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NEW YORK, May 18 (Reuters) - U.S. Treasuries prices rose on Tuesday, with the 30-year bond rising a full point, as Germany announced it would ban some short-selling activities and Wall Street stocks turned lower. Treasury yields hit session lows after Germany's Finance Ministry announced a ban on naked short-selling at major banks. The ban would include a prohibition against naked shorting of euro government bonds. For more, click on [ID:nBAT005467] Germany did not ban all short-selling of bonds, but by banning naked short-selling -- in which a position is taken on a bond without buying or borrowing the asset...

Bernard Madoff, the Mafia, and the Friends of Michael Milken February 3rd, 2009 by Mark Mitchell In 2005, Patrick Byrne, the CEO of Overstock.com and future Deep Capture investigative reporter, began a public crusade against illegal naked short selling (hedge funds and brokers creating phantom stock to manipulate stock prices down). He said, over and over, that the crime was destroying public companies and had the potential to trigger a systemic meltdown of our financial markets. Soon after, I began to investigate a network of short sellers, journalists, and miscreants. I concluded that many of the people in this network...

23 October 2008 A Record Number of Buyers Cannot Take Delivery of the US Treasuries that They 'Own' He who sells what isn't his'n Must buy it back or go to Prison. Daniel Drew Naked short selling and float and reserve plays are causing a record 'failures to deliver' in the US Treasuries markets. Some of this may be a 'kiting' scheme in which the sellers are playing an aribtrage against the slight fees and penalties versus returns on price distortions and extremes in volatility. Or it might be a case of selling and using the same thing so many...

Since 2004 and before, the SEC has permitted investment banks and hedge funds to sell short and fail-to-deliver (FTD) the shares to buyers. In 2005, with Regulation SHO, the SEC "grandfathered" all existing FTDs, meaning tens of millions of shares sold short could remain undelivered indefinitely. Regulation SHO itself was riddled with provisions enabling new FTDs to be created. Only last month, effective Sept. 18, the SEC after long delay slightly tightened delivery requirements. But short-sellers and their prime brokers still find plenty of wiggle-room to move FTDs among accounts so as to avoid delivering shares to buyers who have...

** EXCERPT ** The Securities and Exchange Commission has a list, and it's checking it twice. It's a compendium of nearly 1,000 companies the so-called watchdog has now pronounced off-limits to short-selling. If this do-not-short list weren't such a travesty, it would be hilarious. Among the companies the SEC wants to "protect" are the ones -- Moody's and McGraw-Hill, to name just two -- that did such a horrendous job rating the mortgage paper that helped cause this debacle in the first place. In the end, SEC Chairman Chris Cox and friends will discover that this will turn out to...

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted to extend the temporary rules it put in place to restrict short-selling of a handful of financial stocks. The SEC commissioners didn't take additional steps opposed by Wall Street to expand the number of stocks affected by the rules or make them permanent. The temporary rules were set to expire Tuesday, and the SEC extended the order on the 19 stocks until Aug. 12. It won't be extended beyond then. In a short sale, a trader sells borrowed stock in a bet the price will decline and the stock can be profitably repurchased at...

Wall Street executives expect the Securities and Exchange Commission to extend the temporary limits it has placed on short-selling and expand them to cover additional stocks beyond the 19 financial companies it targeted two weeks ago. The limits are set to expire Tuesday, and executives, lobbyists and hedge-fund representatives of the Managed Funds Association, the biggest hedge-fund industry group, have been talking throughout the weekend, trying to come up with possible approaches to asking the SEC to reconsider expanding the rules, according to people familiar with the talks. A call with regulators on Friday gave the funds group "a fair...

Tuesday’s action in amending Regulation Short Sales HO) listed 19 banks and financial companies for which naked shorting was effectively banned for 30 days. Such a limit was long overdue but why limit the restriction to just 19 companies and just 30 days? Naked short selling (selling shares short that are not first borrowed, which is required to execute a legal short) is endemic and the SEC has turned a blind eye to it since the agency was created. This recent action is a knee-jerk reaction but a clear example of too little way too late. The question is will...

http://www.petitiononline.com/mrktrfrm/petition.html If you care about the HONESTY of the stock market AND/OR our troops, please sign this petition to stop the process of naked shorting stocks in the market. Force Protection (FRPT) builds the best armored vehicles in the world that protect our troops. They have been on the Reg SHO list for a LONG time with 17m shares naked shorted. This is counterfeiting stock. Just like counterfitting money. Should be equally illegal, but it's not apparently, as the SEC will not enforce the rules. One wonders if the powers behind this have ulterior motives past driving a company into...