Counterfeit, and The Confession Machine

People are always comparing women with keen humor about life to Bombeck or Fey, and while I think Susan could totally hang with those ladies over a bucket of beer, her brand of humor is fully her own. Pick it up before you hit the beach, load it to your Kindle to laugh over as the eliptical kicks your butt, reserve it at your local library.

La Crema when snowed in on the ranch, driving her Durango across cattle guards instead of taking the NJ Transit across the Hudson. I love memoirs, chick-lit and social commentary, and this book has all three. This enjoyable memoir is about a big time Manhattan magazine marketing director who decided to pack it all up and move to rural Virginia with her husband and sons to manage a cattle farm. Great gift for all girlfriends, whether they have a personal shopper chick to find them fresh fashions or a personal chicken coop for fresh morning eggs.

After you finish Confessions , pre-order Acres and it will arrive on your doorstep or in your e-reader next week. This journey Susan chronicles is tougher, the toughest ever. And her book is the best ever. Even better than her first. Read more Read less. Kindle Cloud Reader Read instantly in your browser. Product details File Size: O'Higgins; 1 edition April 17, Publication Date: April 17, Sold by: Share your thoughts with other customers.

Write a customer review. Showing of 2 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. I thoroughly enjoyed these two short stories, the authors imagination of a future world and theoretical technology if quite brilliant, and the description and words used for some of the equipment are almost science fiction reality.

The stories held my interest, they pleased my imagination and I was intrigued by the authors imagination. I recommend you take the risk and enjoy the imaginative ride. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Most of the prime brokers have multiple offshore subsidiaries or captive companies that actively participate in shorting. The prime brokers also front the shorting of some pretty notorious investors.

According to court documents or sworn testimony, if one follows one of the short money trails at Solomon, Smith Barney, it leads to an account owned by the Gambino crime family in New York. A similar exercise with other prime brokers, who cannot be named at this time, leads to the Russian mafia, the Cali drug cartel, other New York crime families and the Hell's Angels. One short hedge fund that was particularly destructive was a shell company domiciled in Bermuda.

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Subpoenas revealed the Bermuda company was wholly owned by another shell company that was domiciled in another tax haven country. This process was five layers deep, and at the end of the subterfuge was a very well known American insurance company that cannot be disclosed because of court—ordered sealing of testimony. Most of the large securities firms, insurance companies and multi—national companies have layers of offshore captives that avoid taxes, engage in activities that the company would not want to be publicly associated with, like stock manipulation; avoid U.

The Creation of Counterfeit Shares — There are a variety of names that the securities industry has dreamed up that are euphemisms for counterfeit shares. Unless the short seller has actually borrowed a real share from the account of a long investor, the short sale is counterfeit. It doesn't matter what you call it and it may become non—counterfeit if a share is later borrowed, but until then, there are more shares in the system than the company has sold. The magnitude of the counterfeiting is hundreds of millions of shares every day, and it may be in the billions.

The real answer is locked within the prime brokers and the DTC. Incidentally, counterfeiting of securities is as illegal as counterfeiting currency, but because it is all done electronically, has other identifiers and industry rules and practices, i. Also, because of the regulations that govern the securities, certain counterfeiting falls within the letter of the rules.

The rules, by design, are fraught with loopholes and decidedly short on allowing companies and investors access to information about manipulations of their stock. The creation of counterfeit shares falls into three general categories. Each category has a plethora of devices that are used to create counterfeit shares. Since forced buy—ins rarely occur, the other consequences of having a fail—to—deliver are inconsequential, so it is frequently ignored.

Enough fails—to—deliver in a given stock will get that stock on the SHO list, the SEC's list of stocks that have excessive fails—to—deliver — which should but rarely does see increased enforcement. Penalties amount to a slap on the wrist, so large fails—to—deliver positions for victim companies have remained for months and years. Only the DTC knows for certain how many short shares are perpetual fails—to—deliver, but it is most likely in the billions. In , REFCO, a large short hedge fund, filed bankruptcy and was unable to meet margin calls on their naked short shares.

Under this scenario, the broker dealers are the next line of financial responsibility. The number of shares that allegedly should have been bought in was ,,, but that probably never happened. Three months after SHO it dropped by about 20 million, as counterfeit shares found new hiding places see 2 and 3 below. It is noteworthy that aggregate fails—to—deliver are the only indices of counterfeit shares that the DTC and the prime brokers report to the SEC. The bulk of the counterfeiting remains undisclosed, so don't be deceived when the SEC and the industry minimize the fails—to—deliver information.

It is akin to the lookout on the Titanic reporting an ice cube ahead. This is a sample of tactics used. For a company that is under attack, the counterfeit shares that exist at this ex—clearing tier can be ten or twenty times the number of fails—to—deliver, which is the only category tracked and policed by the SEC.

When a broker dealer processes the sale of a short share, the broker dealer has three days to deliver a borrowed share to the purchaser and the purchaser has three days to deliver the money. In the old days, if the buyer did not receive his shares by settlement day, three days after the trade, he took his money back and undid the transaction. When the stock borrow program and electronic transfers were put in place in , this all changed. At that point the NSCC guaranteed the performance of the buyers and sellers and would settle the transaction even though the seller was now a fail—to—deliver on the shares he sold.

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The buyer has a counterfeit share in his account, but the NSCC transacts it as if it were real. At the end of each day, if a broker dealer has sold more shares of a given stock than he has in his account with the DTC, he borrows shares from the NSCC, who borrows them from the broker dealers who have a surplus of shares. So far it sounds like the whole system is in balance, and for any given stock the net number of shares in the DTC is equal to the number of shares issued by the company.

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The short seller who has sold naked — he had no borrowed shares — can cure his fail—to—deliver position and avoid the required forced buy—in by borrowing the share through the NSCC stock borrow program. When a broker dealer has a net surplus of shares of any given company in his account with the DTC, only the net amount is deducted from his surplus position and put in the stock borrow program. However the broker dealer does not take a like number of shares from his customer's individual accounts. The net surplus position is loaned to a second broker dealer to cover his net deficit position.

Let's say a customer at the second broker dealer purchased shares from a naked short seller — counterfeit shares. The lending broker dealer did not take the shares from any specific customers' account, but the borrowing broker dealer put the borrowed shares in specific customer's accounts.

Now there are three investors with the same counterfeit shares in their accounts. Because the DTC stock borrow program, and the debits and credits that go back and forth between the broker dealers, only deals with the net difference, it never gets reconciled to the actual number of shares issued by the company.

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For companies that are under attack, the counterfeit shares that are created by the CNS program are thought to be ten or twenty times the disclosed fails—to—deliver, and the true CNS totals are only obtained by successfully serving the DTC with a subpoena. The SEC doesn't even get this information.

The actual process is more complex and arcane than this, but the end result is accurately depicted. Ex—clearing and CNS counterfeiting are used to create an enormous reserve of counterfeit shares. The Anatomy of a Short Attack — Abusive shorting are not random acts of a renegade hedge funds, but rather a coordinated business plan that is carried out by a collusive consortium of hedge funds and prime brokers, with help from their friends at the DTC and major clearinghouses.

Potential target companies are identified, analyzed and prioritized. The attack is planned to its most minute detail. The plan consists of taking a large short position, then crushing the stock price, and, if possible, putting the company into bankruptcy. Bankrupting the company is a short homerun because they never have to buy real shares to cover and they don't pay taxes on the ill-gotten gain.