Thomas Pynchon. David Foster Wallace. Joe Nocera.
The wit and the wisdom.
History in the making, and we are all the richer for it.
After Joe's last interaction with me, we were left wondering what the elves would produce, what that special NY Times necromancy would conjur up. The anticipation was palpable. How could he top his railings against ipods, the searing insights about Canadian commercial practices, his provocative stance vis a vis barristas and coffee-culture leadership? It's not like one can just fall against one's keyboard and spew forth that sort of thing.
We had been hoping for something truly special, something that would live up to the vaunted Pulitzer finalist stature. Many didn't think he had it in him. They said he was tired, spent, punked, finished, just another pretty face in the big city.
Thankfully, they were wrong.
Joe, your latest bit, thinly disguised as a dead-serious "Byrne's crazy" article, with the marginally interesting twist of a gratuitous Bunny mention (apropos of nothing, like a cameo on a 50-Cent video) validates your reputation as an erudite wordsmith possessed of a keen intellect and rapier-like wit. I've been an admirer for some time, and have to say that it's appealing to see a master at work, effortlessly wielding chops like a samurai in a Chinese action film.
For those not in on the gag, Joe satirizes the typical dimwitted slop the NY financial press churns out, and does a LOL sendup of the usual cretinism.
Your whole column is stellar, enjoyable on a thematic, critical, and personal level, but I particularly admired the way you integrated a feigned studied ignorance of all evidence of a delivery failure crisis, with the laughable assertion that any failures were likely benign - not a financially driven fraud perpetrated by NY miscreants who take investor money and refuse to deliver the shares they were paid for. Certainly not that. More of an accidental thing. You know, the dog eating a billion or so shares.
Your inclusion of that critical bit of selective blindness (always mandatory in these things) in such an off-hand way gave the piece the necessary conviction early on.
It killed me dead. That you so perfectly captured the tone of the apologist, "Rhino? What rhino behind the couch?" screeds with your tongue so firmly planted in cheek is a tribute to your skill with the language.
For those unfamiliar with how these types of "Wacky Patty/there is no NSS problem" articles usually read, let's go to what you didn't explain (mirroring those articles' conspicuous defects) . Once the reader gets the joke, they'll better appreciate what you did here.
First, in keeping with these types of stories, you didn't explain how companies like Overstock can remain on the Reg SHO list for well over 400 days - actually, years - if this is all innocent. You didn't explain how Patrick and Dad could fail to receive any of the hundreds of thousands of shares they bought, for months, if this was all innocent. You didn't explain how groups like the US Chamber of Commerce could be demanding hearings on the NSS thing if it was all much ado about nothing. In point of fact, you explained nothing, and created something more like a hasty collage of half truth and half-baked arguments than anything reasoned - precisely like the efforts you are clearly mocking with such laser-like precision. On the surface, it all seemed rather sophomoric and disappointing, however I got the gag, and my self-promoting side is clearly delighted to be afforded so much coverage in your sterling pub, in the same breath as a man I have grown to respect no end - Patrick Byrne.
It's truly an inspired Mozart moment when you ignore that the largest organization of its kind in the world has publicly demanded Congressional hearings about NSS. That you left out this elephant in the room, which most by now know about, was a masterstroke of contretemps - ignore by omission what is obvious to everyone, allowing the reader to fill in the blanks, and perfectly parodying the dreary types of articles that have become the norm on the topic. Most couldn't have pulled it off. Then again, most haven't attained your lofty position at the pinnacle of the NY literary scene.
Let's take the important chunks of the column, and add my explanations and observations - that always seems to go over well with the big names in the NY press, who you so effortlessly jab here.
"Publication title: New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Mar 10, 2007. pg. C.1
It was the last Monday in February, and another Utah legislative session was coming to a close. A group of lobbyists, legislators and state officials were meeting to hash out the merits of a controversial bill. Among those in the room was our old friend Patrick M. Byrne, the chief executive of Overstock.com, the struggling Internet retailer based in Salt Lake City.
