Molycorp.Inc. (fka MCPIQ)

[Pieterpanne]

Repeat post...

IMO, the attempted take down in order to obtain an incredible array of assets in a critical industry has been or is being orchestrated in a manner typical of robber barons... the overt attempt to get the company de-listed is the first clue.. then short sell the firm in to bankruptcy... spend pennies on the dollar for state of the art assets and rare earth mining claims...

Five years ago, Overstock filed a naked-shorting case in California against a bunch of Wall Street firms. The gist of the accusation was that they had conspired with clients to manipulate short sales of the company's shares in order to allow more shorting (and thus generate bigger brokerage fees) than would otherwise have been possible. The effect, Overstock alleges, was to depress its share price.

Most of the defendants settled for undisclosed sums, leaving just Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America) in the cross-hairs. Four years of discovery produced vast piles of documentation, much of it still sealed at the request of the defendants, despite efforts by several media outlets (including The Economist) to have them made public.
www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/01/naked-short-selling

If the documents leaked by bank lawyers are any indication, Overstock was not only being ridiculed by the media, but also by insiders at Wall Street banks. Naked short selling (or "failing" a stock) is the practice of shorting a stock that has never actually been borrowed. It's illegal, in part, because it creates fake supply of a stock, and in 2005 and 2006 Overstock.com claims naked short-selling created six times the actual supply of its stock in the market.

Someone might choose to naked short sell a stock when the stock is a negative rebate stock — too expensive to borrow. That's why it sounded so damning when the emails leaked from banks said things like this:

"We are NOT borrowing negatives... I have made that clear from the beginning. Why would we want to borrow them? We want to fail them," said one Merrill exec.

http://www.businessinsider.com/overstockcom-ceo-explains-anti-sac-ad-2013-7