Two landmark articles ran in the Vancouver Sun this week.
Why should we care, here at a site devoted to market reform for the US markets? Well, for starters, because Canada is a heavily-used trading area where naked short selling and other manipulations flourish, and where US stocks can get destroyed from a safe distance, trading through ECNs.
Mark Faulk today called for the SEC to be dismantled. Dave Patch points out that they aren't doing their job.
Perhaps all too true, and even a tame version of circumstances.
But lest we become too smug that we in the US have refined bureaucratic inaction, inefficiency, and perhaps even corruption to new and superior levels, I say, tut tut, no...we don't hold a candle to the Canadians!
Perhaps it is the cold, or the beer, but they have single handedly entered a powerful juggernaut in the race for least impactful defender of the public good. Think the SEC's $1 million fine in the Operation Bermuda Shorts case was a joke? Wondering aloud at Reg SHO's regulatory equivalent of drunk cheerleaders swatting miscreants with Nerf bats? Considering a career on Wall Street, or if that turns your stomach, selling crack and heroin to elementary schoolchildren. or creating a white slavery smuggling operation?
You are not alone. And you may want to do it in the great white north.
The first article you should read is viewable here.
The second can be found here.
This series chronicles ludicrous penalties for felonious behavior that defies description - of course, related to the stock market. Ours, and Canada's.
So is it our market that acts as a black hole for honesty and integrity, or is it a broader impact of the confluence between money and power corrupting systems and rendering them unfit for the purposes they were created - to protect the layman?
It would seem to me that we are neck and neck for inefficiency and stupidity between our two regulators.
Read the articles, which are written by a brilliant reporter at the Vancouver Sun who apparently was neglected when they were handing out the graft proceeds, and thus is honest and forthright in his coverage.
What a shame that we don't have more like him down this way. Certainly, it should come as no surprise that Vancouver is about as far from NY as one can get on this continent without encountering a pipeline or an amorous caribou, or both. I'm sure that some honest reporters exist in NY, as well, but I have to view that as more of a theoretical artifact of statistical possibility than something borne out by evidence, at this point - although the CJR article from a day or so ago was noteworthy. That guy will never work on Wall Street, that's for sure.
Anyway, read these, and revel at the level of unbridled greed and corruption that markets engender.
And then try to have a good night...