Posted on 04/15/2003 12:34:46 PM PDT by JohnGalt
Why? For every short trade, there's someone betting the opposite direction.
Were those trades missed by our "experts' that cost us 30 billion dollars in taxes each year or did our government know what was happening and look the other way?
Hmm. Massive speculation, little hard evidence.
How much money was involved? How much relative to the value of the markets at the time the trades were placed?
The presently unknown "speculators" operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt, Germany, stock exchanges and their profits have been estimated to be in the billions of dollars.
Well, the bolded part becomes important several paragraphs down. And the billions of dollars claim is questionable, as well...
These speculators sold "short" 38 stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as a result of the attacks of September 11. Short selling of stocks involves the opportunity to gain large profits by passing shares to a friendly third party, then buying them back when the price falls.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency uses a tool called Promis to monitor the stock exchanges of the world so as to predict traumatic events.
Actually, they don't. PROMIS is 1980s-vintage legal case management software.
And brokerages have access to significantly better modeling software than the government does.
Fox News on Oct. 16, 2001, broke stories disclosing the use of sophisticated Promis software by the FBI and the Justice Department.
Promis is 1980s software, designed for DEC computers.
A multitude of court records and investigative reports have established not only the reality, but also the versatility of a program initially designed to incorporate data from a variety of data bases in different languages into one readable format.
And this is where anyone who knows anything about database software tells the writer that he's FOS.
Tell us, good sir--is that string of ones and zeroes big-endian or little-endian? What's the delimiter?
Fox and the Washington Times have both reported based on interviews with Justice Department officials that PROMIS is used to monitor banking and financial transactions in a virtual real-time environment.
Anyone who believes this crap is dumb enough to be a Justice Department official.
All of the knowledge of these trades was known immediately as they occurred according to an expert with the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE).
And here's the problem: the speculators were operating in Frankurt and Toronto, not Chicago.
Oops.
Lynne Howard of the CBOE said: "We would have been aware of any unusual activity right away. Any unusual volume would have triggered it. There is an automated system called 'blue sheeting,' or the CBOE Market Surveillance System, that everyone in the business knows about. It provides information on the trades - the name and even the Social Security number on an account - and these surveillance systems are set up specifically to look into insider trading. The system would look at the volume, and then a real person would take over and review it, going back in time and looking at other unusual activity. The system is so smart that even if there is a news event that triggers a market event it can go back in time, and even the parameters can be changed depending on what is being looked at. It's a very clever system and it is instantaneous.
Ah, but this system has one teensy-weensy problem: it doesn't work outside the Chicago exchange...
Even with the system, though, we have very experienced and savvy staff in our market-regulations area that are always looking for things that might be unusual. They're trained to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
But if the trades aren't made on the Chicago Exchange, how do the pieces even arrive at the Chicago Exchange?
Even if it's offshore, it might take a little longer, but all offshore accounts have to go through U.S. member firms - members of the CBOE - and it is easily and quickly identifiable who made the trades. The member firm who made the trades has to have identifiable information about the client under the 'Know Your Customer' regulations (and we share all information with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)"
So how does this affect people and insitutions placing trades on the Frankfurt and Toronto exchanges?
Taking a look at the specific trades gives us the actual companies that were involved in the trades and the irregular volume. The documented pre-Sept. 11 insider trading that occurred involved only companies hit hard by the attacks. They include United Airlines, American Airlines, Morgan Stanley, Merrill-Lynch, Axa Reinsurance, Marsh & McLennan, Munich Reinsurance, Swiss Reinsurance, and Citigroup.
9/11 hit everyone extremely hard--and it was certain to do so, without respect to government policy immediately after the 2nd plane hit the WTC.
I would be far more suspicious if there were long trades placed on the few companies that would actually
Not only selling short, but also "put options" were involved in the massive trading in the days prior to September 11. "Put options" are highly leveraged bets, tying up blocks of stock, that a given stock's share price will fall dramatically.
OK, these would be the most profitable trades, and could be expected to account for the bulk of the profits.
