April 13, 2007
We need to know what the fails are in order to trust the system. We need transparency, and the reason that the DTCC tenders to us for not providing transparency is that they have passed a rule against being honest about it, and disclosing the numbers. The fail to deliver problem is of unknown size by design (not because the information is unknowable), and the consensus was that this state of affairs is deplorable - investors deserve to know how large the fraudulent stock trade problem is, by company, and in the aggregate for the market.
The reason that the DTCC and the SEC don't tell anyone what the size of the FTD problem is is because there would be a collapse in faith in the markets if we knew the level of crookery that was endemic to the system. All of the garbage excuses about the protection of trading secrets is merely a fairy tail. The real reason is obvious to anyone with a brain - protecting illegal trading secrets.
It is illegal to collect money for selling something that you don't own, borrow, or deliver. And because some hedge funds have made doing something that is illegal the core of their trading strategies, the SEC is refusing to reveal the size of the hole that those funds have dug in any particular stock because that might reveal something about their illegal trading strategies, and that would be improper. That is totally ABSURD. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
There are at least a BILLION securities that failure to deliver each and every day. See, http://www.businessjive.com/nss/darkside.html
The SEC's position is that they welcome comments about Reg SHO, and will carefully consider any they receive. Presumably the SEC will carefully discuss those comments in the same way that they did in 2004 (when abundant cautions were sounded by everyone from the NASD and NASAA to economists to ordinary citizens), and then disregard them, as they did the first time around.
Fair markets require transparency. What appears to be aiding and abetting the criminals must stop now. Start referring these criminals to the U.S. Department of Justice for criminal prosecution for market manipulation and for the counterfeiting of corporate securities, which is what planned, non-incidental settlement failures are.