Naked, Short and Greedy

Rigged financial markets and hopeless under-regulation on Wall Street are not new problems. In this book, Susanne Trimbath gives a sobering account of naked short selling, the failure to settle, and her efforts over decades to get this fixed. Twenty-five years ago, Trimbath was working &;backstage at Wall Street&; when a group of corporate trust specialists told her about a problem in shareholder voting rights. When she went to senior management at Depository Trust Company (DTC), they brushed it off saying, &;You can&;t balance the world.&; Ten years later, a lawyer from Texas would tell her that the same problem was about to blow up the financial markets: Wall Street brokers are using short sales and fails to deliver to grab the assets of American entrepreneurs. This is a cautionary tale. What started as a regulatory failure turned into a regulatory crisis. Global financial markets may not survive what comes next.