to influence Berger or the SEC. But the email is a good example of the kinds of conversations that occur with disturbing regularity at our nation’s market regulator. No doubt, those maids and millions were top of mind as the SEC’s associate director of enforcement considered whether he ought to bury an investigation into some serious crimes, fire the whistleblower, and simultaneously apply for a job at the alleged criminal’s law firm.

In the summer of 2006, Aguirre wrote an 18-page letter to the U.S. Congress, blowing this scandal wide open. In this letter, Aguirre noted that his rank-and-file colleagues at the SEC believed that the naked short selling they were investigating had the “potential to seriously injure the financial markets.” So it was all the more appalling when–in November, 2006–the SEC leadership officially closed the investigation into Pequot. In doing so, the SEC said it had found no evidence of insider trading, but it said nothing about the far more serious charges of naked short selling and market manipulation.

Two U.S. Senate Committees spent more than a year looking into this matter. In multiple reports (one more than 700 pages long), Senate investigators did not refer directly to “naked short selling,” but from their descriptions of “market manipulation” and “wash sales” (which are often used to hide naked shorts) it is clear that they believed that Pequot engaged in naked short selling, and that this crime did, indeed, have the potential to “seriously injure the financial markets.”

The Senate concluded that everything about the case – the special treatment received by Pequot and Mack’s lawyers, Aguirre’s dismissal, Berger’s solicitation of Debevoise & Plimpton – was as seedy as can be.

“At worse,” the U.S. Senate stated in one report, “the picture is colored with tones of a possible cover-up.”

Last month – after naked short selling and other hedge fund tricks contributed to the biggest financial cataclysm since 1929 – the SEC inspector general issued a 191-page report confirming just about everything in the U.S. Senate reports. It is impossible to read these reports without concluding that this is the biggest scandal in the history of the SEC–a scandal that entailed a cover-up of precisely those same crimes that “severely injured” (or rather, nearly vaporized) our financial markets.

The SEC leadership responded to the inspector general last week by assigning an SEC employee, who happened to be an administrative judge, but who had no jurisdiction and was not acting in her capacity as a judge, to issue a short document stating that the SEC was innocent – that nobody had acted inappropriately in the case of Aguirre and Pequot Capital. With this document in hand, the SEC announced that it had been “cleared” by “a judge” – making it sound as if there had been some sort of official, independent ruling.

In other words, the corrupt SEC leadership tried to convince us that the corrupt SEC leadership would have the final say on whether the SEC’s leadership was corrupt. The cover-up continued. There was a time when the nation’s journalists would swarm on an abomination such as this. But, alas, there was hardly a peep from our media. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal and other publications helpfully reported that a “judge” had “cleared” the SEC leadership of wrong-doing.

But this scandal is not under the rug yet. And it might grow in magnitude. In a civil case brought by Aguirre, a federal district court ruled earlier this year that the SEC is far from “cleared,” and that it must hand over thousands of internal documents pertaining to the Pequot investigation. The SEC has largely ignored the ruling, turning over documents with much of the relevant stuff blacked out, but it is doubtful that the commission will get away with this. Tomorrow, the court will hold a hearing at which the SEC will likely be ordered to hand over more documents – including those containing evidence of the “market manipulation” (read: “naked short selling”) that helped “seriously injure the financial markets.”

Meanwhile, Paul Berger, the former associate director of enforcement who tried to bury this case, has been made partner at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton. I’d tell you how much he’s getting paid for his “juice,” but I hesitate to incite a citizen insurrection.

* * * * * * * *

Mark Mitchell previously worked as a writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, chief business correspondent for Time Magazine in Asia, and as the editor responsible for the Columbia Journalism Review’s online critique of business journalism. Send tips to mitch0033@gmail.com

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There was an article in The New York Times yesterday about the SEC’s disgraceful ruling that it will take no disciplinary action against the SEC cronies at the center of the Gary Aguirre scandal. Read through the Times’ false veneer of objectivity, and it seems that reporter Walt Bogdanich is trying to say that it’s pretty damn strange that a corrupt SEC has been allowed to adjudicate its own corruption.

Stranger still, no other journalist has expressed outrage over this. Meanwhile, the nation’s mainstream media (The New York Times included) has yet to deliver a story describing the Aguirre scandal’s most important component – the bit that makes it the greatest scandal in the history of the SEC and which helps explain why the commission failed to stop a crime that later contributed to the near total collapse of the American financial system.

Readers of the mainstream media know only that Aguirre is the former SEC attorney who claimed that he was fired for political reasons after pursuing an “insider trading” case against Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack and a hedge fund called Pequot Capital. The real story – the one you don’t read in the papers – is that Aguirre has, all along, made it perfectly clear that his investigation – the one he says that Mack “stopped in its tracks” – was about much more than the relatively minor crime of “insider trading.”

Aguirre blew this scandal wide open in 2006, when he wrote an 18-page letter to the U.S. Congress. The letter reads: “I believe our capital markets face a growing risk from lightly or unregulated hedge funds just as our markets did in the 1920s from unregulated pools of money – then called syndicates, trusts or pools. Those unregulated pools were instrumental in delivering the 1929 Crash….There is growing evidence that today’s pools—hedge funds—have advanced and refined the practice of manipulating and cheating other market participants.”

Aguirre then described the investigation that he had led at the SEC. “The investigation was two-pronged,” he wrote. One prong concerned “insider trading.” However, the second, and far more important prong, concerned “market manipulation.” Specifically, Aguirre and his colleagues were investigating “two suspected violations: wash sales and naked shorts.”

“My colleagues,” Aguirre wrote, “believed [the naked short selling] held a greater potential to severely injure the financial markets.”

That is, Aguirre and his colleagues believed that naked short selling (hedge funds selling stock that they have not yet purchased or borrowed in order to drive down prices and destroy public companies) ranked high among the tactics that “were instrumental in delivering the 1929 Crash” – a repeat of which now seemed entirely possible since the tactic had been “refined” by hedge funds intent on “manipulating and cheating other market participants.” But the SEC rank-and-file’s attempt to investigate this crime was “stopped in its tracks” by SEC leaders who had been corrupted by Wall Street fat cats.

At the time when Aguirre released his letter, a small clique of influential journalists with close ties to certain Wall Street fat cats were going to great lengths to whitewash the crime of naked short selling (see “The Story of Deep Capture” for details). Unsurprisingly, some of these journalists quickly sought to discredit the SEC whistleblower. They reported that Aguirre’s investigation concerned only the minor infraction of insider trading, and that he had failed to present evidence that this minor infraction had occurred. The journalists also declared that Aguirre was untrustworthy – an eccentric who had been fired for poor performance.

After a year long investigation into the matter, however, the Senate Judiciary Committee completely vindicated Aguirre. It noted that Aguirre had been fired just two weeks after his supervisors had raved about his “unmatched dedication” in glowing written evaluations of his performance. It presented clear evidence that Mack’s lawyers were given special access to meetings in which Aguirre’s investigation was discussed. While the SEC was busy quashing the investigation and firing Aguirre for complaining about it, Paul Berger, then the SEC associate director of enforcement, was interviewing for a job at Mack’s law firm.

The Senate investigators concluded that they were “deeply troubled” by the SEC’s failure to look into Aguirre’s claims. “At worst,” the Senate report said, “the picture is colored with overtones of a possible cover-up.”

As part of this cover-up, the SEC eventually claimed that although Aguirre had been fired, the commission had nonetheless pressed forward with its “insider trading” investigation, finding no evidence that Pequot or Mack and committed any violations. However, the SEC has yet to reveal whether its rank-and-file were allowed to complete their investigation into the naked short selling that had the greater potential to “seriously injure the financial markets.”

SEC leaders remained uninterested in the crime until this past summer. Data for June showed that “failures to deliver” (phantom stock sold by naked short sellers) had peaked at more than 2 billion shares – an all time record. More important, the SEC’s cronies on Wall Street were now victims of the very crime that they had perpetrated and covered up. An avalanche of naked short selling, timed to coincide with a false news report on CNBC, had sparked the run on the bank that took down Bear Stearns. Now, other Wall Street institutions (including, yes, Morgan Stanley) were getting similarly clobbered. In mid-July, the SEC pronounced that naked short selling had the potential to “seriously damage” the financial system. It issued an “emergency order” protecting 19 big financial institutions (including Morgan Stanley) from the crime.

That kept the big banks safe for a time. But ultimately, short-sellers proved to be more skilled at cronyism than their former accomplices at the big banks. In August, under pressure from the short seller lobby, the SEC lifted its “emergency order.” In the next three weeks, a half-dozen major financial institutions were eliminated or nationalized. Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack (no doubt regretting that he had quashed the Aguirre investigation) hollered that he was next — that law-breaking short sellers were taking down his bank. The SEC responded by banning short selling outright in 900-plus companies. Meanwhile, everyone from Hillary Clinton to John McCain implicated naked short selling in the biggest financial cataclysm since 1929.

A few weeks later the SEC inspector general issued a 191-page report vindicating Gary Aguirre. The otherwise detailed report conspicuously failed to mention the naked short selling component of Aguirre’s investigation, but it contained many of the same findings that the Senate had described. The report, compiled over many months, concluded that Mack’s interference with Aguirre’s investigation raised “serious questions about the impartiality and fairness” of the SEC. The inspector general recommended that disciplinary action be taken against Aguirre’s supervisors, including SEC Director of Enforcement Linda Thomsen.

But last Friday, having spent no more than a few days reviewing the evidence, an SEC administrative judge declared that the SEC did not mishandle the Aguirre case, and that no disciplinary action would be taken. As Bogdanich’s story in The New York Times makes clear (though in not so many words), the ruling stinks to high hell.

For one, it remains unclear why in the world an SEC judge, as opposed to an independent court, is ruling on this matter. For another, it seems that the judge, Brenda Murray, was not even acting in the capacity of a judge. Rather, she issued her not-guilty verdict in the capacity of “an individual” who was asked by the SEC executive director to evaluate the inspector general’s findings.

In other words, there is good evidence that the leaders of our nation’s market regulator are as corrupt as Banana Republic cops on the brothel beat – that they have engaged in a cover-up that might have helped rock the very foundations of the American financial system – but this evidence will be evaluated in no court. There will be no legal proceeding whatsoever. Instead, an “individual” at the SEC, as a favor to the SEC executive director, says the SEC did no wrong…and that’s it – end of story.

Really, end of story. Because, aside from Walt Bogdanich at The New York Times (a paper that won’t call an “outrage” by its proper name, and which seems incapable of printing the words “naked short selling”), no mainstream journalist seems to give a flying hoot.

* * * * * * * *

Contact Mark Mitchell at mitch0033@gmail.com

- Fox-Pitt analyst David Trone in a research note, today

Here we go again. A giant bank has some weaknesses, but it is, in all respects, a going concern — except that short sellers are peddling rumors and phantom stock, so the share price is plummeting. With the share price in peril, the rating agencies (perhaps over vigilant after taking so much criticism from short sellers and the media) put the bank’s debt ratings on review for a downgrade.

Meanwhile, short sellers corner the market for the bank’s credit default swaps, and point to the value of the CDS as evidence that the bank is doomed. They feed the media with analyses and bogus indexes that mark the bank’s assets to nothing. They spread the news that the bank’s counterparties and trading partners could bail.

