This is the ideal picture for defining the meaning of these awards.

Salma Hayek seems to be the epitome of things global.

Follow this link to a video by Judd Bagley that puts into a much more graphic form the information I alluded to in my previous post about naked short selling.

If this video doesn’t get you steaming mad, then you aren’t paying attention.

The AIG bonus brouhaha is a convenient issue to keep you from looking at what is the real cause of our financial problems.

By the way, I was led to this video by going pack to the comments on the DeepCapture post that I mentioned before.

Follow this link to a Bloomberg Special Report on Naked Short Selling. The link takes you to a 25 minute video.

Perhaps only 1% of the shares that are traded on any given day are caused by illegal short sales.  However, if you lose 90% of the value in a stock that you own, that 1% is pretty important.

I have discussed naked short selling in a couple of previous posts.  I have read a number of explanations of naked short selling.

There is one question that has been nagging at me for which I have never seen an explanation. I have posed this question to a web site that should have the answers.

Follow this link to my question.

I’d like an explanation of how the counterfeit shares of a naked short sale are covered up. People who think they bought real shares expect to get annual reports and expect to vote in shareholder meetings. How is it that the charade is maintained so that these people don’t complain when they don’t get what a share holder expects to get?

I saw a post from Sep 5, 2008 talking about the fact that there are over-votes in shareholder meetings due to these fake shares. I cannot understand why the vote isn’t immediately thrown out if more shares than exist are voted.

There has been one answer posted so far (as of March 17th, 2009 at 6:35 pm).  I don’t find this answer to square with the original post to which I alluded. That post was actually on July 20, 2008. The part that I found only marginally helpful in that original post said:

Bloomberg writes that the “Securities Transfer Association, a trade group for stock transfer agents, reviewed 341 shareholder votes in corporate contests in 2005. It found evidence of overvoting-the submission of too many ballots-in all 341 cases.”

If it is impossible to tell who owns legitimate shares in a company, how does this system continue to operate?  I suppose that it is similar to counterfeit money.  As long as the counterfeiting is kept below some threshold, then the system can continue to operate.  Of course the people who get left holding tha bag of counterfeits are just out of luck. With counterfeit money, it is eventually possible to detect what is counterfeit and what is real at least for physical money.  Maybe not so for electronic money.

The ability of a bank to lend money that its depositors think is safely in the bank and quaranteed by the FDIC is similar to short selling of shares borrowed from a broker.  This is only a minor step away from naked short selling.

Follow this link to an audio recording of a conversation among Vice President Walter Mondale, famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, and moderater University of Minnesota political scientist Larry Jacobs.

The evening of great conversation was titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis”.

In this audio, Seymour Hersh revealed new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.” I am sure that we will be hearing a lot more about this story, but the 1 hour conversation was so much more valuable than just this single revelation.

The discussion ranged over abuses of power from President Johnson in the Viet Nam War to the the unprecedented abuses of the Bush/Cheney administration. I think you will learn a lot about what went on and how these things finally get stopped.

You can follow this link to see how the story was covered by Eric Black on MinnPost.com

Follow this link to the videos of Jim Cramer’s appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

This is one of the finest examples of bulldog reporting since the heyday of Mike Wallace in the 1950s.

Jon just will not let Cramer wriggle out of his (and the media’s) responsibility for bad reporting.  Cramer keeps trying to cop to a lesser charge, but Jon just will not let him get away with it.

The Town Common newspaper facilitated a debate among the Sturbridge Board of Selectment candidates.  It was broadcast live over the cable public access channel tonight, March 12, at 7:00PM.

I want to record for our own reference in the this blog the conclusion that we will use in the election Monday, April 13.

We think the two best candidates are James Ehrhard and Thomas Creamer. Our third choice would be Priscilla Gimas. We would not choose Edward P. Goodwin.

We think our top choices are more likely to get our town unstalled from its current malaise. It is tough to choose based on one debate.  We treat the debate as our first chance to actually hear the candidates speak to us.  This is now a good jumping off point for our further research into the positions, qualifications, and past history of these candidates.

The Town Common promises to have excerpts of the debate on their blog site tomorrow.

Follow this link to an interview with Jim Cramer.

In this 2006 interview that is now on YouTube, Jim Cramer descibes how he  manipulated markets when he managed a hedge fund.  He admits that he committed illegal acts that he got away with because the SEC didn’t understand what was going on.

In 2006, he probably felt safe making these admissions, given that the SEC was run by the Bush administration. He must not have known much about YouTube back then because he thought this interview would not be aired on TV.

I was quite wrong yesterday, when I said that Jim Cramer missed the boat on his Bear Stearns predictions.  Not only was he on the boat, he was steering it.

If Martha Stewart could be jailed for what the government claimed she lied about doing, do you think Cramer could be jailed for admitting what he has done?  Too late to hide behind the 5th ammendment now.

Follow this link to see Jon Stewart prove that Jim Cramer really missed the boat with his predictions of  Bear Stearns’ future.

If you followed the discussion at the time when people were trying to hold Cramer to account, Cramer was artfully able to claim that if you listened to his words very closely, you would have no cause to complain about what he said.

In this video, Jon Stewart seems to be going down that very same path of previous critics.

Never give up on Jon, though.  Wait for the final coup de grace.

Follow this link to a 40 minute interview with Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz is a Nobel economics laureate in economics.  He is a professor at Columbia University and the former chief economist at the World Bank. He is the co-author of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.

This discussion is in the same vein as the other two items I posted today. In an interview like this, Joseph Stiglitz gets a much better chance to go into some details than Paul Krugman can do in a short column.

Follow this link to Paul Krugman’s latest column where he criticizes the Obama administration’s non-plan for bailing out the banks.

Perhaps it is not coincidence that I am finding many knowledgeable economists and financiers that are saying similar things.

Here is my fantasy positive spin on what the Obama administration is doing.  They really know what needs to be done, but they are having a hard time selling it politically. They keep proposing ineffective solutions until all the experts demand that they do what the administration wants to do anyway.  Then Obama can come around and say, “I really don’t want to take over the banks, but if you absolutely insist, then I guess I’ll have to do it.”