Some investors lost a pile on Bank Of America stock in the 2008/09 financial holocaust when short-sellers buried investors under tons of phony paper. Okay, forget some investors. By now the whole world knows it was me.
From one side of its mouth, Washington tells us that short-sellers borrowed the BAC shares I got scammed with, lent to them by someone in a black hole somewhere, but regulators won’t say who, and out of another side of its mouth, Washington tells short-sellers to pay me dividends on my Bank of America as if short-sellers were the company itself.
In today's paper we read of yet another possibility. Some union guy claims that JP Morgan Chase muscled labor union pension funds into lending shares held in retirement accounts to hedge funds and mutual funds by charging higher fees if they didn't. The bank took 40% of the gains earned on monies that guy's union received from their loans, and walked out on all the losses.
So which is it?
1) Are short-sellers Buckaroo Banzai traders operating across the 8th Dimension of money management, borrowing from the rock people deep inside a mountain in another fold of the time and space continuum? If so, tell us who these rock people are, and inform them that Washington thinks they’re making these loans. Rock people and I both need to know that they were the ones who lent Bank of America to short-sellers over 50 and got it back around 3 so we can commiserate with each other and I can ask them not to do it again.
In fact, I’d bet all the continuums would want to hear about the rock people lending shares to the short-sellers because of what happened to me.
Or
2) Are short-sellers some previously unknown structural part of corporate America, entitled to issue a parallel class of company stock and pay dividends on it just like they really are the company itself even though the shares of this as yet officially undiscovered class never appear on the books of the real issue’s registrar or transfer agent and aren't reported to investors in their annual financials, even though this phony-baloney stock has the effect of increasing total shares issued beyond the number believed to exist, polluting all the per-share data investors base their decisions on? If so, somebody has to tell law enforcement. There are laws to be enforced here.
Real law enforcement, like the Texas Rangers maybe. Or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Investors are being hoodwinked right under the eyes of pretend law enforcement, and true crime fighters need to start tossing some perps in the slammer.
Or
Are short-selling Crime Lords getting stock from some bank-run extortion racket, smashing professional money managers in the knees with exorbitant fees if they don't do what they're told?
Face it, Washingtonians, like Wall Street bankers, speak from many sides of their mouths. Perhaps there’s another explanation they haven’t mentioned, or even come up with yet.
In any case, it’s time to transfer the Securities and Excuses Commission to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has more sides to its mouth than anybody, and has been speaking to Native Americans out of all of them for years.
At least everybody knows who you’re dealing with when you come up against one of their regulatory hotshots.
