Well, all parts of the system rely on accurate record-keeping.
Look at voting rights: we had a security company where 20% more people voted than there were shares. Think you could direct corporate, even national power that way? Without records of transfer, how do you know you own it? Morgan transferred a stock to Schwab but forgot to clear it. Doesn’t that mean it’s listed in both Morgan and Schwab? In fact, didn’t you just double-count and double-value that share? Suppose you fail to clear just a few each day. Before long, compounding the double ownership leads to pension funds owning 2% fake shares, then 5%, then 10%, until stock market and the national value itself becomes unreal. And how would you unwind it?
Work backwards to 1999 where the original drop happened? Remove 10% of CALPERs or Chicago’s already devastated pension money? How about the GDP and national assets that 10% represents? Do you tell Sachs they now need to raise $100B more in capital reserves because they didn’t have the assets they thought they have? Think I’m exaggerating? There have been several companies who tired of these games and took themselves back private, buying up every share…only to find their stock trading briskly the next morning. When that can happen without even a comment, you know fraud knows no bounds, a story Financial Sense called “The Crime of the Century.” No one blinked.
But it doesn’t stop there. You don’t only buy stocks, you sell them. And you can sell them by borrowing them from a shareholder. But what if there’s no record of delivery? You can short or sell a stock without owning any. And the more you sell, the more it drives the price down and the more money you make. In fact, profits are infinite if you can sell enough that the company goes bankrupt: you never have to repay the stock at all. And this “naked” short selling can only occur if there’s openly bad recording and enough failures-to-deliver to hide it. You could literally own nothing, borrow nothing, post nothing, and with no more than insider access to an exchange, drive a company out of business. That’s how crucial recording is.
And while for appearance’s sake, they only attack and destroy small plausibly weak stocks, Overstock.com with a $1.45B market cap fought these naked short sellers for years. Publicly, openly, vocally, with the SEC. Besides eroding their capital, besides their legal fees, besides that e.g. Amazon could pay to have their competition run out of business with fraudulent shorting, the unlimited incentive to short instead of long on small companies could suppress the entire stock market, indeed the national wealth and GDP. It may account for some of the small caps underperforming their potential for years, and why an outsized portion of stock value to be in just the 5 protected FAANG or DOW 30 stocks. …We don’t know, because we have no honesty, no accounting, and nothing to compare it to. But no one cares, because it’s been going on for 20 years, and if they cared, they’d do something about it. Again, no one cares about your problems, only your solutions. Even if the nation falls.
Look at it from their point of view: if you’re a business owner, now you can’t rationally list your corporation. Your stock could be manipulated; your business could be bankrupted for no reason at all. We’ve seen the NYSE shrink as businesses start to list in more honest jurisdictions, and even Presidents can’t convince them to come back. Traders and Fund Managers retire in public interviews, telling the world there is no longer any sense or price discovery, and therefore there is market madness.
Yet we just said that to clean up the market would discover 10%, 20%, 40% fake shares, fake business values, fake pension values, therefore fake GDP values, and fake GDP to Debt ratios, and therefore would perhaps lead to an accurate Debt to GDP of 140%, which would crash the U.S. dollar and possibly the nation. Would a complete U.S. financial collapse lead to a nuclear war? And it all goes back to fraud we didn’t stop 20 years ago. How do you solve the problem? The only way out without collapse is to build an honest system parallel to the existing system and slowly transfer assets from the rotten, sinking ship to the new one. The captains of the old ship may not like it, but look at the incentives. No one can tolerate the old ship except the pirate captain; even the crew, the stock traders, don’t want or control it any more.
However, what if you created an honest stock market Blockchain that actually had the stock certificates and actually transferred them, cheaply and reliably without false duplication? This is what is happening in the Jamaican Stock Market. A new company can choose to list on the stock Blockchain and avoid the old system. Other companies or even the whole exchange can clean up the books, slowly, stock by stock, and move it to the new honest system. Because they’re honest? No way! No one cares about truth or honesty, clearly. Because they can sell their stock exchange as superior, solving the existing problems. Stopping fraud, theft, the stealing or crippling of companies, fake voting, depression of Main Street and outsiders in favor of Wall Street and insiders, this is what Blockchain can do. In short, it would work better, cheaper.
What else can Blockchain do?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-09/crypto-cornucopia-part-4-without-it-youre-talking-mad-max
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
| 
