CMKM Diamonds Inc. (fka CMKX)

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The Naked Short Selling That Toppled Wall Street
October 2nd, 2008 by Mark Mitchell

The Wall Street Journal stated in a lead editorial last week that the SEC was “reasonable” to “clamp down” on naked short selling. Well, that was progress of sorts, though one wonders how it could have taken all these years for the nation’s most important newspaper to suggest that it might be “reasonable” to put an end to criminal activity that has eviscerated hundreds of companies and destroyed countless lives.

And now that this criminal activity has been implicated in the Humpty Dumptying of our financial system, one grows wistful for the golden age of journalism when editorialists (people working for famous newspapers, not just cyber weirdos) would express a little outrage, demand that heads roll – muster something better than “reasonable” to describe the limpid “clamp down” of an SEC that bows in oily servitude to the very short-sellers who manhandled our markets.

Alas, The Wall Street Journal is not angry about the scandal of naked short selling. To the contrary, it devotes most of its editorial to tut-tutting the SEC for taking the mild step of requiring hedge funds to disclose their short positions. This, the Journal laments, means the government wants to “slap a scarlet letter on short sellers.” And (shed a tear) hedge funds will now have to “worry that their strategies will be put on display for the world to see.”

Might the world like to see which hedge funds are employing the strategy of illegal naked short selling – offloading huge chunks of stock that they do not possess – phantom stock – in order to drive down prices? No, nothing to see there, says the Journal. Having thoroughly investigated the matter, the editorialist reports that there is “no evidence of widespread naked shorting of financial stocks in this panic.” Indeed, the Journal assures us that there is no evidence that short sellers have engaged in any market manipulation whatsoever.

That is a mighty bold claim. As the Wall Street Journal itself reported, the SEC has ordered two dozen hedge funds to turn over trading records as part of its investigation into possible short-seller manipulation of six big financial institutions — American International Group, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Washington Mutual, and Merrill Lynch.

The SEC has never in history prosecuted a major case against a short seller, and there is no reason to believe that it is actually going to nail someone now. But it is not difficult to see why the SEC feels that is has no choice but to investigate.

Read the rest of this story at http://americandream2009.angelfire.com


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