Posts Tagged ‘hedge fund(s)’

5000 Attorney General DOJ Indictments Targeting Financial Fraud, National Security

January 14, 2010 (By Bud Burrell)

– From “Front and Center”, by Bud Burrell

Last week, in a speech given in West Palm Beach, Attorney General Holder announced the pendency of 5000 indictments by the Department of Justice of individuals linked to financial institution fraud as part of an overall targeting of market manipulators and cheaters across the Board. His speech did not specify for the audience the type of targets the DOJ was focusing on, leaving open the most important questions about such an announcement. Who is being indicted by type, for what kind of specific misconduct?

I have devoted thousands of man hours over ten years to try and work with and within the legal system of the United States to get its principals to focus on the rape of the American investors stealing literally trillions of dollars, through conduct that could only be identified legally as sedition. Ten of thousands of securities issued by thousands of legal issuers have been manipulated, counterfeited, and stolen in virtually every form of security bought and sold in every market in the World. I pointed out to many of the responsible government oversight and regulatory officials that various tactics were being strategically employed to launder money for the purpose of stealing securities and evading taxes.

I broke this down into a single memo of eight bullet points for not only these parties but also for numerous journalists, lawyers, victims, government officials and more, with a uniform silence from them with only a handful of exceptions. The summation of this memo was that criminals both domestic and global were tactically manipulating all forms of assets, engaging in various forms of counterfeiting facilitated by vested public interests, in a huge global conspiracy lined inextricably to all forms of organized crime, again, done strategically to launder US assets into foreign accounts for the purpose of evading all forms of taxes, both legitimate and illegitimate. [entire post]

Financial Armageddon In Retrospect, Part Two

August 21, 2009 (By Mark Faulk)

From “The Faulking Truth Blog“, by Mark Faulk

“A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” ~Margaret Mead

Years before SEC chairman Christopher Cox invoked a one-month ban in July of 2008 against naked short selling in 19 battered financial stocks, including Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), Citigroup (NYSE: C), Lehman Brothers (OTC: LEHMQ.PK), Credit Suisse (NYSE: CS), Merrill Lynch (DOA, as in dead on arrival), Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), J.P. Morgan Chase (NYSE: JPM), Fannie Mae (NYSE: FNM), and Freddie Mac (NYSE: FRE), an eclectic “small group of thoughtful people” sounded the alarm about a financial system gone horribly wrong. Activist Dave Patch started InvestigatetheSEC.com in late 2003, and in early 2004 I began reporting on financial fraud on my website The Faulking Truth. At around the same time, the late Gayle Essary began to utilize his own forums, Investrend and Financial Wire, to bring greater exposure and an air of credibility to the cause. Others, including Bud Burrell, Bob O’Brien, Rod Young, DeWayne Reeves, Darren Saunders, Mary Helburn, and economists Suzanne Trimbath and Robert Shapiro, worked tirelessly to warn the country about the potential train wreck years before it happened. Efforts to reform our financial markets were further galvanized when Overstock (NASDAQ: OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne, along with fellow crusaders Judd Bagley, Brent Baker, and Mark Mitchell, joined the rapidly escalating war. Forbes writer Elizabeth Moyer and Euromoney magazine’s Helen Avery covered the scandal for the financial media, but the Wall Street controlled corporate media for the most part either ignored the issue or attempted to discredit those who exposed the corruption.

At first, the focus of stock market reform advocates was something called “naked short selling”, a predatory trading practice used to illegally manipulate stock prices. The fraud appears to have originally been fueled mostly by Canadian brokers and offshore lenders and hedge funds, who victimized small, struggling companies and their investors. They utilized naked short selling and a lending practice that became known as “death spiral financing” because targeted companies were often forced into bankruptcy. The con artists bet against the company and its shareholders by taking advantage of a trading system that allowed them to “sell” shares that they didn’t own, and in many cases, never even borrowed. They could literally destroy the company, and its shareholders, by creating so much negative pressure that the stock eventually collapsed under the weight of the massive selling. But the key to the scheme was the con artists’ ability to short sell the companies’ stock without having to ever acquire the shares to cover their positions. They could buy and sell stock that didn’t exist, shares that were never delivered, in effect creating an unlimited supply of counterfeit stock.  [entire post]

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