Share shenanigans

Crazy Patrick Byrnes www.deepcapture.com is getting some readers. Look at Washington Mutual. Institutions own 929 million out of the 882 million shares outstanding. Yes that's right. They own more shares than the numbers of shares outstanding. Before housing imploded, wasn't this an old "widow and orphan" stock? How about if you count those holders?

Here's a bit of what Byrne said:

It may surprise you to learn that there are loopholes in our nation’s regulations that permit some people, when it comes time to settle, to hand over nothing but an IOU. By using one of these loopholes, when the time comes for settlement I can take your money but say, “I’m not delivering you any stock. I’m just giving you an IOU for a share of stock that I will deliver later.”

There are reasons these loopholes came into existence. If someone made a mistake by signing the wrong line on a form, for example, or mistakenly sold more shares than he really had, one would not want the entire system to vapor-lock as the mistake was rectified. So the system has been designed so that the gears do not get hung up on minor mistakes. The general idea is that, if someone sells shares it turns out he cannot deliver, he can create these IOU’s and send them on as though they were real shares, giving himself time to clean up whatever error he is experiencing, and sending the real shares a couple days later.

There is no system in place to alert you to the fact that you sent me your money and received nothing but an IOU. The system treats these IOU’s just as though they were real shares. Your brokerage statement will say that you got shares, even though I never sent anything but an IOU. You can sell them, and that IOU will pass on through the system into someone else’s account.

The problem is, suppose I (having mastered these loopholes) start using the system’s “forgiveness” strategically? Suppose I find a company that is likely to need capital to expand, or simply survive, in the near future? They plan on raising that capital by issuing shares of stock to the public (there is no crime in that: for example, lots of young pharmaceutical companies sip at the capital markets for years as they get going). Imagine that I target one of them, and deliberately go out selling that company’s shares into the marketplace, yet instead of delivering stock, I deliver nothing but IOU’s. I flood the market with them, always standing ready to sell more than anyone wants to buy. My IOU’s are anything but temporary: they drift around in the market for weeks, months, and eventually years. If anyone gets mad and tells me that I have to deliver real shares against one of the IOU’s I sold, I say, “Sure, I’ll deliver shares against that IOU,” but what I deliver is … just another IOU. Eventually I flood the market with so many IOU’s that people end up reselling them, and they go and on until there are more share-IOU’s bouncing around than there are actual shares."
http://community.overstock.com/deepcaptureblog/category/2-unsettled-trades-naked-short-selling-crime/

You could almost argue that the hedgies have moved up from the small cap arena.