The clients and partners stay with the bank. Up until now they have no reason not to.

But then, there’s more naked short selling, the hedge funds flooding the market with stock they do not possess – phantom stock. Maybe the hedge funds send a fax to CNBC with one last rumor. Over the course of a day or two, the stock price is slashed in half.

Then, suddenly, the stock is in the single digits.

As a result of the low stock price – not as result of the balance sheet – the bank’s partners and clients freak out. This time, they really do pull their money.

End of bank.

And if there are one or two more like this — end of story. The financial system will be fried.

We’ve seen precisely the same scenario with Bear Stearns, Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, and IndyMac. A variant of this scenario took down AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and perhaps 200 other companies before them.

Morgan Stanley could be gone by next week.

We have new data for September that shows that there was plenty of short selling of Morgan Stanley (and other companies) even during the SEC’s ban on short selling, which ended Wednesday at midnight. Some hedge funds ignored the ban, and the SEC did nothing.

Worse, in place of the ban, the SEC has offered only tepid new rules (cheered by the short seller lobby) that do little to prevent the sale of phantom stock. Under these rules, short sellers do not have to borrow real stock before they sell it. They merely have to “locate” the stock. The SEC doesn’t say how it’s supposed to know whether a short seller has actually located real stock as opposed to telling his broker, “yeah, I located it, it’s in your mother’s wig” (which is pretty much how these conversations go).

Furthermore, the SEC gives hedge funds three days to deliver the stock they sell. This would be fine if they were required to possess real stock before selling. But since they are not, a hedge fund can offload a large block of phantom stock and let it eat away at the financial system for at least three days.

Sometimes, the hedge funds settle the trade with another block of phantom stock, transferred to them by a friendly broker. But even if they fail to deliver the stock, the SEC stipulates no serious penalties. Meanwhile, it shows no inclination to actually prosecute anyone for the jailable crime of short-side market manipulation.

I’m willing to bet anybody a sizeable amount of money that when the SEC releases its “failures to deliver” numbers for October, they will suggest unbridled illegal naked short selling of Morgan Stanley during this past week, even on days when the ban on all short selling was in place. The data will show that naked short selling rose to unprecedented levels just before somebody floated Wednesday’s false rumor that Morgan Stanley was going to lose its $9 billion deal with Mitsubishi.

And the data will show that after the ban was lifted, the law-breaking shorts went nuclear – with failures to deliver of well over a million shares every day. Ultimately, many millions of Morgan Stanley’s shares will be sold and never delivered, just as hedge funds have yet to deliver more than 10 million shares of Bear Stearns that they sold during that bank’s final days last March.

As I write this, Morgan’s stock price is in the single digits, trading around 7 bucks, down an astounding 70% in the 36 hours since the short selling ban was lifted. A death spiral like that does not happen naturally. Because of the short-battered stock price – and only the stock price (again, this has nothing to do with the balance sheet) — Moody’s today put Morgan’s long-term debt ratings on review for a downgrade.

I suspect another 15% off the stock price, and one more well-placed rumor, will do the trick. There will be a run on the bank. Morgan will be gone. And the global financial fire will blaze still hotter.

It is beyond surreal that our most prestigious financial media continue to allow this to happen. It is beyond comprehension that journalists – in possession of the evidence, and presumably in possession of their faculties – continue to spout the line, originally formulated by short-sellers and now woven into conventional wisdom – that this crisis is only about bad mortgages and bad managers and bad balance sheets.

One can argue that, in the long run, the world is better off without half of Wall Street – without its ponzi schemes and paper profits, the sickening salaries and arrogance. Certainly, anyone with a Shakespearean state of mind will appreciate the fates of Morgan Stanley, Lehman, and Bear – all of which eagerly pimped their dodgy prime brokerage services to the very short sellers who destroyed them.

But it does not require Shakespearean nuance to see that this crisis is not just about scandalous banks. It is about criminals destroying banks that are tawdry, yes, but possessing of some virtue, and capable, if left unmolested, of carrying on and contributing to society – perhaps even staving off a global calamity.

Moreover, these same criminals are destroying many other companies, most of which are run by honest people who labor far from the insalubrious alleyways of southern Manhattan. The SEC maintains a list of companies whose stock has failed to deliver in excessive quantities. As I explained in an earlier dispatch, many victims of naked short selling (including some of the big banks) do not appear on that list. But surely it is a scandal that more than 300 companies, many of them financial firms that have nothing to do with Wall Street, do appear on the list.

Surely, it is an even bigger scandal that around 100 of those companies have appeared on the list chronically, day after day, for months on end, and though the sheriff posts the names of these rape victims on its wall, it has yet to prosecute a single rapist. The SEC tells us that a billion shares remain undelivered on any given day — and yet it doesn’t bother to find out which hedge funds sold the phantom stock.

It might be too late, but if Washington and the financial media really want to save the world, they ought to start by demanding that hedge funds borrow real stock before they sell it. And what the heck: Maybe some newspaper could offer the radical suggestion that the SEC should tell hedge funds that they can either go to jail or close out all unsettled trades – today.

If one hedge fund manager were to get cuffed, all the others with outstanding “failures to deliver” might scramble to buy real stock so they can settle. The markets might soar. The innocent victims might get some relief. And the delinquents on Wall Street would get some time to clean up their acts.

Meanwhile, would anyone care to guess which company the naked short sellers will take down after Morgan Stanley?

And would anyone like to share a bunker with canned goods and weapons?

* * * * * * * *

If you’d like to place that bet on the Morgan Stanley data (I’ll give 2:1 odds that it will show short sellers offloading massive amounts of phantom stock , with more than a million “failures to deliver” every day) feel free to contact me. Mitch0033@gmail.com.

* * * * * * * *

Given that naked short selling precipitated the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which triggered global panic, it seems fair to say that the resumption of naked short selling could precipitate the collapse of another big bank, which will fuel still more panic, and then we will really be screwed.

Say what you will about Lehman’s balance sheet, that company was not going out of business until its stock price hit rock bottom, making it impossible to raise capital, and triggering a run on the bank. The stock price hit rock bottom because it was bombarded by naked short selling and false rumors.

Some financial media have been cheering the imminent lifting of the short-selling ban. According to these journalists, the ban did not prevent the stock market turmoil of the last couple weeks. Therefore, lifting the ban should not make things worse and short-selling is good for the markets and blah blah blah.

The media never cease to astound on this issue. The fact that markets have been bad does not mean they wouldn’t have been a whole lot worse without the ban. And if short-selling is good for markets, this is fully besides the point. The point is that naked short selling is most definitely not good for the markets, and, as of tomorrow, that very not-good-for-the-markets activity is going to be allowed to resume with the full acquiescence of the SEC and the financial media.

Look, on September 16, Morgan Stanley was trading around $26. On September 17, it hit a low of $11. The stock was slashed in half in less than a day. That tends to happen when a company is under a full-scale attack by naked short sellers.

On the day after Morgan Stanley was slashed in half, the SEC banned short selling. It is fair to say that if the SEC had not acted, Morgan Stanley would not be with us today.

After the SEC banned short selling, hedge funds stopped circulating false rumors about the companies they had been attacking. Today, in anticipation of the short selling ban coming to an end, hedge funds began circulating false rumors about Morgan Stanley – the most damaging being that Mitsubishi had pulled out of an agreement to inject $9 billion of capital into the bank.

What happens tomorrow when those rumor-mongering hedge funds resume naked short selling?

As one prominent economist said, forebodingly, “We will see.”

This was the premeditated, systematic destruction of market value by an elite crowd of Wall Street cronies who no doubt cackled with delight in the cleverness of their mischief-making. This was criminal behavior on an ungodly scale – the unprecedented looting of America.

Do you think I’m overstating this? Consider that the hedge funds who did this employed precisely the same tactics that precipitated the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.

One of these tactics, as almost everybody now finally realizes, is called “naked short selling.” It involves hedge funds and their brokers selling stock that they do not possess – phantom stock – to dilute supply and drive down prices.

Often, the short-selling saboteurs engage in other shenanigans – whispering scurrilous rumors, oozing innuendo, orchestrating bogus class action lawsuits, deploying armies of Internet message boards to foment negativity, paying seedy “independent” financial research shops to publish distorted analysis, hiring thugs to harass executives and their families, conducting corporate espionage, and instructing government cronies to launch dead-end investigations.

You never heard about this from the mainstream financial media. You never heard it because the market saboteurs were writing the media’s talking points. Some reporters were merely addicts, dependent on the dealers of distortion for negative stories. Other reporters were genuinely corrupt. They thought the market machinations were good fun. “I wanna play, too,” they said. They reveled in taking down companies, and then they asked their short-selling accomplices for jobs.

Our nation’s most influential financial journalists knew that naked short selling was rife. They knew that hundreds of companies had been victimized. They had all the data and they had every reason to believe that billions of phantom shares floating around the system could not be good. But they said naked short selling never happens. They said only bad CEOs and crazy people complain about short seller crimes. They whitewashed the biggest scandal of our lifetimes, and then our markets crumbled.

It was the darkest moment in the history of American journalism.

* * * * * * * *

In July, the SEC issued an “emergency order” to prevent naked short selling from destroying the financial system. The order required short sellers of stock in 19 financial companies to actually obtain real stock before selling it.

This was hardly intrusive, but the media, copying straight from the hedge fund lobby’s script, said that the SEC should leave the short sellers alone. The emergency order had hurt “market efficiency,” the journalists wrote, though common sense would suggest that a market cannot efficiently set prices when it is bloated by phantom supply. The emergency order decreased “liquidity,” the reporters wrote, though they provided no credible data to support this claim, and failed to explain how a liquid market in phantom stock benefits anyone other than a few hedge fund billionaires.

Even worse, some reporters argued that the SEC should not crack down on naked short selling because short sellers are “vital” sources of negative information to the media. What if some of these “vital” sources are manipulating markets? Criminals, apparently, are untouchable, so long as they dish dirt to reporters. The abomination riles all the more when you know (as I do, having studied thousands of these dirt-strewn stories) that the majority of them contain insinuation, omissions, and outright falsehoods.

At any rate, the financial media convinced the SEC to let its emergency order expire. Even as the markets nosedived, journalists, including CNBC’s Charlie Gasparino, were calling the emergency order “ridiculous,” and the SEC cowered. Within a few weeks Lehman Brothers was gone, Merrill Lynch was gone, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were nationalized, and American International Group, a company with a trillion dollars in assets, was trading for a dollar a share and soliciting handouts from the Fed.

On Wednesday of this week, the SEC rushed out new rules that purported “zero tolerance” for naked short selling. According to the SEC, there would now be a “hard” close out rule, requiring hedge funds to deliver real stock within three days of selling it.

Even if the SEC were to enforce a three day settlement, it wouldn’t do much, because the manipulators work like this: A hedge fund tells his broker to sell a million shares of XYZ. The broker doesn’t have any shares, but he sells them anyway. That is phantom stock and for three days it dilutes supply, and eats away at the financial system. When settlement day comes, the broker asks a second broker to sell him a million shares of XYX. The second broker doesn’t have any shares, but he sells a million shares of XYZ (the price now much lower) to the first broker, who uses the phantom stock to settle his initial sale of phantom stock.

