This is exactly what has taken place here with Zion's stock. The question is, if this has been known since 2011, what is being done about it to protect investors.
Years ago, Steve Cohen figured out that finding a good company to invest in and waiting for its stock to go from $4 to $28 took acumen and patience, whereas taking a company down from $28 to $4 could be done in weeks, and, through the magic of short selling, was just as profitable. For Steve Cohen and a number of associated players this insight led to the emergence of a business model: instead of simply betting against companies (short selling), it would pay to disrupt them (naked short selling, orchestrating smear campaigns in the press, instigating federal investigations and shareholder class action lawsuits, etc.)
In the intervening years a network has emerged that developed this business model into an industry. Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky (two famous criminals from the 1980’s) were financiers to the stock manipulation industry, and brought with them the involvement of Organized Crime (primarily, Genovese Family, and later, Russian Mafia). Its current shining lights appear to include Jim Chanos, David Einhorn, Dan Loeb, and Bill Ackman. Numerous wannabees have circled from time to time, from low-rent (David Rocker) to preppy (Whitney Tilson, it now appears). Profiting from stock manipulation would be difficult without the involvement of prime brokers who turn a blind eye to certain trading strategies, primarily, naked short selling, but also, variants such as married puts (by which hedge funds lay off an aspect of their criminal activity to the prime brokers, and prime brokers lay off an aspect of the crime to market makers).
The journalists who became spokesmodels for these cutpurses range from Pinto (Roddy Boyd, Carol Remond, Herb Greenberg) to Lexus (Bethany McLean), with every make and model in between (some, such as Bethany McLean and Roddy Boyd, have never written a story that was not sourced from this tiny set of hedge funds, and breezily engaged in email conversations which reveal their understanding of their role as puppets). Other financial journalists (e.g., Joe Nocera, Floyd Norris) sided with these now-exposed journalists not from corruption, but from having forgotten their duties as journalists. At the bottom of the food chain, we find a small group of phony “researchers” (Barry Minkow, Sam Antar, Gradient Analytics) who conduct no real research, but who produce endless phony “where there’s smoke there’s fire” allegations for parroting by C-list bloggers (Gary Weiss, Tracy Coenen, Floyd Schneider, Yolanda Holtzee, etc.), which are then imported into the mainstream financial press through the efforts of the shill journalists listed above.
For many years, these schemers made a federal toy of the SEC, whose staffers gave concierge service to stock manipulators before going to work for their law firms (e.g., Linda Thomsen), or sometimes, even directly for the hedge funds in question (e.g., Richard Sauer, for whom Rocker Partners and Bethany McLean had a code-name, “Lavaman”). Jim Cramer has participated both as a money manager (as he confessed on video), and also, as a journalist (as DeepCapture has demonstrated). DeepCapture also suspects the involvement of former New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer’s, due to Spitzer’s proximity to Cramer (Spitzer’s college roommate and lifelong friend) and Chanos (Spitzer’s largest financial backer), the confluence among this network’s targets and the objects of Spitzer’s prosecution, and the slightly salacious fact that Jim Chanos let live rent-free in his house Eliot Spitzer’s main escort, Ashlee Dupree (who should be ashamed of herself for having anything to do with these low-lifes).
AI