Yes, dear reader, we are returning to Utah this week. You will perhaps recall that we last visited that great state in early summer. Our interest had been piqued by another piece of legislation, passed during a brief special session, that took aim at the practice of ''naked short selling.'' You will perhaps also recall that Mr. Byrne has been crusading for several years about the evils of naked short sellers, seeing something in the practice that few others see: a conspiracy to destroy upstanding companies like his own, and rob unsuspecting investors. "
"Few others see?" You mean like the US Chamber of Commerce and its millions of members? Again, funny stuff. But more than just funny - the essence of the absurdity is synthesized into just a few, deliberately ill-crafted sentences, highlighting what is conspicuously wrong with these pieces.
First, you perfectly capture the effete tone of these types of hatchet jobs, wherein the writers insult their readers' intelligence by postulating some never-never land, where nameless "others" don't consider taking a buyer's money and refusing to deliver the product purchased to be fraud. In that alternative universe, these "others" presumably view it as doing God's work. The reader is forced to ask whether the hundreds of letters at the SEC site, from virtually every segment of the population, which justifiably contemn the practice as fraud, contain some logical flaw only the author and his familiars see? The immediate follow-on being to question the veracity of the statement itself - how do we know "few" others see things as the authors routinely assert? What basis do we have for believing that claim, which conflicts with the statements of economists, academics, former SEC attorneys, CEOs of prominent companies, and many industry insiders? Joe skillfully causes one to pause, and ask oneself whether this is what passes for reasoning in NY these days - something dulling in the water, perchance, a chemical trick on the synapses?
To be able to impart all of the above with such ease while pretending to be serious is what separates the greats from the not. Read on:
"Shares of Overstock, for instance, have dropped from $76 to the mid-teens in a little more than two years. (Overstock closed yesterday at $17.51.) Could this be because the company has never come close to making money? (Last year, it lost $96.9 million.) Nah. Must be those rotten naked short sellers.
Never mind that most people on Wall Street, or most regulators, for that matter, don't believe that there is much naked short selling going on. (A typical short seller, who is betting that a stock is going to decline, borrows shares at a high price and then buys them when the price drops, pocketing the difference. A naked short seller, on the other hand, doesn't bother to borrow the shares within the allotted settlement period.)"
This bit is wondrous, as I know you are aware of Patrick and Dad's inability to get delivery of a single share for months. That knowledge of your awareness, that "we know you know" post-modern perspective seasons the hilarity like a rare spice, salting the preposterous with a dose of the inane.
I know you were likely burning to ask your purported sources what their explanation for Patrick and his father's inability to get delivery for months of a single share of the hundreds of thousands of shares they purchased was, but by playing that one straight, it worked better. You let the "unnamed sources'" lack of any credible alternative explanation sort of hang out there, underscoring its fundamental absurdity. And you rather artfully pretend to be oblivious to the FOIA data's exposure of the crisis level of the problem, and feign ignorance of the SIA spreadsheet's $63 billion of failure to delivers and receives as of Q2, 2006, just for NYSE member firms - again, an ignorance which is extremely unlikely for an icon of NY financial journalism, and thus the more entertaining for it.
You perfectly capture and balance the simpering tendency of your peers to discuss what they think most Wall Street choagies and their captured regulators "believe," (as opposed to the readily available hard data) against your craft's purported requirement that just facts be considered. By interjecting this bit of non-sequitor, we are again invited "behind the camera" and into the fun that is the making of a parody. Sort of a, "why address the hard data when you can discuss beliefs and unsupported opinion" sendup of the countless other articles that do precisely that.
Art. Truly. Warhol has nothing on you.
"And never mind that the means by which Utah was going to stomp out naked short selling was highly technical -- revolving around something called ''failure to deliver''-- and that it was even questionable whether a large number of ''failures to deliver'' meant that naked short selling was the cause. The bill would have allowed Utah companies to discover who was failing to deliver their shares -- and then sue them for damages. That, of course, had Mr. Byrne licking his chops. Indeed, he was the driving force behind the original legislation."
That one had me blowing coffee through my nose. I mean, "highly technical?" I had to read that twice to fully appreciate the farce.
It's beyond good. By describing the bill's requirement that brokers report to the state the identities of those failing to deliver as being "highly technical," you skewer those like Carol who invariably pretend that a simple act of fraud is some unbelievably complex interaction. I mean, putting jam on bread must be akin to designing semiconductors in your book if that seems "technical," so I got the eye-rolling intent. Hopefully nobody is so dim as to believe you meant it. That's the only way this could backfire on you. But no way are the readers of the Times that provincial.
That you deliberately omit the obvious questions, "What then is the cause for the $63 billion of FTDs and FTRs we know from the SIA's own spreadsheet are the number, after netting hides 96% of the problem?" enables readers to frame the question themselves, which is much more effective. The reader then starts running the numbers, and that $63 billion starts sounding like it could be a trillion bucks or more - demanding that he ask, "What is causing all those real, hard dollars to be taken from buyers, and instead of stock being delivered, NOTHING IS? What is the culprit for this massive windfall for Wall Street's biggest names, which just so happens to rob American investors blind? Is it just an oopsie?"....."Ooops, I just sold another half a billion dollars of OSTK, which is impossible to borrow and has been for the last two years, and after collecting the money, I can't actually deliver a single share. I guess I'll have to keep the money and just "try" to find shares at some undisclosed time in the future, if at all. Meanwhile, I need a new Gulfstream and Feadship and châteaux in Provence. Jeez, I hate when I make that mistake, he he he...."
Again, hat's off for bringing the reader to that point, and creating the perfect environment to raise awareness, while demonstrating the obvious flaws in the pseudo-logic.
I have to say I loved the tone of the next bit in the column, which mis-describes the Utah bill, as well as Wall Street's ability to buy off or bully the Senator who introduced it. There's one really sweet quote from Bramble:
"Senator Bramble was clearly furious. He told The Associated Press that he now believed that Overstock's motives were ''highly suspect.'' He added: ''There are those who believe Overstock has been using the Legislature as a distraction against its own problems. It raises serious questions.''
Mr. Byrne, in turn, publicly called Senator Bramble ''a squish'' and a ''yellow belly.''"
Really rich stuff, that.
I mean, as you well know from our exchange, there are those who believe that the SIA's lobbyist's other large clients, the real estate lobby, showered Bramble with favors and business in a veiled and ostensibly successful attempt to buy his pulling the bill. A simple examination of the Senator's business over the last year would show whether that belief is correct or not, but you pretend that you apparently can't muster that sort of journalistic integrity and acumen. Pulling a Herb, they call it in the biz. Very inside. Wink wink.
Given your purported "struggle" with the bill's "technicality" it is no wonder, however I think you are stretching the reader's credulousness at this point. They will start to lose you here, as there is no way you could believably be that illogical and uninterested, thus they are being alerted this is an obvious put-on. I would have continued playing straight-man, staying in character, but then again, everyone's a critic. We both know that if anyone explores those beliefs about Bramble and the buying-off of the bill, that the Senator likely won't be celebrating that sunshine with quite the same enthusiasm. But it's your column, and that was the only area I would have changed. The rest is perfect as is.
"Needless to say, Utah no longer has a law to stop naked short selling. Though no one will say so publicly, the word is that Utah officials now feel they were snookered by the Overstock C.E.O. And that his behavior at that meeting further damaged his credibility. And that, even though he is one of the state's largest political donors, he is going to have a hard time ever getting the Legislature to take him seriously again. As Gary Weiss, the author of ''Wall Street Versus America'' and one of Mr. Byrne's most vocal critics, put it to me recently, ''We are watching, in real time, a guy in the midst of a meltdown.''
Ahh, a 'lilGW tout and sound bite - perfect, and a nice touch to ensure that all the notes get played. It seems like lately you can't have a good "Patrick's a dangerous wild-eyed crazy" piece without 'lilGW in the house. A guy publicly and convincingly accused of using sock puppets to tout his screeds, who has been shown to be working from DTCC computers by another website (don't know if that is accurate, but it sure explains a lot), and who also has your pretended astounding ability to ignore all data that indicates that FTDs are real, huge, and deliberate, gets his book touted by the "unbiased columnist" (again, apropos of nothing), and his wholly uninformed take broadcast as though gospel. That you were able to weave in this absurdity, as so many do lately, highlighted both the dearth of any credible sources to support the pro-NSS position, as well as the low station of those invariably trotted out to do so.
You perfectly conveyed the sense that it's almost as though all the coverage of the topic is scripted, and there's a small cast of characters who are required to bolster each others' credibility and views.
We both know that an industry whose continued viability is jeopardized by the exposure of a trillion dollars of delivery failures will spend whatever time and money is required to mount a propaganda campaign to denigrate those exposing its malfeasance. Getting that across to the reader without being obvious is a bit more tricky, and the hackneyed 'lilGW performance is a great vehicle to do so. I probably would have included something about the last similar crisis, the S&L debacle, where the thrift industry spent years of ink and dollars demonizing Ed Gray for sounding the alarm about the thievery in that industry, as being wholly unlike this episode, however that might have come off as heavy-handed and preachy. As would have any reminders of the physical assaults and character assassination leveled against the whistleblower in the mutual fund frontrunning scandal....I mean, the notion that would happen yet again, is just, uh...preposterous...let the reader put it together. Don't tell them, just lead them to the water. Nicely done.
"I think his whole crusade is in meltdown. True, the S.E.C. has proposed a few new rules about ''failures to deliver,'' but those rules were in the works well before the Utah legislation was passed. And the agency doesn't even really believe that the failures to deliver and naked short selling are particularly connected. Mr. Byrne's Internet ramblings have lost much of their ''oh my goodness'' factor, so they don't get the attention they once did. A Web site, antisocialmedia.net, which attacked critics of Mr. Byrne and Overstock, was exposed by an Internet sleuth as being run by an Overstock official. Recently, Overstock filed a ridiculous $3.5 billion suit against 10 big Wall Street firms, asserting that they were aiding and abetting the naked short sellers. He is becoming harder and harder to take seriously. I can't help thinking that there are a lot of people who must feel like Senator Bramble -- they once believed Patrick Byrne and now they're wondering why."
Ha ha ha. Absolutely brilliant."Ridiculous" suit? Nice touch - demanding that the reader ask, "What is ridiculous about it?" We both know that the suit contends that the prime brokers have colluded to generate massive delivery failures, in order to harm the company's share price, so unless you are privy to some data the rest of us aren't, we are forced to conclude that the suit is anything but ridiculous. If true, it will be a multi-billion dollar body blow from which countless similar suits will arise.
By framing it this way, you manage to highlight that many of your peers operate sort of like big tobacco's media stooges did - the usual roster of captured journalists parading their tired shtick long after its plausibility had vanished, and who always unerringly advanced the agenda that claims against cigarette manufacturers were specious. Now here, you lampoon 'lilGW by pretending to have that strident and peculiar penchant for ignoring mountains of data in favor of your own increasingly implausible views...and it plays beautifully. Insert claims like "there is no hard evidence linking smoking with lung cancer" and "many experts dispute whether cigarettes are addictive" with "many experts are unsure that naked short selling is a problem" and it's identical- which then has the reader asking what I suspect is your intended question: "Who is paying the check to get these guys to write what they write?" With big tobacco, they knew that once they lost a battle and coughed up billions, that it was over. It's pretty clear that same thought has occurred to Wall Street, hence all the hair pulling to brand the suit ridiculous and Byrne as a dangerous kook - which you perfectly expose as a rather transparent sham.