When the second broker has to settle, he calls the first broker…and the phantom stock shuffle continues until the falling price makes it impossible for the company to raise capital. Then it’s bankruptcy, the stock is zero, and nobody has to deliver anything.

In any case, “Oooh, weee…‘zero tolerance.’ Really scary.” For years, hedge funds have habitually violated stock delivery requirements, and the SEC has done nothing. Big words didn’t scare anybody. When the SEC announced its new rules, the hedge fund lobby cheered, the media reported the cheers, and the manipulators went hog wild.

By Thursday afternoon, it was looking like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and countless smaller banks were on death row. Call this “liquidity.” Call it “market efficiency.” Call it what you like, but it wasn’t good. The meltdown was so severe that traders on Wall Street genuinely believed that Al Queda was taking down the financial system.

More likely, it was the small clique of terrorist hedge fund managers who are most beloved by our financial media. Alas, the SEC panicked. To forestall the end of the world, it decided on Thursday night to ban all short selling of stocks in 700-plus financial companies.

It is a shame that it had to come to that. Short-selling is a legitimate practice, and lots of people do it the legal way. Proper short selling probably keeps the markets honest. If the SEC had cracked down on illegal short selling long ago, the cataclysm would have been averted.

At any rate, maybe now would be a good time for the media to take a closer look at the naked short selling scandal. Stephen Moore, who works for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, said on CNBC that naked short selling caused this week’s turmoil. Why has the Journal not published an editorial expressing outrage?

The Journal’s editorial page, the finest in the country, rightly abhors government interventions, but this is not about free markets. It is about preserving property rights – the basic capitalist tenet that people must own what they sell. It is about stopping criminals.

Aside from the Journal’s editorial page, there is a world of media that has not been compromised by short sellers – a world of good reporters who live far from Wall Street and could be covering this scandal from multiple angles. They need to do so quickly. The SEC will lift its current ban. And if it doesn’t start prosecuting people – if we don’t get a permanent, market-wide, and properly enforced rule requiring short sellers to pre-borrow real stock – then it will once again be open season for hedge fund terrorism, and where our towering financial system once stood, there will be nothing but a gaping, smoldering hole.

]]> http://www.deepcapture.com/the-week-the-world-said-naked-short-selling/feed/ 27 http://www.deepcapture.com/the-short-seller-myth-of-market-efficiency/ http://www.deepcapture.com/the-short-seller-myth-of-market-efficiency/#comments Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:46:53 +0000 Mark Mitchell http://www.deepcapture.com/?p=432 In light of the news today that the SEC might not permanently apply its naked short selling “emergency order” to the entire market, and media reports that a study by Professor Arturo Bris is influencing this decision, we republish the following Deep Capture installment, which shows that Professor Bris quite blatantly fudged his numbers.

“The SEC’s public data say that on any given day over the first three months of this year, there were more than one billion shares that had been sold and failed to deliver (within the allotted 3 days) and that 70% of those fails were concentrated in just 100 companies. That’s a real red flag for the SEC that naked short selling is very widespread, is highly concentrated, and consequently might be being used today to manipulate the price of scores of stocks.”

-Former Deputy Secretary of Commerce Robert Shapiro on CNBC

It’s great that CNBC allowed someone to report this news. It seems pretty interesting – criminals manufacturing piles of phantom stock in order to systematically manipulate the share prices of perhaps 100 companies. Come to think of it, it sounds like a really big financial scandal.

Strange that in the week since Secretary Shapiro’s CNBC debut, naked short selling has not been mentioned even once in any mainstream news publication. And last we heard from some publications, they were arguing that the SEC should allow hedge funds to continue selling stock that they have not borrowed or purchased.

Which was different from a few months ago, when hedge funds and journalists were telling us that there was no such thing as naked short selling. As of last week, the new line was that naked short-selling happens all the time, but cracking down on it would cause irreparable harm to “market efficiency.”

This line even appeared in an editorial by the Economist. If it was in the Economist, it must have been true. Or maybe not. As someone who spent several years writing for the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which is similar to the Economist, I can tell you that the opinions of these places are informed by paradigms, not reporting. String together the words “market” and “efficiency,” throw in a threat of “regulation,” and they’ll be on your side, even if you’re defending criminals.

As it were, the articles in the Economist and every other publication were based almost entirely on a report by a guy named Arturo. As I noted in an earlier blog, some of these same publications reported that the SEC’s emergency order banning naked short selling in 19 financial stocks had caused the stocks to lose value, “according to Arturo Bris, a professor in Switzerland,” even though Arturo’s numbers showed quite clearly that the performances of those stocks had improved dramatically.

I don’t mean to pick on Professor Arturo, but when even the Economist is giving this guy the last word on naked short selling, it seems worth noting that the professor, with considerable help from the American hedge fund lobby, has poured into the media’s credulous gullets a mind-bending brew of cherry-picked numbers and calculated balderdash. Nearly every single number in his report contradicts his thesis that the SEC’s emergency order “significantly” harmed “market efficiency.”

I doubt any journalists read the report, but it should be obvious on the surface that its thesis is absurd.Markets are efficient when prices properly reflect supply and demand. You’d think that preventing people from diluting supply with a bunch of phantom stock would improve “market efficiency.” But apparently there is a “debate” over whether the market can efficiently set prices without criminals manipulating prices, so I hope some journalist, somewhere, will join me as I trudge through the only “expert” report on the planet that makes such a claim.

The report’s relevant section, “The Effect of the Emergency Order,” analyses the 19 affected stocks compared to a sample of 59 U.S. financial stocks not directly impacted by the order, and to a sample of non-U.S. financial stocks that, obviously, will be unaffected by any current or future SEC regulations. Professor Arturo chooses to focus his analysis on the following:

1. Volatility (measured by “open-to-close” price volatility; “close to close” price volatility; and the so-called “trade price range”).
2. Liquidity (measured by “Quoted Spreads” and “Relative Quoted Spreads”).
3. Pricing Efficiency (measured using five statistics that show the extent to which there is a correlation between stock prices and swings in the overall market).

Professor Arturo would have us believe that the emergency order increased volatility, decreased liquidity, and increased market correlation (suggesting less efficient pricing). In fact, his numbers (and, indeed, his words, if you read them closely) suggest precisely the opposite.

I will work, line by line, through the report’s section titled “The Effect of the Emergency Order,” addressing Professor Arturo’s claims in order.

Professor Arturo begins by referring to table IX. Take a look.

According to this table, Professor Arturo writes,the SEC’s emergency order caused “significant volatility increases: open-to-close and close-to-close volatility [of the 19 affected stocks] increased 158 percent and 188 percent respectively. Trade price range increases 4.37 percent in the post-EO period.The table reports similar results for other measures.”

Professor Arturo has determined that open-to-close volatility of the 19 stocks “increased 158%” merely by subtracting the pre-EO open-to-close volatility (168.1%) from the post-EO volatility (327.4%) to get the “difference” of 158.23%.

Similarly, for close-to-close volatility, he merely subtracts the pre-EO number (216.18%) from the post-EO number (404.67%) to get the “difference” of 188.49%.Same for the trade price range: he subtracts pre-EO (2.74%) from post-EO (7.11%) to get the 4.37 number.

He highlights these “differences” throughout his text and in the above table, clearly intending for us to believe that they are important.

But the “differences” are completely irrelevant. They do not tell us by what percentage these numbers increased. And what is important is the whether the percent increases of the 19 stocks exceeded the percent increases of the U.S. and non-U.S. samples.

So let’s compare the increases of open-close volatility, close-close volatility, and trade price range.

Open-to-Close Volatility: For the 19 stocks, the increase is (difference) / (pre-EO volatility) = 158 / 168.1 =94.4%.For the U.S. sample, the increase is 79.68 / 123.65 =64%. For the non-U.S. sample, the increase is 70.60 / 64.34 = 109.7%.

In other words, open-close volatility of the non-U.S. stocks increased far more than that of either the 19 stocks or the U.S. sample. Given that the non-U.S. stocks are in no way affected by an SEC action in the U.S., we can assume the professor’s open-to-close volatility numbers say nothing about the effects of the emergency order.

Close-to-Close Volatility: For the 19 stocks, the increase is (difference) / (pre-EO close-close volatility) = 188.49 / 216.18 = 86.7%. For the U.S. sample, the increase is 170.37 / 93.65 = 182%.And for the non-U.S. sample, the increase is 120.87 /125.52 =102.5%.

In other words, the close-close volatility of the 19 affected stocks increased far less than that of both the U.S. and the non-U.S. sample.

Trade Price Range: For the 19 affected stocks, the increase is (difference) / (pre-EO trade price range) = 4.37 / 2.74 = 159%.For the U.S. sample, the increase is 4.20 / 2.79 =151%.For the non-U.S. sample, the increase is 1.53 / 2.39 = 64.01%.

The increase in the trade price range of the 19 stocks increased more than the U.S. and non-U.S. samples. But given that this contradicts the close-close and open-close volatility numbers, we certainly are not able to conclude that “volatility increased” as a result of the emergency order.

This might explain why, a few paragraphs after pointing to “significant volatility increases,” which is the line that was apparently fed to the press, Professor Arturo admits that “we do not find significant differences in volatility in either the pre or post EO period between G19 and US financial firms.”

Moving on to liquidity, Professor Arturo writes that “differences in liquidity [of the 19 affected stocks] significantly deteriorate.”

As noted, Professor Arturo measures liquidity by looking at quoted spreads and relative spreads. Again, he seems to see some significance in the “differences,” but what matters is the relative increases.

Look back up at that table. What you see is that for the 19 stocks, quoted spreads increased from $0.08 to $0.12 (50%). For the U.S. financial institutions, the increase was from $.0.04 to $0.06 (50%).

Isn’t 50 the same as 50?What “significantly deteriorated”?

As for relative quoted spreads, Professor Arturo writes in the introduction to his report that“from the pre-EO period to the post EO period, relative quoted spreads for G19 stocks have increased from 18 to 48 percent, but they have increased only from 11 percent to 29 percent for comparable US financial stocks. “

“Only from 11 percent,” he writes. Only? If something increases from 18 to 48, that’s a 166 percent increase. If something increases from 11 to 29 percent, that is a 163 percent increase. Isn’t 163 and 166 pretty much the same? This does not suggest that the 19 protected stocks “significantly deteriorated” relative to the sample of U.S. financials.

It is true that the spreads increased a lot more in the U.S. than they did overseas, but by this point Professor Arturo’s picture of what he calls “market quality” is looking pretty fuzzy.

Indeed, a bit further down, he writes that “controlling for firm and market characteristics, the EO has led to a significant increase in market liquidity.”

You read that right. Before he said there was a “deterioration” in liquidity. Then he said that the EO led to a significant increase in liquidity.

By the way, why am I wasting my time with this? Who cares about these screwball statistics?The SEC is talking about protecting companies from getting clobbered by illegal market manipulation. The SEC is talking about stopping a crime and upholding the basic tenet of capitalism and correct human conduct that says that someone who sells something had darn well better deliver it.

If some economist sees a change in some decimal point – big deal!If some blogging media critic had the stupid idea to stare cross-eyed at the economist’s decimal points until he noticed that they’d been completely fudged – well, big deal!Unless these numbers measure radioactivity, I don’t know why we’re even discussing them.Criminals are destroying market value and ruining lives. Decimal points be damned!

