Annals of Baloney (continued)

Today is the end of the "comment period" for a Securities and Exchange Commission rule proposal on "fails to deliver" securities -- the central obsession of naked shorting conspiracy nuts. (The "baloney brigade," as I called 'em in my book.)

The "National Coalition Against Naked Short Selling," an "astroturf" (phony grassroots) group pushing the agenda of penny stock promoters and CEOs of foundering companies, has been busy as the deadline approached.

As I observed the other day, the NCANS sent the Securities and Exchange Commission an anonymous comment letter on the SEC rulemaking, pushing its "stock counterfeiting scandal" crusade. As you can see from perusing the NCANS letter, the "evidence" for the "scandal" consists of a jumble of statistics but without a single instance of any actual company hurt by any such thing.

If you're going to write a 23-page letter you can site one example, I would guess. Right?

So I was looking forward to seeing that evidence when the anonymous NCANS said on its various anonymous websites it has got 1,100 actual people to send in their signatures to the SEC. I said to myself, "Surely these people are going to scribble in a note about what happened to them!"

But when I saw what the NCANS was sending in, all I saw were signatures below a statement saying that "The undersigned have been negatively affected by delivery failures of equity securities in the U.S. markets, and by the crediting of security entitlements in quantities far in excess of the issued securities they claim to represent."

Just name and address. No space for "what happened" or "what stock I owned that got counterfeited or naked shorted or stuff."

So they still haven't provided a single example of a company being hurt by "stock counterfeiting" or "naked short selling."

Don't you think that if 1,100 people were "negatively affected" by something they could say exactly how they were "negatively affected"?

© 2006 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.

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Wall Street Versus America was published by Penguin USA on April 6.
Click here for its Amazon.com listing and here for more information on the book, from my web site.