Wall Street Scam
Update 2007



 

      American investors lost $600,000,000,000--that's $600 Billion--in the February 27, 2007 "China Sell-off," so-called. Worldwide, investors lost $1.5 trillion. What did the American stockbrokers and financial advisors tell the investors who lost those billions?  "Don't play the Wall Street game if you can't take the heat." Some of the con artists pretended to be more courteous, trying to defraud the suckers with the same scam they use whenever there's a sell-off: "Since the prices are down, now's the time to buy."

      This and all the other contrived down-turns in stock prices I refer to in this essay are proof positive that Wall Street is a huge swindle, bilking American and world investors out of billions of dollars each year.

"The immediate cause for the China slump appears to have been concerns that financial authorities were about to take action to curb speculation, including a lift in interest rates and a capital gains tax. The rumoured action has sparked fears that riskier financial trades and investments around the world could now be in danger.

“'What we’re looking at here is a big move away from risk,' David Durrant, a currency analyst with a New York investment management firm, told Reuters. 'The big fall in Chinese stocks especially has got some people nervous about the carry trade.'

"The carry trade refers to the process in which financial investors borrow money in one currency at a low interest rate and then place it in high-risk assets in other markets. This process causes what are considered distortions in currency exchange rates. For example, while the Japanese currency should be strengthening because of increased economic growth, the carry trade has seen a fall in the value of the yen as investors transfer yen holdings elsewhere.

"Large profits can be made from these transactions but they depend on market stability. Once that comes into question, with an event like the China sell-off, there can be a rush for the exits." 1

As is often the case, the Wall Street hustlers gave the game away by signalling the drop in prices before it occurred. The Monday before the Tuesday $600 Billion loss, the former head of the "Federal" Reserve System Alan Greenspan spoke via satellite link to a business conference in Hong Kong, warning of a possible recession. Using one of their most reliable of swindles--the dogma that the economy automatically and uncontrollably goes through ups and downs: the so-called Bull and Bear markets--Greenspan pontificated that we could expect a recession by the end of 2007. The US economy, Greenspan said, had been expanding since 2001 and now there were signs that the cycle was coming to an end.

“When you get this far away from a recession, invariably forces build up for the next recession and indeed we are beginning to see that sign. For example in the US, profit margins . . . have begun to stabilize, which is an early sign we are in the later stages of a cycle,” he said.

     The worldwide stockmarket con game becomes more evident at times like these, when the overheated Chinese economy begins to affect all the other economies in the world. China's economy is only a fifth the size of the American economy, but it's growing five times as fast and therefore contributes as much as the US to the growth of the world economy as a whole. China's 2006 fixed asset investment has been estimated at more than 45 percent of Chinese gross domestic product (GDP). Investment on this scale has never been seen before. Even at the height of the post-World War II expansion, when its economy was growing at 10 percent per year, Japan’s investment ratio never exceeded 34 percent of GDP. In other words, China is moving into the situation that most of the other world economies are already facing: saturated markets leading to decreased profits and investment opportunities.


The History of Continuous Fraud

                              

In September, 2003, the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Richard Grasso, was awarded  a $140 million payout. We've seen Grasso before in a story about oil imperialism, where he was embracing a South American drug lord who is a key part of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) scam. To examine the full nauseating account of this plutocrat's plundering of hapless investors, read this article.

                                                       

                                                       

The Fantasy

                                     

          From 1998 through March, 2000, when Nasdaq crested at 5,000, the Wall Street scam artists raised the price of selected stocks--primarily the technology stocks--and duped a huge number of American and foreign investors into believing they could become instant millionaires. In 2000-2001, an estimated 52% of American households owned stocks in some form. Cash flowing into stock mutual funds hit a record $53 billion in February 2000.

                                              

                                                       

The Reality

                                                                


The reality was that the inflated stocks plummeted 58% after March, 2000, resulting in millions of hapless investors losing over $4 trillion! Did the stock brokers and the corporation executives lose money? Not on your life.

                                                                

A New Way to Lose: Stock Options

Let's take the horrible example of former Cisco engineer Jeffrey Chou. As a Cisco employee, he purchased 100,000 Cisco shares last year, using the employee stock option provision. He purchased the shares at about 5 to 10 cents per share. At the time he purchased the shares, they were worth $60 to $70 per share. The taxes he has to pay in 2001 are computed on the difference between what he paid for the shares and what they were worth when he purchased them: approximately $6.9 million. Chou never sold the shares and they have since plummeted in value. Even if he sold all his shares and his 3-bedroom home in Foster City, California, he'd still owe the IRS about $700,000.