Sorry. Onwards with the report.

I notice that Professor Arturo throws some “semi-variance” numbers into the table that I posted above. Semi-variance increased dramatically for the 19 stocks. That must mean that “market quality” got really bad, right?

Wrong. Semi-variance isn’t a measure of volatility or liquidity. It is a measure of how much stocks could fall, based on their performance during a previous period. Perhaps Professor Arturo stuck the semi-variance numbers in the table to create a misimpression, but he doesn’t include them in his written discussion of the effects of the emergency order, no doubtbecause he knows they are not particularly relevant to “market quality” and “market efficiency” (though they do suggest that the performance of the 19 stocks soared during the emergency order, relative to the previous period, which is the opposite of what the professor and his media mimics said they did).

Moving on, Professor Arturo measures the correlation between the movement of stock prices and the movement of the market as a whole. If there’s a higher correlation, it supposedly suggests that the market isn’t efficiently processing information – that stock prices are determined by general market sentiment, rather than specific data points about the companies’ track records.

Professor Arturo measures correlation using five statistics, shown in the table below.

Referring to this table, the professor writes that there has been “an important deterioration of market efficiency as a result of the EO. The R squared increases from 22 to 33 percent for US financial firms (an absolute increase of 11 percent). R-squared increases 12 percent for G19 firms.”

You see? He did it again. He subtracted 22 from 33, which is 11. Since that’s less than 12, we’re supposed to believe that the R-squared for the 19 protected firms increased more than the R-squared of the U.S. financial firms. The table similarly displays these “absolute differences” as if they were the key to understanding the effects of the SEC’s ban on naked short selling.

But, again, the “difference” numbers are irrelevant. The relevant number, cited nowhere, is the percent increase of R-squared.For the sample of U.S. financial firms, the increase is 10.82 / 22.46 = .481, or 48%. For the 19 affected firms, the increase is 11.5 / 32.22 = .356 or 35.6%.

So the R-squared for the 19 firms increased less than the R-squared for the sample of U.S. financial firms, which is the opposite of what the professor would have us believe.

In the next line, Professor Arturo writes that “Cross-autocorrelation increases by the same magnitude in G19 and US financial stocks. However, cross-autocorrelation increases much more for G19 than for U.S. financial stocks.”

Yes, he said it increases by “the same magnitude.” Then he said the opposite–that it“increases by much more.” If this were the first time, I’d call it a mistake.

In any case, look at the table, and you will see what happened to the cross-autocorrelation of the 19 stocks. Before the emergency order there was a correlation of 8.24%. After the emergency order there was an inverse correlation of -24.4%.

In other words, the emergency order made it exceedingly less likely that the stocks would move with the market, which by professor Arturo’s standards, means the market became more efficient.

The professor goes on to say that “downside cross-correlation increases 3.26 percent for G19 stocks, while it decreases 4.05 percent for U.S. financial institutions.” So market efficiency “significantly deteriorated,” right?

No. Look at the table. Before the emergency order, downside cross-correlation for the 19 stocks was an insignificant -1.61%. After the emergency order, it was an insignificant 1.65%. In other words, there was never much of a correlation. By this standard, the market in the 19 stocks was almost perfectly efficient before the emergency order. And it remained almost perfectly efficient after the emergency order.

As for the sample of U.S. financials, downside cross-correlation was inversely correlated (-1.79%) before the emergency order. After the emergency order it was even more (-5.84%) inversely correlated. By this standard, the market for the U.S. sample of stocks became more efficient.

The downside cross-correlation numbers for foreign stocks show that they became less inversely correlated to the market after the emergency order. So, according to this statistic, the market in foreign stocks, but not U.S. became less efficient as a result of the emergency order in the United States. I don’t know what to conclude from that, but it certainly isn’t that U.S. market efficiency “significantly deteriorated” as the result of a ban on naked short selling.

Lastly, the downside R-squared of the 19 stocks increased 26.9 / 21.94 = 123%. That is significantly more than the increase in the U.S. financial stocks.However, the downside R-squared for overseas companies increased 56%, so obviously something other than an American regulatory action can affect downside R-squared.

All in all, most of the statistics in this report contradict the hedge fund party line that a ban on naked short selling harmed “market efficiency” – and that speaks volumes about the way in which our financial media processes and delivers information.

As for the data showing that criminals are hammering around 100 companies – destroying not just stocks but the lives of employees and small investors…Well, if you’ve read this far, you give a hoot, and that sets you apart from a great many journalists.

So much for the notion that our financial media is comprised of independent thinkers, all busily analyzing data and asking probing questions in the sacred pursuit of “truth.” Far easier to copy straight from the press release (or, more likely, the email sent around by some short-seller or lobbyist).

“The 19 stocks lost 3.83 percent of value…compared with their peers,” reported the Financial Times.

“The…shares affected by the order lost about 3.8 percent of their value, compared to their peers,” reported Reuters.

“Shares covered by the order lost 3.8% of their value compared with their peers,” reported Dow Jones Newswires.

“Shares covered by the order lost 3.8% of their value compared with their peers,” reported the Wall Street Journal, which merely reprinted the Dow Jones story.

That this phrase was circulated with such precision is all the more remarkable considering that it makes absolutely no sense. “Compared to their peers”? What does that mean? If I have a hundred bucks, I cannot lose $3.80, “compared to my peers.” Either I lose the $3.80, or I do not.

Aside from being gobbledygook, the phrase is grossly misleading. The 19 shares covered by the emergency order did not lose value. To the contrary, their prices rose dramatically from the day that the order was announced until its expiration (at which point prices plunged).

Yet, to drive home the misperception, the Wall Street Journal’s headline reads: “Stocks Under ‘Short’ Order Fell During Protection Period.”

Reuters reported that “many of the 19 stocks…suffered declines in their share prices.”

The Financial Times proclaimed that the emergency order “had contributed to a decline in the [19 companies'] share prices.”

All according to the professor in Switzerland. But clearly, these reporters did not read the report by the professor in Switzerland. If they had, they would have known that the professor, who is named Arturo, did not claim that the 19 stocks’ prices had fallen. He said only that their “abnormal returns” during the period of the emergency order were 3.8% (or 10%, according to a follow-up report) less than the “abnormal returns” of “their peers” — a sample of 59 financial stocks that weren’t subject to the SEC’s order.

An “abnormal return” is the difference between expected returns (based on previous performance of the stocks and overall performance of the market) and actual returns. It is highly debatable whether it makes sense to look at abnormal returns (as opposed to plain old prices), but even supposing they are relevant, Professor Arturo’s numbers (if not his misleading language) suggest that the SEC’s emergency order profoundly improved the performance of those 19 stocks.

The professor analyzes only one time period prior to the emergency order: June 1 to July 14. He finds that over this period, cumulative abnormal returns for the 19 stocks were negative 12.34%. From July 15, when the order was announced, to July 20, cumulative abnormal returns were positive 12.42%. From the time that the order actually went into effect on July 20 to August 8 (the last day for which professor Arturo provides data), the abnormal returns were negative 4.57%, still a lot better than the period prior to the emergency order.

Meanwhile, according to the report, the 59 financial stocks that were not directly affected by the order got an even bigger boost. Their cumulative abnormal returns were negative 10.82% over the pre-emergency order period of June 1 to July 14, and positive 5.68% over the July 20-August 8 period when the emergency order was in place.

It might seem paradoxical that unprotected stocks were helped more than the protected stocks, but it is not really surprising when you consider that illegal naked short selling of many of those 59 companies was far more prevalent than in the cases of the privileged 19. Perhaps criminal naked short sellers, guessing that the SEC might extend its protections across the market, began borrowing real shares or decreasing their short positions in all the companies they were attacking. The stocks that had been under the heaviest naked short attacks saw the biggest gains.

The fact that the abnormal returns of the 19 protected stocks were 3.8% lower than the abnormal returns of other stocks is otherwise meaningless. Investors might rather buy the stocks with higher returns, and in that sense the 59 unprotected stocks are more valuable. But this does not mean that the 19 protected stocks “lost value” during the emergency order. It does not mean that their returns (abnormal or otherwise) worsened. It certainly does not mean that their “prices declined.” Not “compared to their peers.” Not any other way.

Normally, I would be inclined to sympathize with the journalists. Financial statistics are a little bit complicated. Deadlines are tight. And never in history have journalists been more overworked. Often, reporters just don’t have time to do the research, or crunch the numbers themselves.

But the problem here is not just that journalists misread, or chose not to read, a report about a complex issue. No, what horrifies is that an entire pack of journalists failed to make the simplest of all calculations. They failed to compute the difference between good and bad.

Illegal naked short selling is one of the biggest financial swindles of our lifetimes. That is bad.

The SEC took a small step towards preventing this crime. That is good.

Rather than demand that the SEC take a bigger step to protect all of the hundreds of companies affected by illegal naked short selling, a bunch of important financial journalists published a slew of nearly identical stories suggesting that the SEC shouldn’t have acted at all — and their only excuse for writing these stories was that somebody sent them an email misrepresenting a skewed report by some guy in Switzerland named Arturo.

That is bad. Really bad.

Click here for a compilation of these bad stories.

Maybe I have too much faith in the press, but I suspect that this sort of intellectual dishonesty – this deliberate illogicality and mischief-making – could appear only on the financial pages. Certainly, editors of Metro sections don’t permit their columnists to write that cops should let gang-bangers clean out every convenience store in town just because some Quicky Marts have been caught cheating on their taxes.

Yes, it must be that different standards apply to financial columnists. Probably, it’s because finance is so complicated. Robbing a convenience store – an editor can understand that’s bad. But criminal hedge funds selling something they don’t have – apparently that’s pretty technical. If the columnist says that illegal naked short sellers (hedge funds offloading phantom stock to drive down prices) are good folk…well, she’s been studying this “complex” and “controversial” issue for a long time – let her run with it.

But now the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the SEC, and all the other people (except hedge fund managers) who have seriously studied this issue agree that it is bad for markets when people sell things that don’t exist. That this was ever a matter of “debate” will astound historians for generations to come, but the surreal intellectual “battle” is over, and it is time for Dow Jones to decommission Carol Remond. She’s become the Joan Rivers of the newswires – her gruff exterior failing to compensate for a tired act.

Carol devoted 17 of her 36 columns this year to ridiculing or discrediting critics of illegal short-selling. The other 19 columns carefully omitted mention of naked short selling, even though most of the columns were sourced from short-sellers and focused on companies that had been hit by massive levels of phantom stock. In a number of her columns, Carol alluded favorably to one particular clique of short-sellers while deliberately censoring information about their most egregious shenanigans.

Of course, Carol’s reporting was always a bit off-kilter. There was, for example, her famous April, 2004 column about the NASD’s decision to close a loophole that was allowing criminals to sell phantom stock through Canada. Carol wrote that the move wasn’t fair because “market participants” had told her it was too hard to find real stock. If editors at Dow Jones didn’t wonder why their reporter was advocating for the freedom of criminals to sell unlimited amounts of fake stock, they might have thought it a bit odd that the only “market participant” named in Carol’s story was Pacific International, a notorious Canadian brokerage whose most celebrated employee was funneling cash to the Genovese organized crime family.

