Our Watchdogs and the Financial Scandal of the Century
Deep Capture

"The problem is that many hedge funds and brokers engage in illegal naked short selling – selling stock and other securities that they have not yet borrowed or purchased, and failing to deliver stock within the allotted 3 days. They do this to drive down stock prices and destroy public companies for profit.

Emmy Award-winning journalist Gary Matsumoto reported on the Bloomberg newswire last week that naked short selling is one of Wall Street’s “darkest arts” and contributed to the demise of both Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. SEC data shows that an astounding 32.8 million shares of Lehman were sold and not delivered to buyers as of last September 11, days before the company declared bankruptcy.

The collapse of Lehman, of course, triggered the near-total implosion of our financial system.

How could this have been allowed to happen?

One answer lies within that black box – the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation. The DTCC is a quasi-private, Wall Street owned and operated organization that is charged by Congress and the SEC with ensuring that securities trades are cleared and settled. As is evident from the cases of Lehman, Bear, and hundreds of other companies, however, the DTCC often fails to do its job.

In fact, it enables naked short selling to go unpunished. Rather than track individual trades to ensure that delivery occurs, the DTCC merely calculates a net total of sales and purchases at the end of each day. So we know how many shares of a given company fail to deliver each day, but the DTCC won’t tell us which hedge funds or brokers are responsible."

Unemployment soars to 8.5 pct. ; 13 million jobless
Associated Press

Financial Rescue Nears GDP as Pledges Top $12.8 Trillion
Bloomberg

"The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008."