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POPSWall Street on Speed
As debates in the blogosphere in the last couple of days have made clear, there are a couple of possibilities of what is at work here. One is that Goldman and others are literally using privileged information to make trades ahead of markets, in which case they are committing a felony. Specifically, the abuse is known as "front-running," or trading ahead of customers, and it is an explicitly illegal form of market manipulation. Front running is epidemic on Wall Street--the whole point of an investment bank trading for its own account is to take advantage of its specialized knowledge of markets--and the SEC or the Justice Department shuts down front-running when it becomes too blatant to ignore. The other possibility is that the Goldmans of the world have found themselves a nice loophole. Tapping into the Stock Exchange's own computers and other sources of trading activity is something that anyone in theory could do, but only a few privileged insiders have the sophistication to exploi
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POPSNYSE ends transparency to protect Goldman Sachs Taibbi argues that the move is designed to protect investment banks from bloggers who are exposing the companies’ stock market manipulations Blogs such as Zero Hedge have been using NYSE data to argue that Goldman Sachs now has an almost unfettered ability to control stock prices. Goldman Sachs is singled out because the investment bank’s share of principal NYSE trading has gone from 27 percent at the end of 2008 to fully 50 percent of trades in recent months.
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POPSActivists protest bailouts near Wall Street Did not hear of any protest on Fox, CNN, or MSNBC. Also, nothing in NY Times or Wall Street Journal. After first learning of it via IReport on CNN I googled and found this report from Reuters of the protest on Friday NEAR Wall Street. Evidently the protesters were not allowed to protest within hearing distance of the very people they were protesting against. This is the state of our ‘right to protest’ controlled by the powers that be. The IReport covers an apparent second protest that occurred on Saturday Apr 4 ON Wall Street when Wall Street was closed. Guess they wanted to do it so they could have bragging rights that they actually protested on Wall Street. Here’s the IReport clip: http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-239743. Here’s a little more info on Bail Out the People website: http://www.bailoutpeople.org/
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POPSYikes Nearly 2 billion shares of Citi traded hands today. That's with a B
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POPSBankrolling Charitable Gifts In the last six months of 2008, as a financial crisis enveloped the country and lawmakers voted on a $700 billion financial rescue package, eight companies that would benefit from that package spent roughly $366,000 on events and charities connected to members of Congress, according to a review of congressional lobbying records. At one event in December, several of the biggest financial firms in the country sponsored a reception on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and dinner at the NYSE Club where Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was the keynote speaker. Public Citizen’s Craig Holman said money for meeting and honorary expenses is “clearly an extension of lobbying activity” and allows companies to “hobnob and rub shoulders” with lawmakers. “They get their name prominently displayed so the official knows who is footing the bill for this event,” he said. “They don’t chip in for free.”
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POPSRedstone finished with Midway "Mortal Kombat" may be one of videogaming's iconic franchises, but it is not hot enough to keep Midway Games afloat. The company has struggled the last few years to rebuild its brand--unsuccessfully--and reported a loss of $75.9 million during its third quarter. The New York Stock Exchange has even threatened to de-list the company's stock, which last traded today at 33 cents a share. It is unsurprising that Redstone decided to dump Midway and run. The real question is what its new controlling owner--Mark Thomas--plans to do with the company. My guess: He'll move to sell off any Midway licenses that are still worth anything (except, of course, for "Mortal Kombat") and then relaunch Midway as an online gaming company--the same path fellow coin-op dinosaurs like Acclaim and Atari are following.
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POPSU.S. Stocks Rally as Obama Picks Tim Geithner to Head Treasury and was poised for the worst annual decline in its 80-year history after economic reports depicted a deepening recession and lawmakers postponed a vote on a plan to salvage the auto industry. Citigroup, which has about $2 trillion of assets, has fallen for nine of the last 10 days on concern more companies and consumers will default as the economy worsens. The benchmark for U.S. equities trimmed its yearly loss to 46 percent today, still the worst year since 1931. The S&P 500 tumbled 8.4 percent this week. The Dow average declined 5.3 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite Index lost 8.8 percent.
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