Naked, Short and Greedy

Audience: Investors, entrepreneurs, companies considering going public, policy makers.

Rigged financial markets and hopeless under-regulation on Wall Street are not new problems. In this book, Susanne Trimbath gives a sobering account of naked short selling, the failure to settle, and her efforts over decades, trying to get this fixed.

Part I. Opening Act

This is a cautionary tale. What started as a regulatory failure has turned into a regulatory crisis. Shareholder democracy is in shambles. The institutions that were established to correct a problem of trade settlement failures (failures to deliver shares for settlement) have instead exacerbated the problem. They may not survive what comes next.

Chapter 1: Primer. A non-technical explanation of the terminology and concepts used in the book, plus the economic implications of trading "phantom" stock and bonds.

Chapter 2: Start at the Beginning. Twenty-five years ago, when I was working "backstage at Wall Street" a group of corporate trust specialists told me about a problem in shareholder voting rights. When I went to senior management at Depository Trust Company (DTC), then and still the largest securities depository in the world, brushed it off saying, "You can't balance the world."

Part II. Back to Where I Left Off

Chapter 3: A Sidewalk Café in New York. At the request of a business colleague, I have coffee with a lawyer from Texas who tells me that a problem was about to blow up the financial markets: Wall Street brokers are using short sales and fails to deliver to grab the assets of American entrepreneurs. I feel a pang of guilt for not sticking it out to fix this before I left DTC in 1993. By 2003, it was a full-blown regulatory crisis!

Chapter 4: Blind Men Describe an Elephant. When I start working on the issues after 2003, the lawyers, companies, investors and consultants I meet are like the blind men and a phantom share is the elephant. From a dentist in Michigan to a Republic operative in Washington DC, few of the self-described experts even knew what a naked short sale was before it either happened to them or someone hired them to pontificate on the subject.

Part III. Committing to a Causeread more...