An examination of "put options" during this period with the above-mentioned companies would reveal the following: On Sept. 6, 2001, the Thursday before the tragedy, 2,075 put options were made on United Airlines and on Sept. 10, the day before the attacks, 2,282 put options were recorded for American Airlines. Given the prices at the time, this could have yielded speculators between $2 million and $4 million in profit. This averages out to 75 times the number of normal activity on these entities.
$2-4 million, off of highly-leveraged put options?
OK, so where did the remaining "billions of dollars" come from?
No similar trading occurred on any other airlines. (Bloomberg Business Report, the Institute for Counterterrorism, Herzliyya, Israel citing data from the CBOE) Morgan Stanley saw, between Sept. 7 and Sept.10, an increase of 27 times in the purchase of put options on its shares. (Institute for Counterterrorism Report, Mechanics of Possible Bin-Laden Insider Trading Scam, Sept. 21, citing data from the CBOE) Merrill-Lynch saw a jump of more than 12 times the normal level of put options in the four trading days before the attacks. (CBOE report)
Interesting.
Although quite a number of news agencies reported on such unusual activity in stock trading in the aftermath of September 11th, the subject has all but died in the past 15 months. Could it have been bin Laden and his operatives that profited from this activity? Apparently not, a National Public Radio report on Oct. 16 reported Britain's Financial Services Authority had cleared bin Laden and his operatives of insider trading.
And we accept NPR, "Beijing Radio America," as a valid source?
Well, if it wasn't bin Laden, then who made all this money based on prior knowledge that the attacks were going to take place?
We haven't actually cleared bin Laden's people, though.
The Israeli Institute for Counter-Terrorism was the first agency to release a detailed report on the insider trading. That alone is evidence of a direct relationship between the financial markets and terrorist investigations.
How so?
We are now engaged in a war that will take thousands of lives and cost untold billions of dollars. Our government has based the heart and soul of this war on its assessment of direct involvement by Iraq and its connections with terrorists and their attacks on this country. Why is this angle of who actually perpetrated the heinous acts of 9/11 not been pursued?
How does this guy know whether or not this angle has not been or is not being pursued?
I know an ex-destroyer sailor who went to work for the SEC as an attorney.
He told me that the acronym "ASW" applied to both securities law and anti-submarine warfare: both were "awfully slow work."
If the people who placed these stock market transactions and made millions were not the perpetrators themselves, their prior knowledge makes them accomplices.
Wow. Amazingly obvious.
Consider the following: Government agencies queried say the matter is still under investigation and so none of the government investigating bodies -including the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and DOJ -are speaking to reporters about insider trading.
So what does he want?
Even so, suspicion of insider trading to profit from the Sept. 11 attacks is not limited to U.S. regulators. Investigations were initiated in a number of places including Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Spain. As in the United States, all are treating these inquiries as if they were state secrets.
They are, especially insofar as they identify targets for counterrorist work.
Compare that with the following statements made in the days following September 11th.
OK...
60 Minutes from Sept. 19, 2001, "Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market." "This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your entire life…This would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence," said Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg Business News, interviewed on Good Morning Texas on Sept. 20, 2001.
That's the earliest phase of a securities investigation: lots of public questions.
"I saw put-call numbers higher than I've ever seen in 10 years of following the markets, particularly the options markets," said John Kinnucan, principal of Broadband Research, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle.
When did he actually notice them? When they were placed, or after 9/11?
Hindsight is 20/20...
Germany's Bundesbank chief, Ernst Weltke, said "that a report of the investigation showed "bizarre" fiscal transactions prior to the attacks that could not have been chalked up to coincidence, they could not have been planned and carried out without a certain knowledge, particularly heavy trading in oil and gold futures."
OK...
ABC World News reported on Sept. 20, "Jonathan Winer, an ABC News consultant said, it's absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan, to the U.S., to North America, to Europe."
Even the most tenuous--or nonexistent--connection is going to get checked out.
What were the actual profits garnered by the people with prior knowledge to the horror of 9/11? Andreas von Bulow, a former member of the German Parliament responsible for oversight of Germany's intelligence services estimated the worldwide amount at $15 billion, according to Tagesspiegel on Jan. 13.
Oh, really?
How'd they come up with that number?
The most lucrative trades were only $2-4 million, and we're supposed to believe that 3,750-7,500 times as much money was made?
