I just found a post on the Investorvillage.com OSTK board, wherein there is a link to a blog of a purported Chinese deep pockets investor who is offering $42.33 per share for all the outstanding shares of the company. Does anyone know anything about this tender - is it genuine? Is the investor a legitimate entity? It looks suspect to me.
If this is a hoax, my thinking is that the SEC should look into the creator of the blog for a violation of 10(b)5 - trying to disseminate false and misleading information to impact the price of the stock. If it is genuine, the shorts just got handed a world of hurt.
Anyone?
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Another masterful article from Alan Newman, focused on the farce that our markets have become, for certain publicly traded companies that have been targeted by miscreants.
You can read it here.
It confirms all our worst suspicions, and is merely the latest sounding board to show how compromised the system is.
Sort of depressing.
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Perhaps more depressing is the farce that is the OTCBB short interest list.
According to it, there is really nothing going on in the OTCBB market as far as short selling goes.
Literally, nothing.
In a market where the MMs have to naked short in order to meet sudden demand. And yet there is little to no shorting going on, per this new feature. Consider Global Links, where one guy bought the entire float and couldn't get delivery. Per this list, less than 10K shares short. Or consider NANN, whose total outstanding shares are 1.3 million. On the SHO list for 92 Consecutive days and a short position of 355,000 shares with an O/S of 1.3 Million shares. The stock trades 4.1 Million shares daily for the 10 day avg. (4X shares outstanding every day on average). Note the drop in value from $2.80 to $.002.
There are many, many more examples one can cite.
In every struggle, there comes a time when we, as thinking adults, have to recognize that our apparatus is lying to us, because it sees no downside to doing so. It feels safe misrepresenting our laws, current events, the state of the union, virtually everything. This is borne by a cynicism about the rank and file that is entrenched in the power structure, and is shared by everyone on the "other" side of the line separating the public from their government and regulators. Put simply, those who can lie with impunity because they can, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Sound cynical?
It's the history of the human condition ever since the first hunter gatherer laid down his spear and decided to plant things, and an imbalance was created between haves, and have nots. Those that have view those who don't have, or don't have as much, as unworthy of equivalent respect, or access to the truth. Thus they lie, for the better of us all - but usually to protect what they have, or to trick those with less into not rebelling.
And now we have a bloated Wall Street gorging itself on the nation's prosperity, and when it is time to tell us about what is actually going on, it lies. Either through statistical sleight of hand, or by omission, or sometimes, just baldfaced. The only challenge that this new reporting mechanism offers us is to figure out what technique is being used to lie.
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The SEC got up and went wabba wabba wabba. The Banking Committee went yadda yadda yadda. Everyone made long speeches indicating that there might be some reason to want to regulate large, anonymous pools of money that largely control how the markets move, and can easily be used to launder money or manipulate stocks. There was much grave concern, and expressions of cautious desire to maybe take steps toward reining them in - or maybe not. All of the concern was about hedge funds abusing their rich clients - not about them abusing shareholders and companies, or other participants.
About the only thing you can say about yesterday's Senate Banking Committee hearing was that if you had tuned it out, and instead imagined the members lip-syncing to Guns & Roses or the latest Shakira, you wouldn't have missed any of the message, nor the nuance. It was a group grope of inaction and bureaucratic BS, and was typical of how that valued watchdog does nothing about the largest problem in the market.
Blah blah blah. Maybe we should do something. Maybe we shouldn't.
Blah blah. Maybe we shouldn' fix it if it ain't broke.
As Shakira says, the hips don't lie. I would do cartoons, but the mere discussion of the hearing has sapped my will to live, and I feel the need to chug a bottle of Wild Turkey, or huff paint, or take a nap, or something, just to keep plodding forward. The last time I felt this way was after my TV tuner inexplicably became stuck on a channel that played Korean soap operas, 24/7. In retrospect, that wasn't so bad - the acting was more professional, and the rheoric more coherent to me.
Maybe a cartoon of a brick, wearing a blond wig, shaking clearly non-existent hips at the august board of the Committee, would lift my spirits?
Worth a try...
