I read this article from the political site DailyKos and laughed outloud, here are some snippets:
This rabbit hole involves the thugs surrounding Jim Cramer and some of the top financial “journalists” from the New York Times, WSJ, Fortune magazine and BusinessWeek, top hedge funds, the Mafia, and the DTCC. It also includes “blackmail, smear campaigns, espionage, fraud, harassment, extortion, bribery, rumor-mongering, sabotage, off-shore money laundering, political cronyism, frivolous lawsuits, witness tampering, biased financial research, false identities, bogus credit ratings, bribery, libelous blogs, bad science, forgery, wiretapping, counterfeiting, collusion, lying, cheating, threats and theft.”
And if that wasn’t fun enough, it may be the underlying story of what collapsed the entire, global banking system or at least served as the catalyst for the collapse.
Unfortunately, this story is so rich and multi-dimensional that I cannot possibly hope to do it justice here. So I will primarily focus on the financial media angle and, specifically, Jim Cramer and his thug cronies.
The story begins when a very highly respected journalist and business editor for the Columbia Journalism Review, Mark Mitchell, decides to look into allegations made by the CEO of Overstock.com, that some top hedge fund managers, in cahoots with a circle of financial analyst and reporters, had conspired to make a lot of money by betting short on companies and then systematically destroying those companies by spreading false negative information about them and employing other tactics such as flooding the market with “phantom shares” to drive down a stocks value.
To understand this you have to understand how short selling works. A short seller will borrow stock (say at $10) and then sell it immediately and pocket the money ($10). Then, when the company’s stock value plummets ($1), they buy it at its deflated value and pocket the difference ($9). This is perfectly legal. But there’s another variety that takes place because of a flaw in the system.
This is where a short seller sells stock that they haven’t actually borrowed yet. There are loopholes that allow shorters to do this legally, but those loopholes have allowed the practice to be abused – which is illegal. Therefore, it is quite easy to fraudulently put on the open market shares of stock that do not, nor ever will, exist. These phantom shares do nothing but crash the value of a stock and therefore make legitimate short transactions highly profitable.
This is what Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne had discovered had been done to his company. Naked short selling combined with bogus financial analysis, lies and rumors propagated by CNBC reporters all served to trash his company’s stock. So he decided to fight back. He gave a big conference call presentation to a bunch of corporate CEOs and broke the story. That’s when Mark Mitchell comes in. (For the record, Byrne is a Republican. I don’t much care for him. But this is completely irrelevant to this story.)
You gotta love how the uninformed view short selling as evil, gimme 10-20 years to put a dent in the stupidity of the masses…and anybody who uses the wacko Patrick Byrne–of boo-hoo-the-short-sellers-are-destroying-my-crappy-company-Overstock-oh-wait-maybe-I-should-just-focus-on-becoming-more-profitable-so-as-to-squeeze-short-sellers-instead-of-whining-about-it-fame–well, they’re just plain ignorant.
The author goes on to talk about how Cramer has supposedly admitted to naked short selling & market manipulation….gimme a friggin break. Quotes are taken out of context and more importantly, they’re from people with axes to grind with Cramer. Read the whole useless article if you want some entertainment…
Cramer might not be the best stock picker around, actually he seems to be one of the worst, but he understands that the masses are so dumb, track record doesn’t even really matter. Nor does market manipulation. Nor does naked short selling.
Nothing matters in the market except profits. Whether Cramer is involved in a short selling conspiracy or not, use this guy’s hypothesis to try to profit from it.
There are sooooooo many ways to make an honest million in this game, especially if you have some intelligence–sorry Ivy Leaguers, overpriced diplomas don’t count, actually a negative since you’re mostly all involved in group-coke-think–making it not worth it to be involved in any conspiracies or market manipulation.
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