Daily Archives: December 30, 2009

More Apparent Wiki Whacking On Naked Short Selling

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Deep Capture has more on wiki manipulation in its latest post:

“In the past (as you can read about here), we know Weiss spread misinformation relating to stock fraud via Wikipedia on behalf of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the Wall Street firm considered a key enabler of illegal short selling. Exactly who’s sponsoring Weiss these days is unclear; however, as the evidence that follows will demonstrate, his concerted effort to whitewash DTCC’s Wikipedia article makes that company the prime suspect.

Now that his ruse has been uncovered – yet again – the focus becomes one of identifying and repairing the damage done. A brief review of some of the thousands of changes made by Weiss will give you a sense of both the scope of the problem and the nature of his motives. I’m organizing the following tiny sampling of Weiss’s Wikipedia edits by topic, with the content as it originally appeared on the left, with Weiss’s changes on the right. Words added or removed appear in red.”

My Comment

For now, I am just posting this as an interesting development that I haven´t personally verified.  Also, I think any notion that the tide has turned on wiki manipulation is overly optimistic.  I doubt, for example, that Weiss´ media bosses don´t know what´s happening. That to me is an incredibly naive position to take.

DTCC Board Stuffed With Kleptocrat Banks/Funds

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The DTCC (Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation) is the largest depository in the world, and, along with its subsidiaries, the place where all transactions in equities, money market funds, corporate and muni bonds, MBSs and derivatives are cleared and settled.  Activists have been demanding detailed release of trades which haven’t been settled or have failed to deliver (FTD), because of the obvious potential for manipulation, A glance at the board of directors, which consists of leading figures from the banks and funds, many of whom profited hugely from the government bail-out, shows that concern is amply warranted.

From Citizen Economists:

DTCC BOARD OF DIRECTORS

The DTCC’s board includes 20 directors.

Art Certosimo, Senior Executive VP, Bank of New York Mellon
Norman Malo, President and CEO, National Financial Services LLC; Fidelity Investments
Stephen P Casper, Partner, Vastardis Capital
Gerald A. Beeson, Senior Managing Director, COO. Citadel Investment Group
Donald F. Donahue, Chairman and CEO, DTCC
William B. Airnetti, President and COO, DTCC
J. Charles Cardona,  CEO Bank of New York Mellon – Cash Investment Strategies,  President of the Dreyfus Corporation
Randolph L. Cowen, Co-Chief Administrative Officer, Goldman Sachs Group Inc
Norman Eaker, CAO, Edward Jones
Timothy J. Theriault, President – Corporate & Institutional Services, Northern Trust Company
Neeraj Sahai, Managing Director and Global Business Head, Securities and Fund Services, Citi
Gerard La Rocca, Chief Administrative Officer, Americas Barclays Capital
David A. Weisbrod, Managing Director and Risk Executive, JP Morgan Chase Bank
Stephen Luparellyo, Vice Chairman and Senior Executive Vice President of Regulatory Operations, FINRA
Mark Alexander, Managing Director, Global Wealth and Investment Management – Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Head of Technology Operations, Broadcort Clearing
Ronald Purpora, ICAP Securities USA LLP
Robert Kaplan, Executive Vice President, State Street Bank and Trust Company
Michele Trogni, Managing Direcotr and Global Head of Operations, UBS Investment Bank
Ian Lowitt, Administrative Officer, Lehman Brother

Steve Cohen, Third Biggest Owner of Sotheby’s In 2009 (Corrected)

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Modern Art Obsession has a post from April 2009 (see below) about Steve Cohen exhibiting a collection of his art at Sotheby’s, (where he  is the third largest owner). The exhibition ran exactly at the same time as Sotheby´s Spring Modern and Contemporary Auction. The Cohen art was not for sale.

Quote:

“So.. we guess there are other ways to dump an art collection skin a cat.