Also strange was Carol’s long-standing, close relationship with Anthony Elgindy, a Mafia-connected short-seller who liked to flash his .380 Colt handgun in business meetings. For years, the Dow Jones reporter used Elgindy’s information in numerous stories about the companies he shorted, but she never mentioned that her pal was extorting and blackmailing the companies’ CEOs, bribing FBI agents, and churning out heaps of phantom stock.

Elgindy was convicted in 2005 for racketeering and stock manipulation. Still, Carol might have stayed faithful to her old friend. But it emerged from prosecutors’ evidence that Elgindy had used unflattering terms to describe Carol’s posterior. She became incensed and wrote columns detailing his crimes (but portraying him as an anomaly – the rare short who violated the law). When the judge handed down an 11-year prison sentence, Elgindy broke down in tears, and there in the court gallery was Carol, laughing with glee.

I’m no psychologist, but Carol seems to have a vindictive streak. It was only after Patrick Byrne criticized her reporting that she vowed to “shred this guy to bits,” and proceeded with considerable vigor to tell people that Patrick was running some kind of criminal enterprise out of a gay bathhouse in San Francisco. (He wasn’t.) When she was criticized by the anonymous blogger and redoubtable crusader against phantom stock who calls himself the Easter Bunny, Carol went on a similar rampage, trying to unmask her critic and prove that he was illegally pumping stocks out of a Las Vegas strip club (The Bunny was doing no such thing, though he did register his blog’s domain name to a nudie bar as a joke.).

It is indeed possible that Carol goes to extreme lengths to whitewash illegal naked short selling, not because she fails to see that it is wrong, but simply because the crusaders against the crime have been so critical of her reporting. Carol probably even thought the crusaders had something to do with the SEC issuing her with a subpoena in 2006, when the commission began an investigation into alleged short-seller crimes. Yes, that must have been the final straw. Carol was provoked. She got angry. She became obsessed. And now…it’s war! Vendetta Journalism.

The only other possibility is that Carol is cool-headed and calculating – that a particular clique of short-sellers have fed her nearly every column she has ever written (including those that won her a Loeb Award, the Pulizer of business journalism), and now she is settling debts and currying favor with her benefactors by deliberating covering-up one of the biggest financial crimes of our lifetimes.

That would be something—eeevil!

Whatever the case, I liked her column that was all about an outfit called Institutional Credit Partners accusing Fairfax Financial, a reputable company in Canada, of misrepresenting an off-balance sheet transaction. Carol gave credence to these accusations, though no reputable investigator had ever done so. She also suggested that Institutional Credit Partners was working alone – that it’s “independent” analysis had just revealed this supposedly shocking news about an off-balance sheet transaction.

The truth, which Carol omits, is that the same bogus information was previously circulated by a thug named Spyro Contogouris, who had been hired by a short-selling hedge fund to harass and threaten Fairfax executives. One of Spyro’s many feats was to write an anonymous letter to the pastor of Fairfax’s CEO suggesting that the CEO was a sado-masochistic group sex aficionado who once scammed the Catholic Church out of millions of dollars.

When Carol published her column, the FBI had arrested Spyro for ripping off a Greek shipping magnate. Carol left that part out. She also forgot to mention that Spyro had been bailed out of jail by the manager of the eminently respectable and completely “independent”…Institutional Credit Partners.

But Carol was no doubt keen to attack Fairfax because the company had sued a clique of short sellers, including Steve Cohen of SAC Capital (a subsidiary of which hired the charming Spyro) and David Rocker, formerly of Rocker Partners. These are Carol’s friends and allies.

Which is why Carol received a government subpoena in 2006. The SEC was investigating relationships among a few journalists, David Rocker, and Gradient Analytics – yet another seedy outfit that claims to be “independent,” though its former employees have given sworn affidavits that short-sellers including Rocker dictated much the information in its falsehood-laden financial research reports.

SEC officials continue to believe that Carol has information that could help them understand Gradient and Rocker’s methods. But to the great chagrin of these officials, the SEC leadership shut down its investigation after the Media Mob went ballistic. Apparently, the SEC was violating the right to free speech by issuing subpoenas to journalists and “independent” research shops.

Never mind that one journalist – Herb Greenberg, first at TheStreet.com, then at MarketWatch.com and CNBC – was accused (in a sworn affidavit from a former Gradient employee) of timing his negative stories, premised on Gradient’s false research, so that Rocker could profit from their deleterious effect on stock prices. Never mind that Jon Markman, a one-time managing editor of MSN Money and formerly Herb Greenberg’s co-editor at TheStreet.com, was named as running a dodgy hedge fund out of Gradient’s back office (“independent” research shops aren’t supposed to run hedge funds, especially if they’re trading on their “independent” research).

Never mind, too, that one of Gradient’s managers acquired multiple aliases and fake IDs to conceal his activities. You won’t hear this from certain quarters of the financial media. You certainly won’t hear it from Carol Remond Rocker, Gradient, Spryo the Goon – these are Carol’s bros. Fairfax messed with them. So Carol went to Fairfax’s house for a drive-by shooting. Hidden in the trunk was a heaping pile of phantom stock. (Fairfax has spent most of the last three years on the SEC’s list of companies whose stock is “failing to deliver” in excessive quantities – clear evidence of a sustained, criminal attack by naked short-sellers, covered-up by Carol.).

Here’s another good one: In April, Carol published a column praising a “reclusive financier” named David Gelbaum for “doing his part to try to stave off recession.” A few months earlier, Carol had raved in another column that the same “reclusive financier” was practicing “a new form of philanthropy.” Carol explained that Gelbaum’s “philanthropy” and recession-fighting involved nothing more than financing a number of alternative energy companies through “private placements in public equity” – or PIPEs.

Now, with these two columns, Carol is having a little fun – thumbing her nose at her critics, seeing what she can get away with, no doubt cackling with diabolical delight. For she knows full well, but pointedly ignores the fact that PIPEs, commonly referred to as “toxic financing,” are the single most notorious weapon of criminal naked short sellers. Crusaders like the Easter Bunny (see his blog, TheSanityCheck.com) have been screaming about this for years, and the SEC agrees that illegal short-selling in the PIPE industry is rife.

In a typical PIPE scam, a hedge fund invests in a cash-strapped, thinly traded public company. In return, the hedge fund receives securities that can be converted to stock, typically at a discount of around 15% to the market rate. The hedge fund manager presents himself as a serious investor, all geared up to build a great company, but then turns around and naked shorts the company, hoping it will go out of business.

With help from a complicit broker, the hedge fund proceeds to shift his discounted shares back and forth among accounts, making it appear that he is delivering real stock to cover his naked shorts. The high volume of trading in discounted shares, coupled with another wave of naked short selling, can send the stock into a “death spiral.” By cracking the stock, the PIPE provider positions himself to earn a big profit by failing to deliver the huge amounts of phantom stock he has sold.

Nathan Vardi of Forbes Magazine describes the proliferation of these scams in an article titled, “Sewer Pipes,” and notes that some of them have been perpetrated by criminals connected to the Mafia – specifically the Genovese organized crime family.

Carol’s columns point out that Mr. Gelbaum, her “reclusive” PIPEs financier, spent much of his career with a hedge fund called Princeton-Newport Partners, which was run by Edward Thorp, a “mathematician” who once authored a book about how to win at blackjack. She doesn’t reveal that Thorp actually developed a system for cheating Las Vegas casinos in cahoots with Manny Kimmel, a mobster from the Genovese organized crime family.

Princeton-Newport derived a significant portion of its revenue from parking stock and colluding in other illegal schemes with Michael Milken, the famous 1980s criminal who has since reinvented himself as a philanthropist, hedge fund collaborator, and media-revered mastermind of miscellaneous investment schemes. A government investigation into Princeton-Newport’s activities produced the key evidence (even more important than the insider trading information provided by Ivan Boesky) leading to Milken’s 1989 conviction on multiple counts of securities fraud.

Neither Gelbaum nor Thorp were charged, but it is perhaps worth noting that the Thorp family worked closely with Anthony Elgindy, the felonious Mob-connected gun-toting short-seller who was Carol’s close friend until he said uncharitable things about her butt. In 2006, the SEC fined Thorp’s son, Jeffrey, $8 million for masterminding a massive fraud that involved (what else?)…toxic PIPEs and naked short-selling.

Carol is aware of this case because she wrote a column about it, noting that the government’s investigation into Elgindy had led agents to his con-conspirator, Jeffrey Thorp. Of course, Carol is incapable of writing anything negative about short-selling, so her column failed to mention that Thorp was a naked short-seller — a strange omission considering the SEC had said that Thorp’s PIPE financing was fraudulent precisely because he had naked shorted into oblivion the 22 companies that he had financed.

The other thing strange about Carol’s column was that it disappeared. It was yanked from the Dow Jones web site. It was removed from media databases, such as Lexus-Nexus and Factiva. It was completely scrubbed from the Internet, though a snippet of it can be found on a blog called Wall Street Folly.

Maybe Carol’s mind was scrubbed, too. Maybe she has no idea that PIPEs and naked short selling go hand in hand. Maybe she completely forgot that a guy working with her old Mob-connected friend, Anthony Elgindy, masterminded the biggest short-selling PIPE fraud of all time. It could even be totally normal that Carol, a reporter who’s life is covering short-sellers, never wrote a story about PIPEs until along came a “reclusive financier”– the former partner of the Mob-connected father of the Mob-connected fraudster who colluded with Carol’s Mob-connected friend while orchestrating the biggest short selling PIPE fraud in history – and only then it was time for Carol to publish two columns about PIPEs and refer to them as a “new form of philanthropy.”

Actually, the “reclusive financier” is probably a decent fellow. He’s never lied to me – that makes him ok in my book. I’m not saying that he’s a fraud. I’m saying that Carol is a fraud. Brainwash, vengeful rage, cold-calculation, lunkheadedness – it’s all the same: she’s a fraud. She lied to us in nearly every one of the 36 columns she wrote this year. There’s an industry infested with mobsters and scalawags and she tracks down the one reclusive PIPE financier who’s a decent fellow. She says he “is doing his part to try to stave off recession.” Carol is lying. The “reclusive financier” is honest – he’d never say something so ridiculous.

Consider the condition of the companies that Mr. Gelbaum has reclusively financed. Carol mentions six of them –Beacon Power Corp., Worldwater & Power Corp., Emcore Corp, Octillion Corp., Bluefire Ethanol Fuels Inc, and Open Energy Corp. When Carol was writing, all of these companies had spent a good deal of time on the SEC’s list of companies likely to have been victimized by illegal naked short selling. Unsurprisingly, the companies’ stock prices have all been on trajectories that look a lot like “death spirals.” Worldwater is now worth a few cents. It was at around $3.00 when it received its reclusive PIPE. Open Energy is trading for less than a penny. Carol reveals none of this.

Oh, my. What other wonderments has Carol conjured? Let’s see — last September, she wrote a column assuring us that the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is an upstanding institution. What other “journalist” would dare attempt such a feat? I can think of only one: Gary Weiss, a former BusinessWeek reporter who runs black-ops public relations efforts for the DTCC, anonymously attacking the organization’s critics on stock message boards and even wangling special editing privileges of the DTCC’s Wikipedia entry, all the while flat-out lying about his activities.