Regardless of how we choose to look at this issue, someone made a tremendous profit when their knowledge could have stopped the murder of over 3,000 people and billions of dollars in damages.
About the only statement in this piece that is completely true. All the experts in the business tell us the information on who made these trades was available almost instantaneously, up to and including Social Security Numbers!
Except that (a) the trades were not placed on US markets, (b) there is no evidence that the traders had Social Security Numbers, and (c) the author has no idea how money-laundering works.
It has been over 18 months now that our government has known who these people are.
This was never actually established in the article, merely asserted.
Why are we not demanding our government tell us who profited from these heinous acts?
Because it would probably queer any efforts to prosecute the perpetrators?
Statement unsupported by anything. He sets the whole tone with a major assumption that he does not support.
Were those trades missed by our "experts' that cost us 30 billion dollars in taxes each year or did our government know what was happening and look the other way?
What trades? It has not yet been established that there were any trades to miss. What is the basis for the 30 billion dollars (I guess he means the homeland security bill)
The presently unknown "speculators" operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt, Germany, stock exchanges and their profits have been estimated to be in the billions of dollars.
He has yet to establish that the speculators exist. He provides no backup for his claims of what countries they operated out of. As for the billions, estimated by whom? Besides, I seriously doubt it would be possible to do that much trading shorting in American stocks on these exchanges. But I could be wrong. Anyway, if you know that it happened, it is very, very easy to find out who placed the trades.
These speculators sold "short" 38 stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as a result of the attacks of September 11. Short selling of stocks involves the opportunity to gain large profits by passing shares to a friendly third party, then buying them back when the price falls.
What speculators? What stocks? How do you know?
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency uses a tool called Promis to monitor the stock exchanges of the world so as to predict traumatic events.
Source? Back in the vince foster days it was alleged that promis was simply bank software, but that in the right hands one could easily use it to monitor banks around the world. Anyway, I find it interesting that after hundreds of years and millions of people trying to create a model that beats the martket, only the CIA has come up with one.
Historically, if such trading activity precedes a traumatic event, it is an indication of foreknowledge.
Such trading as what? He has failed to establish that there was any such trading.
Fox News on Oct. 16, 2001, broke stories disclosing the use of sophisticated Promis software by the FBI and the Justice Department. A multitude of court records and investigative reports have established not only the reality, but also the versatility of a program initially designed to incorporate data from a variety of data bases in different languages into one readable format. Fox and the Washington Times have both reported based on interviews with Justice Department officials that PROMIS is used to monitor banking and financial transactions in a virtual real-time environment.
The author is trying to use the existense of promis to prove his premise. The fact that the software exists (and assuming that it works as he says it does, which I doubt) does not meant that the activity occured.
All of the knowledge of these trades was known immediately as they occurred according to an expert with the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE).
So you don't need promis to know this is going on? The options exchange knew? Besides, you don't short stocks on the CBOE, moron.
Lynne Howard of the CBOE said: "We would have been aware of any unusual activity right away. Any unusual volume would have triggered it. There is an automated system called 'blue sheeting,' or the CBOE Market Surveillance System, that everyone in the business knows about. It provides information on the trades - the name and even the Social Security number on an account - and these surveillance systems are set up specifically to look into insider trading. The system would look at the volume, and then a real person would take over and review it, going back in time and looking at other unusual activity. The system is so smart that even if there is a news event that triggers a market event it can go back in time, and even the parameters can be changed depending on what is being looked at. It's a very clever system and it is instantaneous. Even with the system, though, we have very experienced and savvy staff in our market-regulations area that are always looking for things that might be unusual. They're trained to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Even if it's offshore, it might take a little longer, but all offshore accounts have to go through U.S. member firms - members of the CBOE - and it is easily and quickly identifiable who made the trades. The member firm who made the trades has to have identifiable information about the client under the 'Know Your Customer' regulations (and we share all information with the Securities and Exchange Commission.)"
OK. So the CBOE is pretty good at sniffing out insider trading. That is all the woman said. The author trys to imply that they did in fact sniff it out. All the CBOE woman says is "We would have been aware...". Right, if it occurred, they would have been aware. That does not meant that it ocurred. In fact, it tells me that it didn't.
