Dear Esteemed Guest,
You may know of my battle with Wall Street. I decided to write you about it.
For five years whispers of an urban myth have held that certain hedge funds use an illegal trading technique to loot the stock market. If true, it means that the savings Americans put in the market are secretly being stolen (while Wall Street hires actors to go on TV to say how safe it is to put more of your money there), while some American firms are being destroyed. Target companies are thought to be small financial, high-tech, or biotech firms researching cures for cancer, diabetes, and other diseases.
It sounds like a Hollywood thriller, but two years ago strangers across the USA who had been wiped out financially began contacting me to ask that I get involved in this issue. I did, and became convinced something hinky was indeed going on. How bad is it? Economist and Former Undersecretary of Commerce Dr. Robert Shapiro calculates that a thousand firms have been destroyed and hundreds of billions of dollars (and perhaps a trillion) looted. If so, this “urban myth” is the financial crime of the century.
I tried to expose it quietly, but was eventually left no option but a frontal assault. The hedge funds have tried to deflect this by saying that I am just a malcontent mad about my stock price (even though I began this battle while it was soaring, and have done everything possible to expose this as a systemic issue, not just an Overstock issue). Fortunately for them, they have a stable of a half-dozen compliant reporters who obediently stick to any Party Line they are instructed to parrot (they deal mostly in half-truths, but one Wall Street Journal writer, Holman Jenkins, literally created a 100% fabricated quote).
Unfortunately for the bad guys, the US Senate Judiciary Committee just held a hearing into this issue, and their Senatorial jaws appeared to drop. SEC Chairman Cox hastily called a hearing wherein he candidly discussed the “long-standing and growing problem” of a “market manipulation that is clearly violative of the federal securities laws,” referred to the “serious problem” of Wall Street using a “tool to drive down a company's stock price to the detriment of all of its investors,” and acknowledged that the problem may be so advanced the SEC has been afraid to act for fear of “disruption to the markets.” The toady journalists have gone unusually silent.
If you want to learn more, I invite you to visit a narrated cartoon-lesson I created,
http://www.businessjive.com/nss/darkside.html which explains this simply and clearly (I wrote it so Grandma could follow). Views are over 200,000 and soaring.
Your humble servant,
Patrick M. Byrne
Overstock.com
P.S. If you want to see a 3 minute TV news story exposing this scandal, click here then click “Video”.
http://www.ksl.com/index.php?sid=388415&nid=148Let me know if the links don't work, I'll try to fix it.