The DTCC’s job is to “clear and settle” all securities transactions, but it doesn’t do that very well, which is a big reason why there is so much phantom stock (i.e. stock that doesn’t “settle”). The DTCC knows who is naked short selling and it has a lot of data showing how much phantom stock is in the system. But it says it won’t release this information because it’s against DTCC rules. Which isn’t surprising, since the rules are written by the DTCC’s owners, who are the very same Wall Street firms that engage in naked short selling.

The SEC technically regulates the DTCC, but SEC officials admit they have neither a clue how the place operates, nor the power to force it to turn over complete data. So the DTCC is an essentially unregulated, criminal-protecting, black box institution – which happens to handle more than $1.5 quadrillion – or 30 times the total gross product of the entire planet – every year. There should be a pack of journalists outside its machine-gun fortified doors, cameras flashing, questions hurled.

Instead, there is Carol. Her column gloats that a court dismissed a legal case brought against the DTCC by a company called Nanotech, which was attacked by naked short sellers. Carol says it is bad for companies to sue the DTCC. It is bad because the SEC (whose officials say they have no idea what the DTCC does) filed an amicus brief saying that it had signed off on the DTTC’s rules (which are written by naked short-sellers). Listen to the SEC and trust the DTCC, says Carol, who claims to like short-sellers because they are the market’s “skeptics.”

The head of the DTCC’s PR department is named Stuart Z. Goldstein. He’s a real master of whirly logic and circuitous denials. He’s a mean guy, too — nasty as hell. Question the DTCC’s rectitude, and Stuart Z. will threaten to get you fired and unleash the lawyers.

But Carol loves Stuart Z. And Stuart Z. loves Carol. Ask about the DTCC, and get no answer from Stuart Z. Instead, says he, “Read Carol, and you will see, she’s the best there is. Nobody understands the DTCC” – only Carol and Stuart Z.

Stuart Z. and a clique of short-sellers – these are Carol’s friends. That is why Carol goes to such lengths to bash a company called Biovail, which had sued Gradient Analytics, the company that was managed by at least one guy with multiple aliases while it allegedly let short-seller David Rocker ghost write its “independent” research. Carol received a government subpoena when the government investigated Gradient, and she’s keen to show that her creepy friends are swell, so she devotes no less than six of her 36 columns this year to bashing Biovail (NYSE:BVF), her readers no doubt waiting with tongues hanging for just one more column – one last scrap of arcane negativity about a minor drug company in Canada.

The SEC charged Biovail with finagling its finances, so it seems its executives were not entirely wholesome. But six out of 36 columns to show that Gradient was right? That seems a lot considering the many perfectly innocent companies that Gradient has slimed. Gradient was not right about Biovail, either. In fact, it published a lot of blatantly false information about the company, suggesting at one point that its revenues had nosedived at a time when they were in fact soaring.

Meanwhile, shorts working with Gradient paid off a bunch of doctors to get them to testify (to the media and government investigators) that they had been “bribed” by Biovail to prescribe one of its drugs. The company maintained that it only paid the doctors a small hourly fee to participate in a marketing program (which is a standard sleazy practice of most pharmaceutical companies) but the government leveled charges, citing the doctors’ testimony, though not the fact that the doctors had been paid-off by short-sellers. Biovail settled out of court rather than accept even the small risk of a conviction that would have shut it out of the U.S. market and destroyed its business.

It is quite common for miscreant short-sellers to pay for phony testimony. There is, in fact, a company called Gerson Lehrman, run by former hedge fund employees, that specializes in locating, training and paying-off experts of dubious veracity – largely on behalf of short-selling clients.

When Carol’s friend David Rocker and Gradient Analytics began short-selling Taser, the stun-gun company, there was no strong evidence that a Taser gun had ever killed anyone. This was clearly unacceptable, so Rocker found an expert. His name was James Ruggieri and he was an unemployed high school dropout who’d never touched a stun-gun and didn’t know anything about electricity—but Ruggieri had a plan, and that was to get himself a bunch of chickens and plug them into an electrical socket.

This worked well. Some of the chickens caught on fire, half of them died, and from this, the high school dropout deduced that stun-guns could kill half of all people – a conclusion that he submitted to the American Academy of Forensic Science.

Soon a gaggle of Rocker’s media friends were reporting that a renowned expert from the American Academy of Forensic Science had concluded that stun guns kill. No doubt with help from short-sellers, dozens of people filed lawsuits claiming that their relatives had died after getting Tasered. How did they know? The American Academy of Forensic Science said so.

All but one lawsuit was dismissed, but in the meantime, Taser’s executives had to spend much of three years touring the country, publicly zapping themselves at every opportunity to demonstrate that Tasers don’t kill. (It is possible that Tasers have killed some people, but there is no science to support this, only anecdotal evidence of Taser incidents followed by deaths, most of which might have been caused by cocaine overdoses and other factors).

While the high school dropout was electrocuting chickens, Rocker allegedly busied himself writing Gradient Analytic’s “independent” research reports and submitted them to his friends at the SEC, which dutifully launched an investigation into Taser. The investigation sapped Taser’s resources and distracted its executives–who now had to spend half their time answering to government investigators, and the other half firing Tasers into their chests – for several years until, finally, the SEC announced that Taser’s books were clean – Gradient’s “independent” research, dictated by Rocker, was utterly false.

Of course, Taser has spent most of the past three years on the SEC’s list of companies whose stock is failing to deliver in excessive quantities. That’s undisputable evidence that it is the victim of a sustained attack by hedge funds selling phantom stock.

But you won’t hear about this from Carol Remond. You won’t hear about any of the dozens of companies similarly trampled by short-sellers – only to be cleared of wrong-doing by government investigators. Carol says only bad companies criticize her short selling and “independent” research-writing friends. And she’s got just 36 columns a year to tell us about all of those bad companies. Six of them are called Biovail.

Another four columns focus on a company called RemoteMDX, which makes GPS tracking bracelets used by prisons. RemoteMDX might be a bad company. It might not. Carol provides no good evidence either way. Instead, she merely notes that short-sellers are all over it. She names only one—Citron Research, whose principal, Andrew Left, was once caught double-cashing checks and was also banned for three years from the commodities and futures business after the National Futures Association found that he “made false and misleading statements to cheat, defraud or deceive a customer…”

Mr. Left has been accused of naked short-selling by a company called BIDZ.com, but he assures me in an email that he has never sold phantom stock. “I believe naked short selling is dangerous to the financial system,” he says.

He’s right. Mr. Left is honest. Carol is the fraud.

According to Carol, the most suspicious thing about RemoteMDX is that a German brokerage claims that an investor ordered a bunch of the company’s stock and never paid for it. So now the brokerage is stuck with the stock. Carol seems to think that this is RemoteMDX’s fault. I don’t know why.

The more likely culprit is the brokerage, Norddeutsche Landesbank (NordLB). As Carol notes, NordLB claims to have purchased 14.75 million shares on February 25. But a total of only 3.2 million shares traded that day. Could it be that NordLB took possession of around 11 million phantom shares in service to a naked short selling client or broker? Would NordLB’s announcement that it was looking to offload 14.75 million unwanted shares put downward pressure on the stock price, to the great benefit of naked short sellers?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. But it’s certain Carol wouldn’t ask them. Carol’s sources say RemoteMDX is suspicious. Are the sources suspicious? The sources are short-sellers and if you’re a journalist in “the game,” you don’t ask that question.

That is why Carol’s readers do not know that RemoteMDX has spent 128 days this year on the SEC’s list of phantom stock victims. And that is why Carol neglects to reveal that while nobody other than Carol and her shadowy sources have accused RemoteMDX of wrongdoing, the German authorities have begun to investigate the brokerage, NordLB, for “irregular trading” in RemoteMDX’s stock.

Meanwhile, another column by Carol. Headline: “Autopsy of a Naked Shorting Poster Child: USXP.” That’s Universal Express. Somebody needs to tell the colorful tale of this company—Carol doesn’t do it justice. But for now, it suffices to say that USXP’s CEO has been charged with some heinous crimes – cooking the books, stealing corporate money, selling unauthorized shares, churning out outlandishly false press releases, and being married to the Imelda Marcos of Boca Raton.

USXP’s shareholders – highly organized, devotional, and ever-ebullient–say (in emails to just about every journalist, lawyer, professor and government official in the country) that the jury is still out and the judge has been bought. They say the SEC’s charges were designed to silence the CEO, who had given a speech about naked short selling. Then the government put him in a jail usually reserved for brutal killers. Then they stuck him in solitary confinement. All to silence his views on naked short-selling. It’s a cover-up! A massive conspiracy!

Gee, I wonder why Carol wants people to believe that this company is the “poster child” for crusaders against naked short selling. I don’t know enough about USXP to have an opinion. But to Carol, it looks bad. It sounds crazy. It suits her propaganda.

A company called Allied Capital is no poster child, but it’s been plenty shafted by naked short sellers. It has spent months on the SEC’s victim list, with up to 3.5 million of its shares failing to deliver. Meanwhile, David Einhorn, who is part of Carol’s short-seller clique, has spent much of the past three years insinuating that Allied is something like Enron (which titillates journalists looking to break the next big corporate scandal). Einhorn has even written a book about his attack on Allied, which Carol must read, and I must review, because it’s a pretty good description of the short-and-distort game.

People like Deep Capture reporter Patrick Byrne began exposing Einhorn a couple of years ago, and the short-seller seems to have calculated that it was time to take the PR offensive. His strategy is clear: reveal all his tactics, and hope that his openness lends an aura of innocence – as if he really believes the tactics are legit. Then spin the story to make it seem like Einhorn is some kind of folk hero – a concerned citizen fighting an epic battle against an evil corporation, a corrupt government, and a dysfunctional status quo.

Einhorn even suggests that he lost his battle against Allied – he’s a victim, which is a more sympathetic thing to be than a rich short-seller. He says if he ever makes any profits from shorting Allied, he’s going to donate it all to charity! (He’s made a lot of profits, but so far there’s no evidence of any donations).

Anyone who disagrees with Einhorn’s analysis, or begins to investigate him for stock manipulation, is lambasted as a corporate shill and part of the broken establishment, which no journalist wants to be.

Brilliant public relations, actually. It seems to have worked. Journalists follow this guy like he’s the Jerry Garcia of finance. But all you have to do is read his book and see that he was lying about Allied all along. One of his partners had “influence” at the SEC, he says, so the commission, along with other agencies, launched a multi-year investigation that cost Allied upwards of $50 million. But, as Einhorn notes, everybody – investment banks, the SEC, court judges – concludes that he’s full of it. Allied is no Enron.

The only crime at Allied involved the Michigan office of an Allied subsidiary called BLX. The office gave out some fraudulent loans to friends. In other words, it scammed Allied. Some members of Congress have asked the Small Business Administration to explain in more detail its oversight of BLX. So Carol wrote a column about that, her suggestion being that David Einhorn—friend of Carol’s friends, enemy of Carol’s critics—must be right about Allied. It’s the next Enron.

