Can Turtles Fly?

Matt Levine of Bloomberg highlights how anyone can file anything on EDGAR , the SEC online report dissemination system (same thing probably can happen in other countries as well?). The person may still be criminally liable depending on what they file but that is after-the-fact, so one shouldn't blindly accept regulatory filings: The Securities and Exchange Commission's Edgar system for making securities filings is notoriously prone to hacking. "Hacking" maybe isn't the word; it's very low-tech. You submit an application to the SEC, have a notary stamp it, and get back your Edgar ID. Then you can just make whatever filings you want on Edgar. Want to say that you just bought Facebook Inc.? Sure, whatever, go right ahead, knock yourself out. Want to buy stock in a smallish public company, make an Edgar filing claiming that it's being taken over, and then sell your stock on the reaction to the fake news? Yeah that can sometimes work, though not as well as yo...

Various articles I encountered over the last few months that you may find interesting... (Recommended) " When Bankers Started Playing With Other People's Money " by William D. Cohan (The Atlantic, Feb 28 2017) --  (Except from Why Wall Street Matters by William D. Cohan) : When Wall Street investment banks became public: "On April 10, 1970, nearly a year after first filing its IPO prospectus with the SEC, DLJ pulled it off, raising $12 million from the public and as a result fundamentally altering how Wall Street has functioned ever since. “Going public changed Wall Street permanently and forever,” Richard Jenrette (the J in DLJ) told the Times. “If Wall Street had remained in a private mode, it would have acted like a club and been so vastly undercapitalized that someone would have taken it over long ago. There would have been no alternative but to have let the [commercial] banks take over”—something that the Glass-Steagall law, of course, had made illegal....