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Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch Accused Under RICO
by James West - MidasLetter
Perrenial warrior against naked short selling and Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne has amended a previously filed lawsuit against Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch to include charges under New Jersey RICO laws.
The original lawsuit, filed in the California superior court in San Francisco, alleged that Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch unit engaged in a “massive, illegal stock market manipulation scheme” that involved so-called naked short-selling.
In naked short selling, short sales are executed but never delivered, thereby causing the company’s share price to fall.
“Merrill, Goldman and certain of their market maker clients agreed to and created a scheme to effect the naked short selling in Overstock securities that is the subject of this action, in order to perpetuate short selling and drive down the price of Overstock, to their mutual profit,” alleges the motion, which was filed on Wednesday.
Jonathan Johnson, President of Overstock.com, stated, “Recently discovered revelations of concerted action among certain market makers and these two brokerages necessitate that we amend our complaint to include additional claims. We expect that this conduct of Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch is fully actionable under anti-racketeering laws.”
GoldmanSachs666 Message Board
Fraud*
According to the Collins English Dictionary 10th Edition fraud can be defined as: "deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage".[1] In the broadest sense, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation. Defrauding people or entities of money or valuables is a common purpose of fraud, but there have also been fraudulent "discoveries", e.g. in science, to gain prestige rather than immediate monetary gain
*As defined in Wikipedia
Monday, December 20, 2010
Goldman Sachs Accused of Racketeering
How can a bank like Goldman Sachs operate competently when it is continually fending off (or succumbing to) charges for fraud, racketeering , insider trading and who knows what else? If an institution really valued its good name then it would do everything to maintain it, such as acting honestly, transparently and ethically.
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4) We did not avoid a second Great Depression because we bailed out financial institutions. Rather, the collapse in the economy and the surge in unemployment were the direct result of a gaping hole in the U.S. regulatory structure that prevented the rapid restructuring of insolvent non-bank financials. Policy makers then inappropriately extended the "too big to fail" doctrine to ordinary banks. Following a striking loss of public confidence that resulted from arbitrary policy responses, coupled with fear-mongering by exactly those who stood to benefit from public handouts, the self-fulfilling crisis was contained by a change in accounting rules that effectively disabled capital requirements for all financial companies. We are now left with a Ponzi scheme.
http://www.hussman.net/wmc/wmc101220.htm
Thus, our policy makers first created a crisis of confidence, and then resolved it by legalizing a global Ponzi scheme.
As David Einhorn at Greenlight Capital has noted, "We learned the wrong lesson." We should have learned that existing capital standards were insufficient and that there was a large, gaping hole in our regulatory structure that failed to provide "resolution authority" for non-bank financial companies. Instead, we've learned the dangerously misguided notion that some institutions are simply too big to fail. This inevitably creates a situation where reckless misallocation of capital continues to be subsidized at increasing public cost, while bondholders go unscathed and insiders take bonuses with the same alacrity as Bernie Madoff's early investors.
http://www.hussman.net/wmc/wmc101220.htm
Crisis Dominoes Start Falling With Lehman Auditor
Here’s how Lehman Brothers paid for their Knicks tickets: a week before the game, they went to you and offered to you “sell” you their worthless puke-stained lava lamp for a hundred bucks, with the understanding that two days after the Knicks game, it would come back and “buy” the lamp back for the same $100 (plus a small commission for your trouble). And when Lehman pocketed that $100 from the initial transaction, they decided to call that not borrowing but a true sale, i.e. they booked that hundred bucks as revenue from an honest sale of a worthless piece-of-shit lava lamp.
In 2007 and 2008 Lehman would do this before the end of every quarter. They would "sell" billions of dollars of assets, typically bonds, to various companies, and use that money to pay down debt before the quarter’s end, so that they didn’t look so flat-ass broke to investors. Then, a week or so after the end of the quarter, they would go out and borrow more money, and then "buy" the assets back. The reasons they did this were myriad, but in most cases the assets they were "selling" were depressed in value at the time and could not have been sold at anything like face value had they really gone out on the market and tried. So instead of really "selling" these items on their balance sheet, they worked together with other companies to jury-rig these “repurchase” agreements that looked like sales but were actually loans.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/crisis-dominoes-start-falling-with-lehman-auditor-20101220
BOSTON (MarketWatch) — This was the year America finally took on the power and greed of the Wall Street banks.
And the banks won.
They dodged the bullet of real reform, probably for all time. They bounced back to post huge profits, helped by legal theft from the middle class. They completed their takeover of both political parties — and bought themselves a new Congress even more pliable than the old one.
Middle-class America is flattened, devastated and broke. The bankers that caused it all have escaped punishment. They’re raking in huge profits. Oh, and the tax cuts just got extended for high earners, too!
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/wall-street-wins-main-street-pays-again-2010-12-21
Regulatory capture
Regulatory capture occurs when a state regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure, as it can act as an encouragement for large firms to produce negative externalities. The agencies are called Captured Agencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
Is Regulation Really for Sale?
How plausible is this argument? Can benign regulation really be bought?
When I was a regulator, I would certainly have denied it. I had never worked in the financial industry, and knew few people who did. (Full disclosure: I am now an independent Director of Morgan Stanley.) My successors have all come from the financial sector, however, which, until recently, was regarded as a sign that they were street-wise. Now we are not so sure.
Regulators are typically not subject to those temptations. They are not normally allowed to own stock in financial firms (at least in the jurisdictions that I know). But can they nonetheless be captured?
I see two potential grounds for concern. The first is the revolving door between the industry and regulatory bodies. This is more prevalent in the US, where regulators’ salaries are very low, especially in the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Turnover among senior – and not so senior – people in these agencies is very high. The Fed folk are paid a little better, and stay rather longer.
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/davies11/English
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