Next, we have the obligatory "Short sellers are good for your bones and teeth" rant, wherein they are painted as victims of all these nasty companies who have been on the SHO list for years. And there's the laughable claim that short sellers have gone dark, which ignores the fact that short interest on the NYSE is approaching all time highs. Who is doing all that short selling if they have gone into hibernation, the reader is forced to ask himself? A beautiful takeoff on some of the recent "singing tractor workers" pieces from your peers, and one that most are sure to appreciate. I did.
BTW, thanks for the plugs. I loved the coverage - you can't buy this kind of thing, so it is not unappreciated. I don't have the money to take out full page ads for my site, but this is the next best thing:
"And then there's the Internet, where Mr. Byrne and his chief ally, a man who uses the pseudonym Bob O'Brien, go after anyone who disagrees with them. (To get a flavor of Mr. O'Brien's belligerent style, and his response to questions, check out his Web site, thesanitycheck.com, where he has posted a Q.& A. with me that took place this week.)
Mr. O'Brien is as fanatical about naked short selling as Mr. Byrne, but he also spends time on other message boards. For years, one of his favorite stocks has been NovaStar, the subprime lender that recently collapsed, which Mr. O'Brien has touted endlessly, while attacking anyone who disagreed. He once even went so far as to publish a thinly veiled threat aimed at the family of Marc Cohodes, who was at the time Mr. Rocker's partner. There are clearly people who stuck with NovaStar because of Mr. O'Brien -- and have lost a lot of money. Wouldn't they have been better off if they had been able to hear the bear view of NovaStar?"
Oh, the pain, the pain. Those poor investors, and billionaire hedge fund managers, all of whom have been victimized by fanatics and loons. If only those dangerous bad bunnies could be silenced, we would all be safer for it.
The supposed outrage, and the laughable premise that the "bear view" about NFI wasn't broadcast in the Wall Street Journal, Marketwatch, on CNBC, in the pages of Forbes, the NY Times, Barron's, and from every major and minor NY financial periodical, for years, and that Jim Cramer wasn't a vocal basher of the stock, for years....priceless. This echoes the Lapdog's piece, wherein my awesome and mysterious powers to silence the entire US financial system's media outlets is trumpeted as though even slightly plausible. I'm glad you had the column inches to include it - a nice giggle for those following the story forever.
I know that when you see your colleagues spending their time trying to construct a bridge upon this slender reed you have to wonder about their agendas, not to say their powers of reason, or skill as storytellers. I've also always thought that fiction can be harder than non for some. I'm with you on this one, and I'd counsel them to stick to the non until they gets the basics down a bit better. You have to make the story believable is the first rule of good fiction.
"There is one other important person who appears to have lost faith in Mr. Byrne lately. That's a man named John A. Fisher, a former executive at the old Hambrecht & Quist investment bank, who now runs his own boutique firm.
A few weeks ago, Mr. Fisher resigned from the Overstock board, saying that he could not go along with Mr. Byrne's decision to sue the big Wall Street firms. The Overstock board is now down to four directors, two of them insiders. In an S.E.C. filing, the company said it would work quickly to find some new independent directors.
So, Mr. Fisher, who is a former H&Q banker, and who is now a boutique banker, is against suing those he has to work with every day, and is likely dependent upon for cooperation. Huh. That is unexpected. Really. I can't for the life of me read between the lines on that one and figure it out. Hmmmmm. Hmmmmmmmmmmm...
Joe. Shhhhhhh.
You had me at "technical."
All in all, nicely done. It's always a hoot to read one of your wry rib-ticklers. I wish you'd devote more of your time to launching these knee-slappers, and less to the purportedly straight coverage. In these dark times, we can always use a little levity to brighten our day.
Keep up the good work.