“Let them call me rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it! For I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul.” — Thomas Paine.

From Bob O’Brien’s “Sanity Check,” a succinct account of why the “fail to deliver” problem is a big and serious one:

• The DTCC, via Cede & Co., is the registered owner of all shares held in “Street Name,” which are all shares in margin accounts.
• Margin accounts represent the bulk of independent investor account types.
• Registered owners are free to use their “property” as collateral for loans or debt.
• It is unknown what, if any, loans or debts are collateralized by the stock “owned” by the DTCC.
• The DTCC’s “Stock Borrow Program” lends shares to be delivered to buyers, if sellers fail to deliver.
• The Stock Borrow Program is operated on the honor system, and is anonymous.
• It allows one genuine share to be lent multiple times, leaving a string of markers/IOUs in the share’s wake.
• This creates a systemic risk for the stock market, as more markers are in investor accounts, falsely represented as shares, than shares actually authorized by the companies.
• These markers are freely traded and treated by the system as real, resulting in a large secondary market of counterfeit shares – resulting in depressed stock prices.
• With paper certificates being eliminated – by the DTCC – there is no way to confirm that a share is genuine, versus a bogus marker.
• There is nothing to stop your broker from taking your money, and merely representing to you that you bought shares, without ever actually buying them. You have no way of knowing the difference, barring demanding paper certificates for your property.
• Only a handful of people on the planet understand all this.
• In the end, it is simple – Wall Street is printing shares electronically, investors are paying real money for those bogus shares, and the whole thing is predicated on the idea that few will ever understand what is being done, or bother to check.
• This represents a hidden tax on investors and the economy.
• It is, for the most part, illegal.
• It is being kept secret by the DTCC and the SEC, who are terrified of systemic collapse, and a complete loss of investor confidence, should all the facts become known.
• All the facts are becoming known.

Does this sound complicated? It’s not.

Anecdote: a few years ago, in my neighborhood, a retired lady of some means was going around badgering strangers and friends for loans. She was reputed to own a few homes, so many people obliged. Then it turned out that the titles of the houses had been promised out several times over. Which meant that the lenders hadn’t received the collateral they thought they had when they gave her their money. Which meant that if she didn’t pay, they would have nothing to go after in court. Which is precisely what happened.

That, crudely, is what naked short-selling – and indeed. the whole derivative scam – amounts to. It multiplies claims on value, thereby bleeding value from those who legitimately hold it, because they paid money for it, to others who didn’t pay anything real, but traded one “counterfeit” claim for another.

And of course, on a larger scale, that’s what the paper money regime is too. It’s a multiplication of claims on a fixed store of value, which has the effect of diluting and eventually erasing that value.

We’ve been hit by a triple quadruple whammy of essentially the same type of fraud: fractional banking, excessive creation of money, abusive derivatives, and naked short-selling.

Update 2 (October 25): Links have been added and some comments on them in the main blog post, in addition to the earlier update with Olagues’ comment.

I am unable to return any personal email for the next two weeks as I am traveling on business.

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By the way, I notice Matt Taibbi’s new True Slant post, as well as his earlier Rolling Stone piece, get around to Pete Peterson’s influence….

Hmmm.. Didn’t we tell everyone to take a look at Peterson and Blackstone and Black Rock..when was it..way back in April this year?

http://mindbodypolitic.org/2009/04/28/pete-petersons-not-so-clean-crusade-against-entitlements/

Not bad for an obscure blog, whose tips just happen to show up months before they’re broken by gonzo journalists…..

Other complaints about Taibbi’s loose sourcing:

*An anonymous poster points out how much of Taibbi’s work is simply lifted without full credit from  Deep Capture‘s research (Judd Bagley and Mark Mitchell are the two researchers there).

*Robert Wenzel has pointed out his own extended piece, “Does Goldman Rule the World?” written in 2007.

*An options blog points out that Taibbi has lifted his material from there, as well (link below).

*Other Goldman Sachs blogs make the same claim and New York Magazine asks if Taibbi just summarized about 100 years of Goldman conspiracy theory and added some crude language…

Note: this itself is misleading.

There are no “hundred years of Goldman conspiracy” – the first criticism of Goldman on trader boards that I saw was around 2003 fall, 2004 and I believe they may have been links taken from this site, Catbird Seat, although I am not entirely sure. (Added, June 24, 2011: I should clarify that they were anonymous links and I am guessing that they were from that blog…they might have been from some where else. I haven’t been able to find them since.  My own research into Goldman came out of research for “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets” and was published first as an investment report there).

The links suggested extensive fraud and manipulation. I think I was the first person to put that into an extended piece in 2006. (I’ve already posted on how Taibbi “bubble” thesis looks like a cropped version of the argument from my 2006 pieces, “Why It’s Time to Sell Goldman” and from my 2008 pieces,  “Paulson Putsch” and “Three-Card Capitalists.”

Far from being a brilliant or original investigator, Taibbi is a colorful and sometimes misleading retailer of other people’s leads and ideas who adds the footnotes and the “I was there” element that investigative journalism reveres…and needs.  Which is OK and on the whole useful –  we won’t pull up the wheat in that field of tares…

(I’ll discuss the dangers and limitations of “smoking gun” journalism another time).