Hmmm… Maybe the page from the Billionaire Art Opportunist Collector playbook could be :

  • Step 1.. Buy lots of Art, push prices way up, and tell everyone who’ll listenin the media you’re a wise long term buyer.
  • (Photo #1, Richard Prince, “Graduate Nurse, 2002”,Ink jet print and acrylic on canvas,89 in x 52 in.   FYI… A description from Sotheby’s.. “This work is one of the best paintings Prince ever made, particularly because of its monumental scale and the rich, painterly quality of the brushstrokes”)
  • Step 2.. Buy an art auction house (or a Whopping controlling interest in one),
  • Step 3.. Stage a show of the great works having auction house experts tout your collection..
  • Step 4..Tell everyone these art works, on proud display, are not for sale
  • Step 5… Wait for someone stupid enough to say.. I wish I could have a collection like the one by this well known art collector, which just happens to be on display in the auction house.
  • Step 6.. To be determined…. Hmm.. possibly.. Cash out..??

Note: Cohen’s SAC Capital amassed its position in Sotheby’s in the 6 months upto March 31, 2009, and  Sotheby’s shares doubled by June 2009 from a low in February.

Correction (January 7, 1020):  Cohen sold his stake in June:

The fund acquired its Sotheby’s stake between September and April, a period in which the auction house’s stock was battered by the financial crisis and a shrinking art market. The share price was below $10 for much of that period, down from a high of $61.40 at the end of the boom. This spring, the stock rebounded somewhat –­ it was $14.48 a share on June 30­, so SAC’s sale of its roughly four million shares was likely to have netted several million dollars

Edward Bernays On Why Conspiracies Work

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“In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons […] who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”

—  Edward Bernays

GATA Sues Federal Reserve For Records On Gold Manipulation

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From the website of the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, the leading activist against gold price manipulation in the market:

“GATA today brought suit against the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, seeking a court order for disclosure of the central bank’s records of its surreptitious market intervention to suppress the monetary metal’s price.”

For some of my warnings of gold price manipulation, see the following:

“Was the IMF Involved in Gold Price Manipulation?” Dissident Voice, June, 2006

“Hanky-Panky at the Counting House,” Dissident Voice, June 6, 2006

Establishment Media Hops On Survivalist Bandwagon

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Newsweek, getting on the survivalist bandwagon…months late…(see my piece “Getting Off the Grid“).

You read it first here or on some other libertarian site…then it percolates upward to the “elites,”  carefully sanitized of its origins. An anthropology of the taboos and totems of the journalistic tribe is in order..

“In the end, what it all boils down to, at least for the preppers, is self-reliance—a concept as old as the human race itself. As survival blogger Joe Solomon pointed out in a recent column, during the Victory Gardens of WWII, Americans managed to grow 40 percent of all the vegetables they needed to survive. “My mother’s parents had a 10-acre garden, and my grandfather worked at the dairy farm next door,” says Hill, the former jet mechanic. “They worked by raising their own food, they had their own chickens, they canned vegetables, and my grandfather fed a family of 12 like that.” But in the modern world, he says, many of those skills are easily forgotten. Today, our food comes from dozens of different sources. Most of us aren’t quite sure how electricity gets from the wires to our stoves. We use debit cards to buy a can of tuna and we wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to filter contaminated water. We are residents of the new millennium; we simply haven’t needed to prepare.

So for the moment, people like Bedford are reteaching themselves lost skills—and in some cases, learning new ones. Bedford has read up on harvesting an urban garden, and is learning to use a solar oven to bake bread. She is ready with a pointed shot in the event she ever needs to hunt for her own food. And until then, she’s got 61 cans of chili, 20 cans of Spam, 24 jars of peanut butter, and much more stocked in her pantry; she estimates she’s spent about $4,000 on food supplies, an amount that should keep her family going for at least three months. Now, even if something simple goes wrong, like a paycheck doesn’t go through, “we don’t need to worry,” she says.”