Here's what you won't be hearing any time soon, or reading about in the NY Financial press: "Easter Bunny's prediction of massive, pervasive naked shorting crisis comes to fruition, destroys US market." "Patrick Byrne's call that system is in danger of vapor locking due to illegal market manipulation cause by NSS now 100% dead on." "Bob O'Brien spelled out exactly how NSS will cause systemic meltdown and erosion of public confidence in US markets, and is completely correct on all counts."
Nope.
What we are seeing is the US markets relentlessly melting down, as even the bulge bracket firms, and the "too big to fail" entities, are victimized by unbridled, unconstrained naked short selling. Exactly as used to be the case in the 1920's. Exactly in the manner that resulted in the SEC being formed, and the uptick rule (discarded just a few short months back as an anachronism), and requirements for timely clearing and delivery. All of which the SEC has basically ignored, very deliberately.
While the national net worth is stolen, and the markets are rendered a cesspool of crookery that makes an Afghan flea market seem rigidly honest.
Cox is going to introduce an emergency rule requiring that short sellers actually borrow the stock they then sell - in the two largest holders of mortgages in the nation. Why? Because apparently it is OK to put thousands of companies out of business using the same technique, but when it becomes so obvious that the taxpayers are going to get stuck with a massive obligation due to the bear raid and resulting crisis of confidence that nobody can pretend it isn't happening anymore, the SEC has to act. Sort of is forced to.
Pure tripe. Ass covering. And it won't work. Because it will likely lack adequate penalties, and be so deliberately poorly written and structured that any serious legal challenge will overturn it.
This is how the SEC intends to pretend it is doing something, when for the last decade it has deliberately and studiously done nothing but aid and abet the predators. And even as it does something, mark my words, in the end, it will be shown clearly that it did nothing but help the crooks. This is a grandstanding sham, wherein the SEC does something in this "emergency" to appear active and on the ball.
I predicted that we would see a financial calamity, which would put the entire burden of years of unbridled crookery by wall street, squarely on the backs of the taxpayers. And here we are. I also predicted that the SEC would use this entire contrived disaster to let the criminals off the hook for robbing the nation of its retirement savings. That is still to come, but mark my words, it's a coming. I expect what I described two years ago, where the government basically allows all the naked shorts to close out at current mark to market, essentially rewarding the largest financial theft in history, and rendering the constitutional protection of property rights a farce. That's the only way this can be cleaned up - we, the investors lose everything, and the guys who drove all our companies into the toilet get to keep 100% of the money they generated doing so.
Patrick just issued a statement on this that sort of says it all, albeit much more politely than I do. So much for equality under the law. Depends upon how much juice one has, I suppose. And the ugliest part about all of this is that the Wall Street firms also singled out for special protection by Cox, are the very same firms that largely made this illegal and predatory scam possible, and which benefited hugely from the practice.
Billions and billions and billions made, raping the future of America via its public companies and their capitalizations. The destruction of GDP for profit, unchecked by any of the entities chartered with ensuring it would never happen.
As to who is sucking out all the money being gained by gaming the system, how do you think so many hedge fund managers are making close to a billion a year, or more, without generating anything? No new drugs, no shoelaces, no intellectual property....nothing. Just pulling the money out of the market. They win. You lose. You pay, they collect. And the fact that so many have done so many illegal things for so long ensures that it is not only pervasive, but that they are "too big to fail, or have too much juice to stop or prosecute." For example, you have the secretary of the treasury being the guy who ran Goldman when the most massive crookery in history was going on, and they created every variety of toxic derivative and bogus NSS scam I can think of (my opinion). This is the kind of guy I am describing. Someone running the country, who ran one of the big wall street firms that brought us to this point. Anyone seeing the irony here? Can anyone legitimately hope for any justice when crookery of this magnitude is rewarded thus?
We are in this situation precisely because the SEC decided to use the 1934 Act as asswipe, and behave as though the laws and rules requiring prompt settlement and delivery didn't apply to the brokerage community. The sleight of hand is well documented in the NIPC petition, which explains how there is no rule that allows the SEC to substitute flawed UCC state law for the federal securities laws, and yet they just go ahead and do it anyway, acting as though there is. That is the single most damaging thing the SEC has done, and it has created this entire nightmare.
