bigpicture.typepad.com
Taxes and Policy I am having a hard time keeping up with all of the bailouts and special facilities created for dealing with this crisis. And for the past 8 years, a conservative was in the White House, with a very conservative agenda. For something like 16 of the past 18 years, the conservative dominated GOP has controlled Congress. We now see that the grand experiment of deregulation has ended, and ended badly. The deregulation movement is now an historical footnote, just another interest group, and once in power they turned into socialists. Indeed, judging by the actions of the conservatives in power, and not the empty rhetoric that comes out of think tanks, the conservative movement has effectively turned the United States into a massive Socialist state, an appendage of Communist Russia, China and Venezuela.
Short Selling Back in July, Bill King wrote up something called "SEC Induced Mother-of-All Short Covering Rallies." Its all the more relevant today, and is reprinted with permission after the jump .
The specifics are a "temporary halt in short selling in 799 financial institutions" until October 2nd. I have been trying to contextualize this, and I keep coming back to what seemed like a wild theory yesterday that seems a whole lot less wild today.
But Joe is a good money manager, a great stock picker, and a thoughtful guy. He raised an intriguing issue: None of the many hedgies he knew were pressing their bets recently. The bear raids on the banks and brokers were NOT a case of piling on by US based hedge funds. And from what he was seeing and hearing about in terms of order flow, the vast majority of the financial short selling the past week or so were being done overseas. It may not be a coincidence that the financial short selling ban is both here and in London. Then there is another coincidence: The huge increase in shorting of the financials occurred on the anniversary of 9/11. And on top of that, the same institutions attacked on 9/11/01 were the ones suffering in recent days. Joe asked the question: Is anyone investigating whether this is a case of financial terrorism? He wanted to know if someone was at least looking into this question (Joe is buds with Jim Cramer, and mentioned it to him, who then omitted to cite in his column that this was Joe's theory, not his own). Anyway, its an interesting theory, one that seemed kinda out there -- until last night's emergency action. Nothing else really explains the insanity of banning short sales -- except for Joe Besecker's questions. I can think of only 3 other possibilities that explain this insane action: 1) Extreme idiocy and incompetence -- not unthinkable ftom the gang that couldn't shoot straight in DC these days; We will see if it gets extended a month from October 2nd to November 5th. I can think of no other explanations for the dismantling of the free operations of trading markets. The grand irony of all this is that Naked Shorting has been very profitable for the big broker dealers, like Morgan And Goldman and Merrill and Lehman. They have looked the other way for years, and the SEC has been AWOL on this issue. Short sales require a locate (shares to borrow) and then a subsequent delivery. It should take less than 3 days to deliver the borrowed shares, but instead, delivery is often delayed indefinitely. Failure to deliver leads to a margin charge, which can be as high as 9-15%. If you want to know who to blame for the past 5 years of naked shorting, you only have two places to look: The Financial brokers themselves, and the nonfeasance of a feckless SEC.
SIPC released this: "On Friday, September 19, 2008, SIPC will file a proceeding placing LBI in liquidation under the Securities Investor Protection Act (SIPA). After extensive discussions and consultation with representatives of the firm and its parent company, as well as representatives of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and others, SIPC has decided that such action is appropriate for the protection of customers and to facilitate the transfer of customer accounts of LBI and an orderly unwinding of the business of the brokerage firm. This action is being taken in connection with a proposed sale of the business of the broker-dealer to Barclays Capital Inc. A hearing on approval of that sale is scheduled for September 19, 2008, at 4pm, in the Chapter 11 proceeding of the parent company, LBHI. One of our small funds was prime brokered with Lehman, and even though we were advocates of selling/shorting the equity, that was merely a trade. Our hearts go out to the many good people there suffering through this Fuldian mess. Hopefully, the Barclays buy means that many of the 10,000 people who work in that division wont lose their jobs .
Disclosures & Terms of Use * The information on this site is provided for discussion purposes only, and are not investing recommendations. Under no circumstances does this information represent a recommendation to buy or sell securities.
|
http://csua.com/feed/