Stockgate - Naked Shorting Scandal: Wall Street: Destroying the Evidence

» Kirk - Wall Street: Destroying the Evidence

.
Blogfest 2005 - Jun 21, 2005
- Wall Street: Destroying the Evidence

by Mark Faulk
http://www.faulkingtruth.com/Articles/Bl...

Looking for an easy way to get rid of the bodies after you're raped and robbed your victims? Apparently Wall Street is. This is from the Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, June 21:

"In a little-publicized move that could banish hundreds of companies from the Bulletin Board, the Nasdaq Stock Market has proposed to the Securities and Exchange Commission that companies that miss securities-filing deadlines three times over a two-year period be removed from the over-the-counter market for a year.

Nasdaq made the proposal after identifying more than 3,000 instances of late or incomplete filings by 1,806 companies in the two years to August 2004. Of those companies, 1,067 are still quoted and make up roughly one-third of all Bulletin Board traded firms. The Bulletin Board is an electronic marketplace for companies that don't meet the listing criteria of exchanges like the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange."

This move, scheduled to go into effect as early as this summer, could effectively "get rid" of a third of the small companies that trade on the OTC Bulletin Board Exchange by banishing them to the "Pink Sheets", a loosely-regulated exchange that is the stock market's equivalent of the Wild West.

Is it a coincidence that as investors in many of these companies have begun to speak out about the abusive practice of share counterfeiting by naked short selling, Wall Street is working towards effectively covering their tracks by simply burying the bodies out in the middle of the desert?

Okay, boys, here's the plan:

First, we'll let "the gang" financially destroy every small publicly-traded company in America by selling billions of shares of stock that don't even exist, and drive their stock price into the dust. That oughta kill off a few thousand of 'em right there (we'll leave those bodies for the vultures and coyotes to pick clean).

Then, we'll make 'em file so much paperwork that most of 'em will never be able to keep up, and the ones that do manage to file on time won't have the time or money left to even run their business, much less complain about naked short selling.

And finally, after we've squeezed every damn penny out of every stockholder of every little company in America, we'll pass a rule that says we can run 'em out of town for not filing on time. Hell, if we word it just right, we'll get rid of most fo 'em right there.

And the ones that survive that? No problem, we'll just keep diluting their stock by selling counterfeit shares and split the money up between the whole gang. I mean, there's plenty to go around, especially since we'll rape, rob, and pillage the shareholders while we're at it. It won't be long until those companies are worthless too, and their shareholders will have lost every cent on a bunch of stock that they never even owned. Then we'll just bury their carcasses alongside the rest of 'em.

Okay, so I'm exaggerating here just a little, there won't really be any coyotes and vultures feasting on the carcasses of dead companies and shareholders.....at least not of the four-legged or winged variety. But other than that, I think it's a pretty accurate assessment of the situation.

But wait, shouldn't every company have to file their paperwork on time? I mean, it seems only fair that the little companies have to follow the same rules as the "big boys" at the New York Stock Exchange. Let's read on in that same Wall Street Journal article:

Currently, even Big Board firms don't face immediate delisting if they fail to make timely filings of required reports to the SEC. Nasdaq begins delisting procedures once a company misses its deadline for filing quarterly or annual results. The SEC recently approved an NYSE rule under which the exchange will begin monitoring companies that are late in filing their annual reports, essentially giving them up to a year to file.

So......file late if you're a small company, and you're banished for a year. File late if you're a big company, and we'll keep an eye on you for a year. Sound fair to you? The clincher is that after the Bulletin Board companies have been sent to the Wild West of the Pink Sheets, they don't have to file at all, so what Nasdaq is really saying is "if you don't file on time, we'll banish you to an exchange where you don't have to file at all". Sorry, but I fail to see how that protects investors......and we all know that Wall Street is all about protecting the small investor.

"Protecting the small investor." Whew.....I could hardly get that out with a straight face. In reality, Wall Street has been hard at work covering their tracks for the past couple of years, and now that they've bilked trillions of dollars from small investors, and destroyed thousands of small companies, they're busy looking for ways to destroy the evidence. Kill off a third of the companies and the investors that they've been robbing for years? It's a helluva start.

-- posted by Kirk