So long as Taibbi doesn’t muddy up the story with too many of the usual half-wit mantras of the cultural establishment, he’s helping the debate….

The more serious gaps – in relation to 9-11 – can always be countered by bloggers.

(And in time,  Taibbi might “break” the 9-11 story too. Hope he gives Dr. Griffin a footnote when he comes around to that).

At one point in Matt’s article he writes:

“Here’s how naked short-selling works: Imagine you travel to a small foreign island on vacation. Instead of going to an exchange office in your hotel to turn your dollars into Island Rubles, the country instead gives you a small printing press and makes you a deal: Print as many Island Rubles as you like, then on the way out of the country you can settle your account. So you take your printing press, print out gigantic quantities of Rubles and start buying goods and services. Before long, the cash you’ve churned out floods the market, and the currency’s value plummets. Do this long enough and you’ll crack the currency entirely; the loaf of bread that cost the equivalent of one American dollar the day you arrived now costs less than a cent.

With prices completely depressed, you keep printing money and buy everything of value — homes, cars, priceless works of art. You then load it all into a cargo ship and head home. On the way out of the country, you have to settle your account with the currency office. But the Island Rubles you printed are now worthless, so it takes just a handful of U.S. dollars to settle your debt. Arriving home with your cargo ship, you sell all the island riches you bought at a discount and make a fortune.”

If you go to this article from Deep Capture http://www.deepcapture.com/the-simple-metaphorical-explanation/ and read it, Matt’s example, though summarized, is awfully similar to the one written at Deep Capture. Now, I do not know whether Matt gave credit to the author who wrote the article but I could not find any mention of the person within Matt’s article. If Matt did not give credit, then there is a case for plagiarism.

For those who don’t know, plagiarism is defined as the “unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.” (Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/plagiarism)

I hope this is taken seriously and my worries refuted. Matt authors great articles but this does not mean that he stands above honest journalistic integrity.

Regards,
Anon

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My Comment:

When I have more time, I will try to put the pattern of plagiarism in the American media into a larger context….and show just what it cost the country and why the media has very little moral ground to stand on when condemning the bankers. And that includes many of the alternative sites too…

Indeed, at some point, I would like to undertake a bear raid of my own – on the English language media. I include not just the establishment print and TV outlets, but the blogosphere, wiki, alternative press, and the like, which are supposed to be so free of manipulation.

Bagley’s (and Mitchell’s) admirable work at Patrick Byrne’s Deep Capture blog only touches the tip of the iceberg. For a quick recap of Byrne’s position on naked short-selling and his ideological orientation, here’s a video of an interview with him.

I add it, because of Olagues’ comments (see comments below). I assume that Olagues comes from a libertarian position that’s more to the right than Byrne’s. Example: Byrne seems to be involved with school-choice activism with the widow of Milton Friedman.

Update One (Sunday, October 25):

Former options market-maker John Olagues posts a comment below, with a link, which I will add here.

At first glance, his analysis seems to support my own conclusion that the Fed and the major banks were involved. (I have also blogged last year that I believe that LIBOR was manipulated).

I need to research Olagues’ piece a bit more to verify the reliability.

I’m taking a sabbatical of a couple of weeks from this blog.

Keiser’s image of speculators as suicide bombers has been used by a number of people. But parts of his argument sounds strange to me. The well-connected banks are “blowing up” other banks through speculation, so as to drive the dollar higher?

Undoubtedly the dollar is being manipulated and the banks will make money off of it, but blaming speculation alone is too easy a game and it will lead to the wrong remedies.

While speculation undoubtedly exacerbated the crisis and pushed the market over, speculators can only undermine fundamental weakness.

The housing bubble collapsed because the mania exhausted itself and the underlying loans were bad. Speculators didn’t make the bad loans. Mortgage lenders and banks did that.

Speculators didn’t certify the derivatives based on them were great. The ratings agencies did that.

Speculators didn’t hold a gun to home owners and tell them to buy. Greenspan encouraged them – though even he didn’t hold any guns to their head.

Speculators didn’t look the other way when numbers of professionals complained to the regulators. The SEC did that.

Speculators didn’t publish fulsome flattery of Greenspan and Summers and Rubin and Paulson. Magazines – including Vanity Fair and Time and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal did that.

Speculators didn’t bestow degrees and honors on these charlatans. The universities and prize committees did that.

Speculators didn’t attack anyone who criticized them or called them into question. Partisans did that.

Speculators didn’t rewrite history and ignore the scores of right-libertarians at Mises, Lew Rockwell and other libertarian sites who foresaw this and warned repeatedly to rein in monetary debasement.  Left-liberal academics and journalists did that.

Speculators didn’t rah-rah for war and the expansion of the corporate state and police laws so dissidence became difficult. Right-conservatives and neocons did that.

Speculators didn’t attack anyone who argued for generosity, or self-restraint, or humility, temperance, or any moral virtue. Libertines and anti-religious bigots did that.

Speculators didn’t bribe Congressmen to pass bad legislation. Lobbyists did that.

Speculators didn’t swallow propaganda whole sale and follow the line of least resistance. Lazy consumers and the public did that……

Ergo – Goldman Sachs is a fairly accurate reflection of the kind of society we’ve become. Laws aren’t going to change that. Political and public culture has to change.