Spend the time with this. Send it out. It's well done. <object width="400" height="300"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3722293&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" /><embed src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=3722293&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="400" height="300"></embed></object>
Energy traders sensed a wounded dinosaur in the form of California, the hedge funds did the same thing with Lehman et al... to me the moral is "don't be a wounded dinosaur". The likelihood that anybody, least among them being the SEC, is looking out for anybody at all, is minimal at best....
banks shouldnt be on the stock market for they are not completely private companies because of the FDIC guarantees. banks can be brought down easy by hedge funds, they can naked short sell but that's not the most important. Hedge funds have their cash stored at banks, if they have alot billions of cash which is bigger then the capital of the bank they can withdraw all their money from the bank they want to bring down, naked short sell the bank on the stock market and make ALOT of money.
And, of course, counterfeiting 50,000,000 shares (not to mention the manipulation of the press, i.e. faber and cnbc), which circumvents the registration process and is basically an unauthorized secondary offering.........that doesn't bother you.
"While manipulation is nasty, wouldn't BSC have failed without all this naked short selling?" That's like saying we're all gonna die, so it's ok for somebody to shoot you today. Total bullshit. There's no mistaking that BSC, LEH, AIG, etc, etc all fucked up, got greedy beyond imagination. But that greed was likely enacted by a small percentage of the employees of those companies, and the other thousands of employees lost it all, job, pensions, wiped out. I'm just an 'ol country boy, never had no Wall Street gig, or big time job at a Fortune 500 company. I absolutely hate the fact the greedy bastards are systematically destroying this country. But to say it's ok to drive a company in the ground like that, in just a few days, is beyond belief. Just hope you never get a job with a company that gets caught in the crosshairs of short selling hedge funds.
While not specifically related to BSC there is a real problem with large specs using debt to manipulate stock. A company can be forced in to BK by its bond holders, even a small % of them, they also have the power to grant the company a reprieve. That is a lot of power to move the stock price.