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They aren't always correct. Any analysis that doesn't come from an employee in the accounting department of a potentially fraudulent company is an opinion, not

They aren't always correct. Any analysis that doesn't come from an employee in the accounting department of a potentially fraudulent company is an opinion, not a fact. If the expose contains no lies but is nevertheless incorrect, investors and speculators are supposed to figure things out on their own. (How often they succeed is another matter.) Sometimes they can get the help of someone like Carl Icahn who'd tweet about a "short squeeze of the century" after getting a big long position. If the expose contains lies, the SEC and the Southern district of New York are supposed to prosecute. The problem is, that even if the expose is completely correct, a fraudulent company can manipulate it's share price for quite a while until the music stops. The short seller will try to get the music to stop early, whereas the fraudulent CEO will try to continue his fraud as long as possible (thus screwing more and more people as time goes by). If he can get the short seller to a margin call, his fraudulent company will survive for longer. And with the information that the SEC has, any CEO would be able to force margin calls in short sellers whenever they wish.

neilv 3y ago
Thanks. IIUC, there there are shortcomings in regulation/policing, which creates a very market-based/libertarian opportunity for private parties to also police fraud, but that private policing might be defeated if those private parties had to disclose their positions to the SEC (because some SEC personnel could leak/collude with the fraudster)? Is the core difficulty here that people don't trust government enough to handle the fraud problem? Or is it more appeal of profiting from the private policing of fraud? (Both are understandable.) On the trust angle, would it be possible for the government to earn sufficient trust? Or is there some fundamental reason people with government jobs couldn't conduct the same research these private parties are?
- username332211 3y ago
  The problem with trust is there's existing evidence American regulators have improper relations with private corporations. There's the recent case I mentioned in another thread of the CFTC and the election-betting market websites predict.it and Kashi. Kashi (A VC rich funded startup) hired former a CFTC commissioner and suddenly the regulatory approvals of predict.it (a project by a university in New Zealand) were withdrawn. (It's a bit more complicated than that, but I'd rather not go into all the details. You can research it on your own. Perhaps you'd reach a different conclusion than me. Maybe the CFTC was behaving properly and the internet consensus is just paranoid.) Could regulatory agencies be reformed to be beyond suspicion? Probably. How? Don't ask me, I'm not a politician, I can't pretend to know how.

neilv 3y ago

Thanks. IIUC, there there are shortcomings in regulation/policing, which creates a very market-based/libertarian opportunity for private parties to also police fraud, but that private policing might be defeated if those private parties had to disclose their positions to the SEC (because some SEC personnel could leak/collude with the fraudster)? Is the core difficulty here that people don't trust government enough to handle the fraud problem? Or is it more appeal of profiting from the private policing of fraud? (Both are understandable.) On the trust angle, would it be possible for the government to earn sufficient trust? Or is there some fundamental reason people with government jobs couldn't conduct the same research these private parties are?

username332211 3y ago
The problem with trust is there's existing evidence American regulators have improper relations with private corporations. There's the recent case I mentioned in another thread of the CFTC and the election-betting market websites predict.it and Kashi. Kashi (A VC rich funded startup) hired former a CFTC commissioner and suddenly the regulatory approvals of predict.it (a project by a university in New Zealand) were withdrawn. (It's a bit more complicated than that, but I'd rather not go into all the details. You can research it on your own. Perhaps you'd reach a different conclusion than me. Maybe the CFTC was behaving properly and the internet consensus is just paranoid.) Could regulatory agencies be reformed to be beyond suspicion? Probably. How? Don't ask me, I'm not a politician, I can't pretend to know how.