If federal securities law was actually enforced by the SEC, then trades would be broken at T+3 when the share didn't arrive to make the securities entitlement shown in the customer account good. Instead, the SEC allows that securities entitlement to function like a share, but absent the actual share.
It's called counterfeiting, or rather, trading in unregistered securities. The 33 and 34 Acts outlaw it. But the SEC allows it, which allows brokers to not break trades once no share shows up, but instead to represent ever greater numbers of securities entitlements in the system, absent shares to support them, and trading exactly like genuine securities. Those securities entitlements that aren't allowed to exist per federal securities law once the share doesn't show up, instead trade like stock, are bought and sold, and have contaminated the entire system with a rot so pervasive as to be unfixable. The SEC deliberately did this. It wasn't accidental. It knows it's position and behavior violates federal law. But it doesn't care, because it figures you are all too stupid to get it, or to stop them.
It's a con game. They know it. They understand it. It is spelled out clearly in the NIPC petition. They have no answer, or counter to the charge. They simply ignore it, hoping that the bleating flock doesn't get it. Good bet.
And now, their refusal to rein in predatory, rampant naked short selling, in spite of a massive campaign by Patrick, and 4 years of alarm bell sounding on this blog, and even more and longer alarms by Dave Patch and Bud Burrell, has resulted in a complete breakdown in the functioning of the American market system.
The most disturbing part about this, aside from the obvious, is that, as Patrick points out, we are now officially a double standard financial market. If you are important to the nation's staying solvent, you have one set of rules and are protected, albeit in a sham manner. If you are "just" a normal company, you have another set of rules. You are the girl in the bar it is OK to rape. Paris Hilton? Tut tut, bodyguards everywhere to protect her. You?
A hussy who was asking for it. This astounding de facto admission from the SEC underscores that the whole conceit of a fair and balanced system is a lie and a sham.
What is insulting is not just that nobody is going to actually acknowledge that this was all preventable, and called well in advance by guys like me. No, it is that the SEC and elected officials obviously feel it is absolutely OK to allow unbridled criminal manipulation in small companies, and then later in medium sized companies, and now, in the largest entities on the planet. It's only when the biggest banks and financial institutions in the country are being put out of business that they suddenly pretend that they just discovered that selling stock that doesn't exist could be, well, er, negative for capital formation, investor protection, and the integrity of the markets.
No kidding.
Huh.
I mean, that is so unexpected. Imagine. Selling possibly trillions of dollars of non-existent stock, with the nudge nudge wink wink approval of the SEC, could eventually damage the whole system irreparably. That is so hard to grasp. Really.
What sickens me is that the structural deficiency could be largely solved by eliminating the market maker exemption, requiring the SEC to uphold federal securities law on security entitlements (and not pretend UCC preempts federal law), and requiring a pre-borrow on all short sales. But it won't be. They won't do it. They will instead engage in a series of half measures that won't actually do any good, and will result in the bankruptcy of the country in short order.
And you can go back over the years of blogs here, and read exactly how it was trumpeted to everyone that would listen, that this would destroy the US market system so 500 obscenely rich white guys could steal the national net worth. Just as a much smaller number did in the S&L crisis, at a much smaller level.
And you will never hear that it was all foretold, well in advance, by an extremely vocal minority that tried everything and anything to avert the disaster. Nope. I won't be mentioned, Patrick is invisible to the press, and everyone pretends that there was never any canary in the mine shaft. And even now, the captive NY press continues to advance the transparent lie that obvious and massive market manipulation didn´t cause the destruction of share prices in these huge companies, but rather, a sudden, spontaneous recognition that they were bad companies did. Sort of like the dot com implosion stole TRILLIONS of market cap, when one day the entire market realized that it was all hogwash and decided to sell in unison. I guess when you own the printing presses, you can argue whatever hogwash you like. It is NEVER the bad guys doing it, ALWAYS the company´s fault. Repeat until no more market is left to discuss.
This sort of a civilization is doomed, I'm afraid. That's the only conclusion I can arrive at. And when the population finds itself share croppers on land their fathers fought and died to protect, essentially serfs to the new owner/master structure that they owe everything they will ever make to, the only positive is that a few can honestly say, I told you so.
Small consolation.