The globalist corporations made
out like bandits on Wall Street in
1998:
  • America OnLine - up 586%
  • Microsoft - up 115%
  • Wall Mart - up 106%
  • IBM - up 76%
  • McDonalds - up 61%
  • General Electric - up 39%


But the April, 2000 stockmarket
crash resulted in:
  • E-toys losing 94% of its value
  • Amazon.com losing 70% of its value
  • Priceline.com losing 75% of its value
  • Visx losing 75% of its value
  • Ebay losing 61% of its value
  • E-Trade losing 60% of its value
  • Microsoft losing 40% of its value



The corporation executives somehow managed to know just when to sell ther own private stock--before the crash:
  • Microsoft's co-founder, Paul Allen, dumped 36 million shares of Microsoft worth $3 billion

  • Dell chairman, Michael S. Dell, dumped 6.2 million shares worth $308 million

  • Steve Case, president of America Online, dumped 36 million shares worth $3 billion

  • Jeffrey Mallet, senior vice president of Yahoo! Inc., dumped 110,000 shares at $180 a share--netting him a cool $20 million

  • Gary Bloom, executive VP of Oracle Corp. dumped 125,535 shares for $5.7 million

Surely the brokerage companies and the stock evaluation services warned the investors of bad stocks so they could sell before the crash? Fuhgeddaboudid!

Stock analysis publications such as Moody's, Standard & Poor's, Duff & Phelps, Fitch, and A. M. Best charge from $30,000 to $50,000 for each yearly rating. Do you think a large corporation is going to keep paying if it gets a bad rating? Right!

A Security and Exchange Commission study found that Wall Street analysts gave a "sell" rating only 1% of the time. In Merrill Lynch's evaluation of 2,000 U.S. stocks there was not a single "sell" recommendation. In 1999 when all major stock analysts were rating Compaq stock as "buy" quality, the stock lost 54% of its value, resulting in a loss to investors of $9 billion.

The moral of this story: unless you are a corporate executive or a stock broker, and somehow mysteriously know just when to buy and sell your and other stock, you'd best be wary of Wall Street.

The Scam Continues in 2001

On July 31, 2001, Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulators said that one-quarter of the 57 analysts they surveyed had purchased shares of companies at low prices (unavailable to the public) before recommending the stocks to investors. In three cases, analysts sold their shares even while recommending them publicly, earning from $100,000 to $3.5 million.

Investment bankers handle the lucrative business of underwriting new companies' initial public stock offerings (IPOs). There's supposed to be a "Chinese Wall" separating the banks' investment departments and the research departments that suggest stocks to investors. The SEC's acting chairwoman, Laura Unger, revealed that analysts at some brokerages and banks report, at least indirectly, to the investment banking divisions of their firms in addition to the research units. Unger reported that in many cases the analysts' compensation is increasingly tied to the profitability of their brokerage firms' investment banking units.

Tom Tomorrow

This is the Stock Market con game Dubya and his handlers are trying to get Social Security investors to play into. In this journal we have described many kinds of fraud which Wall Street insiders perpetrate on hapless investors; now here's a new one. In August, 2001, Bush appointed Harvey Pitt as Chairman of the SEC, a prominent securities lawyer who had represented the accounting industry in its push for tort-reform legislation. During his tenure, Pitt made sure that as many illegal corporate actions as possible were swept under the rug (such as offshore accounts used for money laundering) and he made it clear that he did not plan to create reforms to clean up Wall Street. Now even the SEC has become a new kind of fraud in the Wall Street scam.

The Enron Syndrome


An accompanying article exposes the entire phenomenon of corporate criminal behavior perpetrated by Enron and a number of large corporations. In reference to Wall Street manipulations, Enron, Waste Management, Sunbeam, Global Crossing, Rite-Aid, and many other corporations carried out such criminal acts as:

  • paying stock options to high executives and not reporting it on the company books

  • hiring personnel from the accounting firm responsible for auditing their books as consultants (working for a corporation as both auditor and consultant is a clear conflict of interest)

  • paying senior executives huge sums just prior to bankruptcy, as in the case of Enron:

    • in the year prior to its December 2001 bankruptcy filing, Enron handed out $745 million in payments and stock awards to 144 of its senior executives.

    • the company disclosed that these executives received $310 million in salary, bonuses, loan advances and other income, while $435 million came in the form of exercised stock options and restricted stock packages (including the $54.6 million in retention bonuses that were given to 200 executives in the days immediately preceding the declaration of bankruptcy)

    • among those receiving the biggest windfalls was:

      • Kenneth Lay, former chairman of the company, who raked in $150 million in income, bonuses and stock packages

      • former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling took in $25 million

      • former chief financial officer Andrew Fastow received over $10 million

      • Thomas White, the current army secretary in the Bush administration who was a top executive in the company’s energy-services sector, received $17 million



The Complete Wall Street Scam

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Notes

1 Nick Beams, "Global markets slide after China sell-off," World Socialist Web Site (www.wsws.org), 28 February 2007


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Updates

Reference: