Courtesy of Pam Martens
Scene from LifeLock Commercial
Remember that LifeLock tv commercial where masked bank robbers storm into a bank, smashing things with a baseball bat and screaming, “on the floor.” As the customers hit the floor, a security guard is still standing looking calmly at the robbers with his hands at his side. A woman looks up from the floor at the guard and whispers to him: “Do something.” His reply: “Oh, I’m not a security guard, I’m a security monitor. I only notify people if there’s a robbery.” After a few seconds of observing the scene around him, he looks back down at the woman and says: “There’s a robbery.” The commercial ends with the voice over: “Why monitor a problem if you don’t fix it?”
This commercial perfectly reflects the attitude of the Securities and Exchange Commission under the past two SEC Chairs, Mary Jo White and Jay Clayton, both of whom hailed from giant law firms representing the largest trading firms on Wall Street. The SEC had a front row seat at the serial crimes being committed by these firms; it monitored them in real time; and it did nothing to stop the serial crimes from reoccurring.
This morning we decided to take a look to see if the SEC was potentially aware of naked short selling in the shares of GameStop – the subject of House and Senate investigations and a hastily called meeting of regulators yesterday by U.S. Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, who also holds the position as Chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council.
It turns out that GameStop shows up on the SEC’s list of “Fails-to-Deliver,” a report that raises suspicions (but not conclusive proof) that somebody was engaging in naked short-selling in the shares of GameStop.
GameStop’s market cap spiked from $2 billion to $22.6 billion in a matter of days in January. Along the way, a large hedge fund, Melvin Capital, which was short the stock (a bet that the price would decline) had to be bailed out by Ken Griffin’s Citadel hedge fund, while a related company, Citadel Advisors, was also net short the stock. This week GameStop shares have been plunging back to earth. Adding to the cries of foul play, devotees of a Reddit message board, WallStreetBets, who had been hawking GameStop’s future prospects and buying the stock, had restrictions placed on their ability to buy any sizeable number of shares by their favored trading app, Robinhood, which directs the bulk of its trades to Citadel Securities for execution.
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