BAThompson's post clued me in to this from Wilbur.
"In his rambling, disjointed diatribe back in 2005, where he made the
Sith Lord comments that he has since admitted he made up, he also made
a number of other false statements."
Let's see. Is that the long, rambling call where I said that:
1) The SEC had grown inappropriately close to Wall Street? (If so, I think this has been confirmed by
Gary Aguirre and a
Senate Judiciary Committee report );
2) The New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer was a corrupt hedge fund choagie? (If so, subsequent events have confirmed
the corruption, and I am waiting for anyone in the press to see the
“hedge fund choagie” implication of Spitzer’s favorite girl, Ashlee, living
rent-free in the summer home of Spitzer’s biggest hedgie donordonor, Jim Chanos);
3) Certain hedge funds had grown inappropriately close to certain
journalists of the financial press (which CNBC’s own Jim Cramer has since confirmed);
4) As a result of the indolence of the SEC, New York Attorney
General, and financial press, a circle of hedge funds were taking down
companies through:
Of course, there were some ancillary claims, such as that David Einhorn
shorted Allied, hired Kroll to investigate them, prepared a report that
he submitted to the feds, and worked the journalist crowd to shill on
his behalf, claims which were confirmed by none other than .... David
Einhorn, in his recent book. I think I pretty consistently claimed as
well that naked shorting could destabilize the system (as CEO's of Bear
and Lehman and the SEC Chairman all came out and confirmed this
quarter), but I'm not sure how much of that I actually put in that one
call. But all in all, I think that if my predictions had any higher a
batting average I'd have my own ashram someplace.
Incidentally, in retrospect that this is where the cover-up formally
began. All that the shills would report of my claims were that I was
mad that OSTK went down and something about a Sith Lord, even though
the former issue (OSTK trading) had been taken up for just a few
minutes at the start of the presentation, and the "Sith Lord" comment
was made in passing at the end. No surprise: that is all that the
shills would report on is what makes them shills. Incidentally, the
call took place on August 12, 2005. Curiously, as Judd has documented,
that is when a crowd of hedge find message board choagies descended
onto OSTK, and as another has documented (to be made public someday),
August 19 is when large married puts began to be generated in OSTK.
How utterly unexpected.
Patrick
