Courtesy of Pam Martens.
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) wants to teach the public financial literacy. It says “Our Financial Literacy Center serves as a credible resource for basic financial education to help people better understand and manage their personal finances.” Is the NYSE a credible source?
Right off the bat, I’m not feeling confident when I read: “Only the highest quality companies can choose to list their securities on our exchanges. And once they do, NYSE Euronext plays a unique role in providing deep and liquid markets for the trading of those securities, benefiting all investors, large and small.”
Throughout the years, the NYSE has had to delist numerous companies that have turned out to be frauds or grossly mismanaged. They were not “the highest quality” companies by a long shot. Millions of Americans have lost their life savings believing that if a company trades on the NYSE, it was a safe bet.
In January 2002, the NYSE suspended trading in Enron with the announcement that “The exchange has determined that the company securities are no longer suitable for trading on the NYSE.” On the same day, accounting firm Arthur Andersen said it had fired the lead auditor who worked for Enron and placed three other partners on leave, based on a preliminary investigation into the destruction of documents related to the energy giant’s collapse.
On September 8, 2008, the NYSE announced a temporary trading halt in the trading of the common and preferred stock of Fannie Mae (former ticker symbol FNM) and Freddie Mac (former ticket symbol FRE) so that investors could digest the news that the companies had been placed in conservatorship by the U.S. government. The companies had a total of 24 separate preferred securities or bonds trading on the NYSE. On June 16, 2010, with their shares trading for less than a dollar, the stocks were delisted from the NYSE.
On September 17, 2008, the NYSE announced that the common stock of Lehman Brothers Holdings, Inc. (former ticker symbol LEH) along with its 13 preferred securities that also traded on the NYSE would be suspended for trading, based on the company’s announced bankruptcy filing on September 15. The NYSE said the company was no longer suitable for listing.
…