In a similar vein, Carol wrote a column that noted in a tone of sheer giddiness that her friend David Rocker had countersued Overstock, the company run by Deep Capture reporter Patrick Byrne. This was significant, Carol suggested, because Rocker had once countersued some company in Belgium that turned out to be a fraud. Get it? Crooks in Belgium sued Rocker. Patrick Byrne sued Rocker. Therefore, Patrick Byrne is a crook.

Right, and exploding chickens in your backyard is science. Rocker no doubt delivered Carol’s brilliant deduction to the SEC, which was still investigating Overstock at Rocker’s behest. Keeping things weird, Sam Antar, a convicted felon who orchestrated the swindle at Crazy Eddie appliances, which was once the world’s biggest corporate fraud, had begun to help Rocker run the SEC’s investigation of Overstock while posting on the Internet his own “independent” research, which looked a lot like the “independent” research that Gradient and Rocker made together.

Shortly after Carol’s column was published, the SEC announced that it would take no action against Overstock, but Carol didn’t write about that. Patrick is the founder of Deep Capture, and I’m writing for Deep Capture, so call me biased, but it seems to me that Carol ought to apologize for insinuating that Patrick was a crook.

But Overstock was never Carol’s real concern. Rather, she was intent on discrediting Patrick’s crusade against illegal naked short selling. Last August, when the NYSE busted somebody for this crime, Carol wrote a column that said, “Turns out that one guy did, in fact, illegally trade shares in [Overstock]” But, of course, it “doesn’t come close to amount to [sic] the massive conspiracy alleged by Overstock.”

Actually, Carol, Overstock alleged that several million phantom Overstock shares have been floating around the market for the past few years. Patrick Byrne and many others (including myself) are crusading against the crime because hundreds of companies have been similarly affected and it threatens the stability of our financial system.

At this point, every expert unattached to your clique of short-sellers agrees with this assessment. The Chairman of the SEC agrees with it. And you, out of vindictiveness or allegiance to some pretty dirty players, are one of the only people still calling it a “conspiracy” theory.

That’s why I just wrote 5,000 words about you.

(Click here for a compendium of Carol Remond stories)

Unfortunately, these words were not written by some enterprising journalist seeking to nail the criminal hedge funds who have manufactured billions of phantom shares (shares sold “naked” because they don’t exist) while using other dubious tactics – such as publishing false “independent” financial research, working with a crooked law firm (the recently indicted Milberg, Weiss) to saddle companies with bogus class action lawsuits, hiring thugs and private investigators to harass corporate executives, orchestrating dead-end government investigations, employing armies of basement-dwelling creeps to bash companies and smear reputations on Internet message boards, and feeding distorted and maliciously false information to compliant or naïve journalists – all part of a massive, collusive effort to destroy public companies for profit.

No, sadly for anyone who cares about the state of our financial markets and media, those crimes go mostly unreported. And as for the few basic truths that appeared in today’s Wall Street Journal, they were not products of any journalistic effort. They were, rather, the words of SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, who managed (no doubt, with some difficulty) to convince the Journal to publish an op-ed wherein he explains why he had to issue an “emergency order” to prevent abusive short-selling from crashing the American financial system.

Why is this not front page news? Why is the Journal not clamoring for the criminals to be put away?

We’ve noted that The Wall Street Journal’s “Money & Investing” section, which covers the hedge fund beat, was once under the control of editor David Kansas, who was known for unleashing reporters on companies targeted by his long-time short-selling friends, while ignoring, with seemingly purposeful intent, all evidence suggesting that his friends were up to no good. Kansas, I believe, was the principal reason why the Journal long held back from investigating the naked short selling scandal.

But Kansas and some of his comrades have left the Journal, and I believe most of the paper’s other reporters are well-intentioned. It’s just that this is a complicated story – it can take time to wade through the grim data, to see for yourself the rapes in progress, and to come to terms with the ugly dimensions of the problem. It’s all the harder when you’re having smoke blown in your face by people whom, for whatever mistaken reasons, you have come to respect.

It is no coincidence that Jim Chanos, manager of hedge fund Kynikos Associates, was elected chairman of the Coalition of Private Investment Companies, the hedge fund lobbying and PR outfit. Chanos is the guy who helped Fortune Magazine’s Bethany McLean break the Enron story. Ever since, he’s been the David Koresh of media, convincing a cohort of zombified journalists that he can bestow blessed immortality — the next big scoop. The reporters swoon to this guru’s sermons, even when they sense that there is something untrue – even when, Waco-like, the authorities are closing in and a gruesome end is nigh.

Chanos has been busy dishing out the usual proselytizations: short-selling is good for the markets, short-sellers help root out bad companies like Enron, short-sellers are victims – nice fellows under attack by crazies and people who don’t like free markets. “We’re on the side of the angels,” Chanos proclaimed yesterday, clearly hoping that the media’s cries of “Amen!” would drown out the rumblings of a government that finally seems to be waking up to the notion that while there is nothing wrong with short-sellers, and free markets are swell, there is something not so good, and not so free, about a market getting pummeled by peddlers of fake stock and false information.

Chanos and his followers should throw in the towel. Contrary to our earlier concerns, it seems like the SEC is blowing off the hedge fund lobby and its media followers. Short-sellers of stocks in 19 financial companies have actually been forced to borrow real shares — not just locate them; not just say “yeah, yeah, my buddy in Staten Island’s got ‘em in his drawer,” but have real shares in hand before selling them. Even better, Cox said today that he intends to expand the enforcement across the entire market. We’ll see if he follows through.

Perhaps to avoid panic, the SEC Chairman has said that his emergency order was a preventive step, and was not meant to suggest that naked short-selling of the financial stocks was already rampant. But we know from SEC data that more than $6 billion worth of shares go undelivered every day. We know further that the phantom stock has been targeted at specific companies, including Bear Stearns, which saw as many as 13 million shares fail to deliver in its final days. Much more naked shorting takes place “ex-clearing” – for which no public data exists.

The immediate results of the SEC’s emergency order speak to just how big the ex-clearing problem is. Since Monday, when the order took effect, short-selling of the affected companies has decreased by 70 percent – and 90 percent in the cases of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It is safe to say that a lot of that reduction is attributable to hedge funds that were previously selling shares without borrowing them. Now extrapolate to the entire market. We know that short-sales make up around 30 percent of total market volume. If we knock some points off that 70 percent number and decide that, say, half of short-selling has been naked – then 15% of total market volume on any given day could be phantom stock.

That is an admittedly rough number. The fact is, we just don’t know the exact figure. But as evidence for the hypothesis that the number is, in fact, even larger, consider that Chanos and friends insist that the SEC’s restrictions on illegitimate naked short selling will seriously reduce “liquidity” in the markets. Some Wall Street lobbyists have even suggested to the SEC that the New York Stock Exchange would have to temporarily shut its doors if the SEC were to enforce its emergency order market-wide.

In other words, people like Chanos (who has denied that he has ever participated in naked short selling and has previously expressed surprise that it even occurs) is now saying that the practice is so widespread that the markets cannot function without it. The market’s “liquidity” depends on illegitimate naked short selling. Without the phantom stock which predominates in our markets, nobody would know what to do–prices would go haywire, there’d be total chaos.

All of which is reminiscent of the SEC’s earlier weird statements that naked short selling occurs rarely, but there’s so much naked short selling that enforcing rules against it might “create excess market volatility.”

If you’re a journalist, and you’re still confused, just wrap your head around this: even the hedge funds now admit that a very significant chunk of the stock that they sell cannot be readily borrowed. It cannot be borrowed, because it does not exist. This massive supply of phantom stock is what is setting prices in our supposedly “free market.”

It is a recipe for financial meltdown It is the scandal of a lifetime. And the financial media fiddles.

I doubt the American people even know what hit them.

It is hard to believe, given that the news has so quickly disappeared from the front pages, but the SEC last Tuesday issued an historic “emergency order” to head off financial apocalypse by preventing criminals from “naked short selling” the stock of 19 big finance companies.

The SEC’s move was kind of weird (Why only 19 companies?) but it was gratifying to Deep Capture and a band of crusaders who have long been hollering that crooked hedge funds use naked short selling (selling stock that has not been purchased or borrowed, and usually does not exist – i.e., phantom stock) to drive down prices and destroy public companies for profit.

For years, arrogant journalists brushed off the crusaders, while a pack of dishonest, but influential reporters with close ties to hedge funds harassed and ridiculed them (see, “The Story of Deep Capture”). Meanwhile, government agencies denied that phantom stock was a problem. SEC Director of Trading and Markets James Brigagliano once referred to the crusaders as “bozos.”

But on Tuesday…well, here was something altogether different. The SEC said that phantom stock was not just a problem; it was an “emergency” that had the potential to crash the nation’s financial system.

In other words, the bozos were right!

Well, we cheered, and then we closed our eyes to take in that warm glow of vindication. My eyes were closed a bit too long, I’m afraid, because I missed the curtain opening on Cirque du CNBC and its amazing spectacles – great feats of flimflammery, upside down speechifying, all manner of contortionism and illusion.

Within three days, this grim circus, with a lot of help from the mighty hedge fund lobby, would reduce the SEC’s “emergency order” to a twisted joke – a grand gesture to do nothing whatsoever.

The day after the SEC’s declaration, the circus was already well under way, with the hedge funds spinning furiously and their media marionettes singing the party line: short sellers are “vital” to free markets; everybody loves free markets; only bad companies and bad CEOs complain about short sellers – go investigate the CEOs, hands off the “vital” hedge fund managers.

As for billions of dollars of phantom stock threatening to topple the American financial system – don’t even mention it. If somebody does, repeat, over and over, “Only bad companies complain about shorts…shorts are vital”

I sketch out the hedge fund party line only for those who are new to the so-called “debate” over naked short-selling. If you’re a long-time crusader, you’ve heard it all before. You’ve heard it on CNBC so often that you’re probably now banging your head against a wall and saying something like, “oogly oogly oogly,” half-mad with incomprehension – still unable to come to terms with the utterly surreal spectacle of an important television news network, in the United States of America, completely whitewashing a massive crime.

By the time CNBC interviewed SEC Chairman Christopher Cox on Wednesday, the top market cop seemed to have become rather befuddled by it all. Amidst the incessant chants – “bad CEO’s…vital short-sellers” – Cox backed away from his earlier suggestion that he might extend the emergency order to protect the entire market, rather than just 19 big financial firms with ties to Wall Street.

Meanwhile, Chairman Cox suggested, preposterously, that it’s somehow more acceptable to naked short smaller companies because their shares are harder to locate and borrow. This is something only a hedge fund contortionist would say. There are always shares to borrow at some price, and a tough borrowing environment hardly justifies selling millions of non-existent shares to drive down prices.

But we sympathize with Mr. Cox. While the CNBC lady suggested that the SEC should investigate bad companies instead of shorts, and questioned whether the SEC had initiated some kind of “witch hunt” against short-sellers generally, the chairman labored valiantly to point out the obvious (though apparently not to CNBC) distinction between legal short-selling and the blatantly illegal practice of spreading maliciously false information while selling non-existent stock to create panic and drive down prices.

Mr. Cox seemed like he wanted to do the right thing. It’s just that Cirque du CNBC can be a rather discombobulating place.

