Read this article. It's really priceless.
The subject matter, Mark Cuban's ill-conceived stock bashing website that's nothing more than a foil to slam his short positions, is the ostensible topic. I haven't even bothered commenting on the site, as it's pretty obvious to most upright bipeds what is being done there.
But this article is astounding - I literally thought that the guy who emailed me the link was making it up.
Check this out:
"Mark Cuban's New Best Friend: The person who should probably be most excited about the criticism being directed at Mark Cuban is Patrick Byrne, the chief executive officer of Overstock.com (Nasdaq: OSTK - News).
Cuban, by promoting Sharesleuth.com as a journalistic endeavor, has given Byrne more ammunition for his misguided war against the financial media. I imagine Byrne, if asked, could point to Sharesleuth.com as an example of how "miscreants" can wreak havoc on the public markets, and in doing so, throw the words "responsible journalism" out.
This is the perception versus reality problem. If Carey wants to continue to hold himself out as a journalist, it has a negative impact on other financial journalists, and opens doors for bullies like Byrne to try to squelch the media's ability to do its job. Carey and Cuban are essentially telling the public that Sharesleuth.com is operating under the same standards at The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, but no one I know at those newspapers is tipping off their publishers about potentially profitable stock trades.
Perhaps it's just a matter of semantics - after all, "journalism" is a rather ambiguous term in this day and age. The financial journalists I've talked to about the matter all have a lot of respect for Carey, and more than a few are envious of the fact that he was able to find a backer to do the type of investigative work that journalists crave and that is missing from too many business publications (I'm no different, and after Sharesleuth.com was announced, I sent a Carey a note saying so).
Nonetheless, not one journalist I've spoken to about Sharesleuth.com believes that Carey is acting in the role of a journalist, and it's for no other reason than the fact that he is providing pre-publication information to someone who is trading on it.
"You just don't do that," one well-known financial journalist told me. "I can't imagine working on an investigative story and telling people what I'm about to publish, and that they may want to trade a particular stock. It's unfathomable for a journalist."
Exactly, but it's not unfathomable for a stock researcher. A stock researcher with a singular client, no less."
Apparently you just don't do that, and he can't imagine doing it, but he can make stuff up about the head of a public corporation, and use it as material for character assassination.
Thank goodness the lines are now well defined in terms of journalistic ethics and outrage.
Here we have a Yahoo-distributed pundit, imagining what the CEO of a company would say, think or do, and then slamming him for this straw man invention.
It also unfairly characterizes Byrne's battle against illegal market manipulation, that could well pose a systemic risk to the markets, as a war on journalists.
I imagine that if the author had been handed an ATM card, complete with PIN number, that draws from a BVI or Costa Rican account, and had been instructed to bash Byrne, that would be the exact way he could do it while maintaining a veneer of deniability.
I love imagining! Imagine if the financial press actually reported on Wall Street and the SEC's conduct as recently exposed. Wouldn't that be a hoot?
Isn't it fun to be a journalist? My only question is how much lower can some examples of the species sink?
Never mind. I'm quite sure we will see over the coming weeks.
----------------
The SEC has been at it again, torturing the truth with a zeal that any inquisitor would have been proud of.
Specifically, in their effort to convince the world that naked short selling isn't a big deal, and that their horrific failure in regulatory inaction, "Reg SHO," in some way "worked," is mangling the numbers every which way they can to squeeze out a defensible statement.
Unfortunately, as with their feeble efforts to protect investors, they fail miserably.
Take this nugget from their site.
In it, more specious claims are made with a straight face than in the average wrestling interview.
Dave Patch has a complete debunking of the claims now live at InvestigatetheSEC.com, but here's the capsule summary:
The SEC, mostly composed of attorneys, is massaging and distorting the data to support their provably false contention that Reg SHO has resulted in a material decrease in FTDs, and is thus "working." It is doing so in a flagrant and easily exposed manner, and speaks again to a regulator run amok, out of control, whose imperative is to deceive rather than to protect the public.
Don't take my word for it. Read Dave's piece. He breaks it down, and shows the lie for what it is.
Sadly, that's entirely consistent with the deceptive practices one would expect from a regulator which has just been exposed as colluding with market marauders who defrauded investors in the most blatant manner possible, as discussed in the last 3 blogs.
Where do we go from here? Congress doesn't seem to have a problem with their creation being shown to be a fraudulent enterprise that aids and abets Wall Street crooks. The media seems to greet every example of deceit and trickery from our market watchdog with stony silence, preferring to pretend nothing is happening.
How bad does this have to be shown to be before a special prosecutor is put into the mix, and the shiftiness at the SEC is halted?
Or have we become a nation so inured to the idea of the rule of law, so apathetic to flagrant abuse and crookery, that no amount of malfeasance and ugliness raises our pulses and causes outcry and indignation?
What kind of country does that leave for our kids? What kind of retirements are we headed for? If we don't deserve better than an apparatus that lies, cheats and steals from us, do we even care when it is exposed as a system doing exactly that? Judging by the spectacular silence from the mainstream media, the answer is, screw America, just gimme my vig, and I'll tell whatever story you want.
I have never seen a lower moment in American journalism, nor in the prospects for the system to ever be righted. When the pretense of fairness is discarded in favor of an acknowledgment of blatant, endemic corruption, the rot is so deep that the patient has no chance.
Bring on the special prosecutor. How much more of this do we have to see before we say, "Enough!?"