Taking a look at the specific trades gives us the actual companies that were involved in the trades and the irregular volume. The documented pre-Sept. 11 insider trading that occurred involved only companies hit hard by the attacks. They include United Airlines, American Airlines, Morgan Stanley, Merrill-Lynch, Axa Reinsurance, Marsh & McLennan, Munich Reinsurance, Swiss Reinsurance, and Citigroup.
Who documented it? Anybody can come up with this list. If it has been documented, then why not tell us who documented it?
Not only selling short, but also "put options" were involved in the massive trading in the days prior to September 11. "Put options" are highly leveraged bets, tying up blocks of stock, that a given stock's share price will fall dramatically.
Once again, no source. I'm also not quite sure what he means that they tie up large blocks of stock. One doesn't need to own any stock to buy a put option.
An examination of "put options" during this period with the above-mentioned companies would reveal the following: On Sept. 6, 2001, the Thursday before the tragedy, 2,075 put options were made on United Airlines and on Sept. 10, the day before the attacks, 2,282 put options were recorded for American Airlines.
Assuming this is true, this is an incomplete picture. It could very well be that on an average day, little or none are traded, but that when they trade, there is usually a big block.
Given the prices at the time, this could have yielded speculators between $2 million and $4 million in profit. This averages out to 75 times the number of normal activity on these entities.
One cannot know if this is true or not without doing research. Of course, there is little reason to assume that there is any basis in fact for anything the author says.
No similar trading occurred on any other airlines.
Kind of stupid on the part of the speculators isn't it? All the airlines took a hit.
(Bloomberg Business Report, the Institute for Counterterrorism, Herzliyya, Israel citing data from the CBOE) Morgan Stanley saw, between Sept. 7 and Sept.10, an increase of 27 times in the purchase of put options on its shares. (Institute for Counterterrorism Report, Mechanics of Possible Bin-Laden Insider Trading Scam, Sept. 21, citing data from the CBOE) Merrill-Lynch saw a jump of more than 12 times the normal level of put options in the four trading days before the attacks. (CBOE report)
All this could be true, but it doesn't prove much of anything. Of course, I would like to know what CBOE report this is.
Although quite a number of news agencies reported on such unusual activity in stock trading in the aftermath of September 11th, the subject has all but died in the past 15 months.
Perhaps because there is nothing to the charges?
Could it have been bin Laden and his operatives that profited from this activity? Apparently not, a National Public Radio report on Oct. 16 reported Britain's Financial Services Authority had cleared bin Laden and his operatives of insider trading.
So, the fact that Bin Laden didn't do it means someone else did? Oh, wait, I'll bet it's the evil miltary-industrial complex.
Well, if it wasn't bin Laden, then who made all this money based on prior knowledge that the attacks were going to take place? The Israeli Institute for Counter-Terrorism was the first agency to release a detailed report on the insider trading. That alone is evidence of a direct relationship between the financial markets and terrorist investigations.
So the fact that the Isreali Insitute for whatever released a report proves that there is a direct relationship between financial markets and terrorist investigations. What does that mean? So terrorism affects financial markets. Is that some new knowledge? Does it in any way suggest that in fact operatives in Toronto shorted ceratain stocks on teh CBOE, no wait, that was the put options, oh, which somehow tie up stock. We know this because I can prove that Promis software exists. But wait, thats not how I know, I know because the CBOE is pretty good at tracking stuff.
We are now engaged in a war that will take thousands of lives and cost untold billions of dollars. Our government has based the heart and soul of this war on its assessment of direct involvement by Iraq and its connections with terrorists and their attacks on this country. Why is this angle of who actually perpetrated the heinous acts of 9/11 not been pursued?
What angle? Who actually perpetrated the attacks?
If the people who placed these stock market transactions and made millions were not the perpetrators themselves, their prior knowledge makes them accomplices.
I thought it was put options. Or was it both? Who knows.
Consider the following: Government agencies queried say the matter is still under investigation and so none of the government investigating bodies -including the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and DOJ -are speaking to reporters about insider trading.
Consider this: The only factual statements in this whole report do nothing to back up your basic assertion.
Even so, suspicion of insider trading to profit from the Sept. 11 attacks is not limited to U.S. regulators.
Yeah, nutball reporters are interested as well.