Moments before the SEC Chairman was interviewed, circus clown Joe Nocera, who doubles as the New York Times’ top business columnist, was on CNBC, working up the crowd by suggesting that Mr. Cox had lost his mind and was doing the bidding of bad companies and stupid people “saying woe is us, woe is us, blame it on the shorts.”

Remember, Joe Nocera is the anti-investigative journalist whom Deep Capture has tape recorded telling some of his media colleagues that the naked short-selling scandal “makes his eyes glaze over,” and he isn’t going to look into it because “life is too short.”

Far easier to read from the script: “Bad companies! Vital shorts!”

The next day, CNBC had yet to televise any of the CEOs, economists, and many other experts who agree that the phantom stock problem is, indeed, an “emergency.” Instead, the network brought on hedge fund cronies to say that their hedge fund cronies are “vital.”

Predictably, CNBC did a long interview with the dreaded Michael Steinhardt, a mentor and incubator of some of the most notorious short-and-distort hedge funds in the land. Steinhardt, for example, once employed David Rocker, who has regularly used the media (most notably, CNBC’s Herb Greenberg) and a dubious financial research shop called Gradient Analytics to disseminate misleading information about target companies, most of which are also victimized by massive levels of phantom stock. Jim Cramer, CNBC’s top-rated “journalist,” once ran a hedge fund out of Steinhardt’s offices, and CNBC’s “Money Honey,” Maria Bartiromo is married to the top partner in Steinhardt’s newest fund.

These are the sorts of relationships that prevail at CNBC. Our critics say it is too “conspiratorial” to point out these relationships, but we believe otherwise. Watch CNBC. Observe the lubrications that are lathered on favored hedge funds. Then judge for yourself.

Steinhardt didn’t have much to say about hedge funds that destroy public companies by selling billions of dollars of phantom stock while publishing false financial information, colluding with crooked law firms to file class action lawsuits, orchestrating dead-end government investigations, hiring convicted criminals and thugs to harass CEOs, and feeding false information to compliant journalists. Indeed, he didn’t have much to say at all, except the predictable mantra that all the “moaning and groaning” about short-sellers comes from bad companies and silly people who are angry about falling stock prices.

Participating in this interview was Paul Roth, another hedge fund manager who was mentored by Steinhardt. When asked whether it would be a problem if, say, a hedge fund were to sell ten times as many shares as actually exist in a company, Roth said, “That’s not illegal…the problem is sometimes you located the shares [and sold them] but somebody scooped them up [before you could deliver them to their rightful owners].”

CNBC’s Joe Kernen, who conducted the interview, characteristically let this statement go unchallenged. So let us state, for the record, that it would be a crime of monumental proportions to sell, say, 1,000 shares in a company that had only 100 shares outstanding. It is a crime because you cannot possibly “locate” or “scoop up” 900 shares that do not exist. It is a crime because there is only one possible reason why a hedge fund would sell ten-times a company’s public float, and that’s to manipulate the stock price.

But understand how these people think: If you can get away with it, it’s not illegal.

Around the same time that CNBC was massaging Steinhardt and Roth, members of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the leading Wall Street lobbying outfit, were on a conference call with some high-level SEC officials.

As it were, none of the hundreds of companies victimized by phantom stock got to be on any conference calls. But they’re used to that.

They’re also not too surprised that after CNBC aired the hedge funds’ talking points for three days, and the lobbyists wailed on the conference call, and uncounted other hedge fund billionaires bellowed in the name of “efficient markets” and the right to destroy “bad” public companies, the SEC announced that it would preserve its “market maker exemption,” which allows some brokers to sell stock they don’t have in order to “make a market.”

The “market maker exception” is one of several loopholes that hedge funds have been using for years to create billions of dollars worth of phantom stock. Market makers are, in fact, required to eventually deliver the stock they sell. But the name “market maker” imbues magic powers. If the SEC asks why you haven’t delivered the shares you sold, stick the words “market maker” on your forehead, mutter something about keeping things “liquid”, and the SEC goes away – even when you’ve sold ten times the float and even when the phantom stock goes undelivered for months or years at a time.

Since it was already against SEC rules to use naked short selling to drive down prices, the most exceptional feature of the commission’s “emergency order” was that it was going to close the “market maker exception” loophole – at least as it applied to trading in 19 big financial companies. By retaining that exception, the SEC has, in essence, decided that it isn’t going to do anything after all. Hedge funds and their “market makers” can go right on selling phantom stock and threatening the stability of the American financial system.

From “emergency” to “exception” in a few short days…Behold the powers of Cirque du CNBC and its hedge fund choreographers.

In the spring of 2006 I met with the very bright editor of the editorial page of a major American newspaper (I do not name the paper only because I do not wish to embarrass the individual involved). After several hours of discussion, he said gently, “I know my paper has not been so fair to you.” He proceed to invite me to submit an editorial on the subject of naked short selling, suggesting a length of 1,200 words. I predicted that he would not be permitted to publish it. He replied, “I run the editorial page. I determine what gets published on it.”

Some time thereafter I sent him the editorial that appears below. The next day he called and said, “I’m terribly embarrassed to have to say this, but it appears I will not be able to publish this or anything by you.”

He sounded surprised. I wasn’t.

That said, it seems it a shame not to let it see the light of day, even at this late date. So again, the following is an editorial prepared for a major US newspaper which ostensibly is concerned with the operation of our capital market. The months referred to are 2006 months. Since then, the numbers involved have increased 30-100%.

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A stock transaction is an exchange of stock for money. In our country the mechanisms by which stock and money change hands (”settlement”) have become divorced. Commissions are paid when money is delivered, not stock. Since follow-through incentives are weak, sometimes no stock changes hands, in which case the system creates markers of various kinds. These can be failed-to-deliver short sales (the famed “naked shorts”), the (perhaps more numerous) failed-to-deliver long sales, failures to receive from overseas exchanges, share entitlements (i.e., what is left behind in your brokerage account when your broker loans your stock to someone else), “open positions,” and “desked” trades (whereby your broker buries your order in his desk but takes your money and sends you monthly brokerage statements reflecting a trade that never actually occurred). Because our system does not adequately distinguish these markers from real shares, the markers take on lives of their own, multiplying, and creating three problems as they do.

First, these phantom shares turn proxy voting and corporate governance into a hoax. The April issue of Bloomberg magazine reports, “A robust market for stock loans puts into circulation billions of borrowed shares that can create multiple votes that corrupt corporate elections.” The effect is that, “In close contests with little room for error, the results of high-stakes company decisions may hinge on the invisible influence of millions of votes that shouldn’t be counted.” According to Thomas Montrone, CEO of Registrar & Transfer Co., “It is an abomination…. A lot of the time we have no idea who’s entitled to vote and who isn’t. It’s nothing short of criminal.” A securities consultant notes, “There are votes cast twice on almost every matter of substance… It definitely can and does, in my experience, affect the outcome of corporate elections and proposals.”

How deep is this problem? Bloomberg writes that the “Securities Transfer Association, a trade group for stock transfer agents, reviewed 341 shareholder votes in corporate contests in 2005. It found evidence of overvoting-the submission of too many ballots-in all 341 cases.” Bloomberg suggests that that this is not innocent, but that arbitrageurs have discovered and are exploiting this crack. As one source notes, “It appears to be the case where there are opportunities to game the system.” Bloomberg concludes that until these problems are fixed, “double and triple voting on one share will continue to make a mockery of shareholder democracy.”

It’s one thing if a “Should HP buy Compaq?” decision gets gamed by arbitrageurs who understand the back office better than anyone else, but there is a second way this crack is exploited to harm investors. In a normal market supply and demand balance in equilibrium. If, however, some market participants can produce phantom goods, and thus shift the supply curve to the right, they can shift the equilibrium price as well (that’s why it is “illegal”). In some companies the supply of phantom shares has become a significant fraction of (or perhaps multiple of) the shares issued and outstanding. Evidence of this comes from detailed analysis of proxy over-voting such as appears in the Bloomberg article cited above, the persistence of firms on the Reg SHO threshold list, and examination of records from transfer agents, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, and Freedom of Information Act responses from the SEC. A recent SEC FOIA response regarding the 2004 FTD’s of one company reveals days where over 40% of the volume were phantom shares, but I believe it may reach more than that in some companies. While the SEC could settle this question in a heartbeat, the Commission refuses to release relevant data on the following grounds: “The fails statistics of individual firms and customers is proprietary information and may reflect firms’ trading strategies.” That those strategies are “illegal” is apparently of little moment to our regulator.

Phantom shares can be used to game proxy voting and warp market prices, but the third effect is the one that haunts me: what risk do they create for the system? Robert Shapiro, Harvard Ph.D. economist and former Undersecretary of Commerce under President Clinton, has written, “There is considerable evidence that market manipulation through the use of naked short sales has been much more common than almost anyone has suspected, and certainly more widespread than most investors believe.” His research into death-spiral converts (a type of financing that generally is accompanied by naked shorting) turned up at least 200 companies that appear to have been largely destroyed, posting “a combined market loss of more than $105 billion.” Considering the more general topic of “massive naked short sales” he writes, “we believe that this type of stock manipulation has occurred in many hundreds and perhaps thousands of cases over the last decade…. Illicit short sales on such a scale or anything approaching it point to grave inadequacies in the current regulatory regime.” It would also imply damages in the low trillions of dollars (hence, the circling by plaintiff’s attorneys that has been reported in recent months).

Again, the SEC and DTCC have sought to assuage nascent public concerns while releasing as little data as possible. The SEC’s FOIA responses, however, reveal that on any given day, 500 million shares remain unsettled (N.B. this does not include share entitlements, desked trades, open positions, overseas delivery failures, or, as far as anyone can tell, ex-clearing). SEC economist Leslie Boni analyzed the FTD problem, and her report describes FTD’s as “pervasive,” calculates that the average persistence of failures is 56 trading days, that some go on for much longer, and that these failures are not random but strategic. Bradley Abelow, a former DTCC director questioned under oath for confirmation as New Jersey Treasurer, reluctantly described settlement failures within our system as “occur[ing] as a matter of course with great regularity,” adding “fails to deliver of securities is endemic.” The SEC’s own website, in a section on Regulation SHO explaining why in January 2005 they grandfathered all failed deliveries, reads, “The grandfathering provisions of Regulation SHO were adopted because the Commission was concerned about creating volatility where there were large pre-existing open positions” (those would be the same “large pre-existing open positions” they elsewhere assure us do not exist).

A tremendous amount of quibbling occurs over whether or not such evidence is decisive. What is overlooked is that we are not debating the properties of sub-atomic particles beyond the sensitivities of modern equipment. The question of how many unsettled long and short sale, open position, desked trades, offshore failures and share entitlements exist for any firm is a knowable fact. Each element is, in fact, known by someone. They aren’t saying. Instead, those who know these elements struggle to assure the public that there is no problem, and suggest that anyone trying to bring attention to this issue is a malcontent.

We are far down a financial rabbit-hole, one in which the SEC’s Red Queen is downplaying the problem while grandfathering it on the grounds that it is “concerned about creating volatility where there were large pre-existing open positions,” and refuses to disclose the size of these “large pre-existing open positions” on the grounds that it “is proprietary information and may reflect firms’ [illegal] trading strategies.” We catch disquieting glimpses of hundreds of millions of persistent unsettled trades,