5,000 Words About An Obscure Bad Newspaper Reporter
August 12th, 2008
by Mark Mitchell
The ever cuddly Carol Remond (“I’m going to shred this guy to bits,” she said of Deep Capture reporter Patrick Byrne) has published yet another defense of criminal naked short sellers. In a recent column for Dow Jones Newswires, Carol writes that the SEC should think twice about cracking down on the criminals because some of the people (she names four) who have complained about illegal naked short selling have run into legal problems of their own.
Maybe I have too much faith in the press, but I suspect that this sort of intellectual dishonesty – this deliberate illogicality and mischief-making – could appear only on the financial pages. Certainly, editors of Metro sections don’t permit their columnists to write that cops should let gang-bangers clean out every convenience store in town just because some Quicky Marts have been caught cheating on their taxes.
Yes, it must be that different standards apply to financial columnists. Probably, it’s because finance is so complicated. Robbing a convenience store – an editor can understand that’s bad. But criminal hedge funds selling something they don’t have – apparently that’s pretty technical. If the columnist says that illegal naked short sellers (hedge funds offloading phantom stock to drive down prices) are good folk…well, she’s been studying this “complex” and “controversial” issue for a long time – let her run with it.
But now the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the SEC, and all the other people (except hedge fund managers) who have seriously studied this issue agree that it is bad for markets when people sell things that don’t exist. That this was ever a matter of “debate” will astound historians for generations to come, but the surreal intellectual “battle” is over, and it is time for Dow Jones to decommission Carol Remond. She’s become the Joan Rivers of the newswires – her gruff exterior failing to compensate for a tired act.
Carol devoted 17 of her 36 columns this year to ridiculing or discrediting critics of illegal short-selling. The other 19 columns carefully omitted mention of naked short selling, even though most of the columns were sourced from short-sellers and focused on companies that had been hit by massive levels of phantom stock. In a number of her columns, Carol alluded favorably to one particular clique of short-sellers while deliberately censoring information about their most egregious shenanigans.
Of course, Carol’s reporting was always a bit off-kilter. There was, for example, her famous April, 2004 column about the NASD’s decision to close a loophole that was allowing criminals to sell phantom stock through Canada. Carol wrote that the move wasn’t fair because “market participants” had told her it was too hard to find real stock. If editors at Dow Jones didn’t wonder why their reporter was advocating for the freedom of criminals to sell unlimited amounts of fake stock, they might have thought it a bit odd that the only “market participant” named in Carol’s story was Pacific International, a notorious Canadian brokerage whose most celebrated employee was funneling cash to the Genovese organized crime family.
Also strange was Carol’s long-standing, close relationship with Anthony Elgindy, a Mafia-connected short-seller who liked to flash his .380 Colt handgun in business meetings. For years, the Dow Jones reporter used Elgindy’s information in numerous stories about the companies he shorted, but she never mentioned that her pal was extorting and blackmailing the companies’ CEOs, bribing FBI agents, and churning out heaps of phantom stock.
Continued at:
deepcapture.com |