Investigations were initiated in a number of places including Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Spain. As in the United States, all are treating these inquiries as if they were state secrets.
What law enforcement agencies that you know of regularly tell you the inside scoop on investigations?
Compare that with the following statements made in the days following September 11th. 60 Minutes from Sept. 19, 2001, "Sources tell CBS News that the afternoon before the attack, alarm bells were sounding over unusual trading in the U.S. stock options market." "This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your entire life…This would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence," said Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg Business News, interviewed on Good Morning Texas on Sept. 20, 2001. "I saw put-call numbers higher than I've ever seen in 10 years of following the markets, particularly the options markets," said John Kinnucan, principal of Broadband Research, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle. Germany's Bundesbank chief, Ernst Weltke, said "that a report of the investigation showed "bizarre" fiscal transactions prior to the attacks that could not have been chalked up to coincidence, they could not have been planned and carried out without a certain knowledge, particularly heavy trading in oil and gold futures." ABC World News reported on Sept. 20, "Jonathan Winer, an ABC News consultant said, it's absolutely unprecedented to see cases of insider trading covering the entire world from Japan, to the U.S., to North America, to Europe." What were the actual profits garnered by the people with prior knowledge to the horror of 9/11? Andreas von Bulow, a former member of the German Parliament responsible for oversight of Germany's intelligence services estimated the worldwide amount at $15 billion, according to Tagesspiegel on Jan. 13.
OK. Yes, we know that these allegations were made. I would like to know the result of any investigations. However, that does not excuse that your article is mostly innuendo and specualtion.
Regardless of how we choose to look at this issue, someone made a tremendous profit when their knowledge could have stopped the murder of over 3,000 people and billions of dollars in damages.
If it actually happened...
All the experts in the business tell us the information on who made these trades was available almost instantaneously, up to and including Social Security Numbers! It has been over 18 months now that our government has known who these people are. Why are we not demanding our government tell us who profited from these heinous acts?
Really, you talked to all of the experts in the business? Anyway, yes, it is very easy to find out who placed these trades. I would take that to mean that it did not in fact happen. Or, if it did, that the government is busy tracking down the money and the suspects and doesn't have them all yet.
Of course, to the author all of this is proof that there is some kind of massive cover-up.
Assuming that they were made. A lot of hype the days after 9/11 that there was unusual activity, without any of it backed up, does not mean that it happened. It certainly doesn't meant that it happened to the extent of the billions of dollars asserted here. Besides, there could be good reasons why the government would not tell us. Let's say that in fact the government has some idea who it was, but can't find that person. They don't want to tip that person off that they are on to him.
Actually, it just tells you the short interest which is not quite the same. Anyway, I was not alleging that nobody traded at all on these days, but that there was any abnormal behavior. The fact that one can look this stuff up doesn't mean that it happened. That everyone alleges it without backing it up with the easy to gather info more likely tells me that it did not.
Ahhh. I was under the impression that the 9/11/01 hijackers were being tracked by Mossad because they were, oh what's the phrase I'm looking for, oh yeah, ISLAMIC TERRORISTS. Mossad tracks a lot of Saudis, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebaneese, Pakis, you name it. If you're bowing to Mecca, and get spotted in known hangouts with known bad guys, you're going to have SOME ONE start keeping an eye you--at least to make sure that you do not acquire unusual tastes in vests or other attire. Heck, WE were tracking some of the animals that were on those planes.
While these stories have yet to be resolved, so many are actively looking to manufacture a link between Saddam and 9/11, though admittedly it looks like most people don't really even care anymore and are content that regime change justifies the death of American soldiers and the spending of American treasure.
Don't care if Iraq had anything to do with 911 or if they planned, funded, and trained the savages that did it. Your assertion that "regime change" justifies our troops dying and our taxes being turned into JDAMS is, IMHO, faulty reasoning.
The failure of a ruling clique to abide by the cease fire begged for by that clique in 1991 makes that contract null and void. We had an obligation to revoke the ability of the Iraqi ruling clique to exert any power in their nation. It's what happens when you go to war with a basically kind-hearted nation, and then spend 12 years taking advantage of the slack you got cut.
And I know that we disagree, John. Oh well.
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