According to Wikipedia, he also has undertaken a campaign against naked short selling.
Beginning in 2005, Byrne become known for his campaign against naked short selling, a practice which he says has been used in violation of securities law to hurt the price of his and other companies' stock.[5] Under his direction, Overstock.com has filed two lawsuits alleging improper acts by Wall Street firms, a hedge fund, and an independent research firm.
. . . .
Byrne was instrumental in Utah's passage of a law aimed at curbing naked short selling. The legislation was repealed in February 2007, after state representatives were advised that it probably would not withstand judicial scrutiny due to federal preemption.[42] Byrne criticized the repeal,[43] but Senate Majority Leader Curtis Bramble said that legal advisers believed that the state would lose any litigation over the law.
Byrne's website has more information about his various actions to obtain justice for himself and others.
4 COMMENTS:
The End of Sound Money and the Triumph of Crony Capitalism
The triumph of crony capitalism occurred on October 3rd, 2008. The event was the enactment of TARP — the single greatest economic-policy abomination since the 1930s, or perhaps ever.
Like most other quantum leaps in statist intervention, the Wall Street bailout was justified as a last-resort exercise in breaking the rules to save the system. In the immortal words of George W. Bush, our most economically befuddled President since FDR, "I've abandoned free market principles in order to save the free market system."
Based on the panicked advice of Paulson and
Bernanke, of course, the president had the misapprehension that without a bailout "this sucker is going down." Yet 30 months after the fact, evidence that the American economy had been on the edge of a nuclear-style meltdown is nowhere to be found.
http://mises.org/daily/5113/The-End-of-Sound-Money-and-the-Triumph-of-Crony-Capitalism
Was market-rigging computer program Goldman's or U.S. government's?
As The New York Times reported today in the story appended here, the computer programmer who got caught stealing Goldman Sachs' computer code for market-rigging operations has been sentenced by a federal judge to an astonishing eight years in prison. The most telling detail about the case may be, as the Times reports seemingly without awareness, the speed with which federal agents acted against the code theft. In early June 2009, the Times reports, the programmer copied the code from the Goldman Sachs computer system to a computer system in Germany. On July 2, 2009, the programmer delivered the code to his new employer in Chicago. He was arrested by six FBI agents the following day at the airport in Newark, New Jersey. The investigation was wrapped up within a month, perhaps in less than three weeks. Would the theft of computer programming from any other company (OK, except maybe JPMorgan Chase) be pursued so vigorously by the federal government when Osama bin Laden and dozens of murderers, bank robbers, and rapists remain on the loose? And was the government really obliging Goldman Sachs here, or was it taking care of itself, the market-rigging computer program really being part of a government operation, considered a matter of national security, like another market-rigging operation, the gold price suppression scheme?
http://gata.org/node/9714
When will people demand answers?
It's like we live in a "dead" society...
Buffett Tells Country, TARP Gave Over $1 Billion to Goldman Sachs
At a time when all the tough guys in Washington are making plans to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits for high-living seniors and to cut Head Start for low-income kids, it was generous of Warren Buffett to point out that we taxpayers gave over $1 billion to Goldman Sachs through TARP. Buffett probably didn't intend to point out this fact to the country, but it is an unavoidable implication of his $2 billion profit on his loans to Goldman.
Buffett made his $5 billion loan to Goldman about a week before the Treasury lent $10 billion to Goldman through the TARP program. Buffet got 10 percent interest on his loans, while the Treasury got 5 percent on its loans. In addition, Buffett got a much more generous commitment of stock warrants, which is the basis of the $2 billion in profits that he is now set to pocket.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/buffett-tells-country-tarp-gave-over-1-billion-to-goldman-sachs
I read all of David Stockman's piece (comment #1) and I came away thinking, "That sounds about right. Things are going to be really bad in the future."
Then I remember reading Richard Koo's paper on the "balance sheet recession" and thinking again, "Things are going to be really bad" but I still am none the wiser. When "bad" gets here, then I will know.
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