Showing posts with label options. Show all posts
Showing posts with label options. Show all posts
Friday, 16 February 2024
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Wednesday, 21 December 2022
Tuesday, 12 November 2013
Twitter IPO: why the wrong people ended up with the money
If you think the social media company's stockmarket flotation is an advert for starting your own hi-tech company, just look at what happened to the founders
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Photograph: Rex Features
Every time a Silicon Valley name goes to Wall Street and raises billions, you hear a creation myth. You heard it again last Thursday, as Twitter floated on the stock exchange.
It comes in many flavours, but the ur-myth runs thus: a young man with more ideas than dollars hides in his parents' garage, has a eureka moment and devises some new gadget or program that changes the world – or at least distracts swaths of its population. Then comes the glorious denouement, where our startup hero goes to the stock market and cashes in big. And that, dear reader, is why we have Bill Microsoft, Mark Facebook, and Larry and Sergey Google. The end.
This is capitalism's version of The X Factor.
In the X-Factor economies of Britain and America, you may no longer be able to count on a decent job, affordable home or moderate pension, but still you are offered visions of outlandish success – whether in singing (for the glamorous) or business (for the rest of us). Doctoral theses will some day be written on how, as the arteries of social mobility hardened, the BBC served up ever more versions of the minted entrepreneur: Dragons' Den, Gerry Robinson, The Apprentice. The assumptions are easy to tease out: collective bargaining may be dead, but heroic labour can still earn the individual a string of zeroes.
The story of Twitter, as told over the past few days, snaps perfectly into this bigger jigsaw. A band of T-shirted young men (tick), coding in a flat (tick), come up with a crazy new software application (tick), which soon becomes a global phenomenon. Within seven years is floated on the stock market at a value of $34.7bn – more than most of the companies in the S&P 500. Cue details about how the founders are now paper billionaires, the employees are sitting on options that will make some of them millionaires, and the entire San Francisco HQ celebrated with an "overflowing tower of doughnuts" (tick, tick, tick).
Except the more you look at what has actually happened with Twitter, the more it comes to look like the opposite of the heroic earnings of a few hard-workers. Many of the billions will go to a select group, many of whom have put hardly any work into the company or taken comparatively little risk. That is true of the stock market flotation, of Twitter itself and of its entire business model.
Let's start with what happened last Thursday, when Twitter went to the stock market. On the first day of trading, the company's shares soared 73% – implying that they had been sold for over a billion dollars below what they could have got. By way of comparison, shares in Royal Mail jumped over 40% on opening, forcing Vince Cable to do some explaining.
Yawning gaps between offer price and true value are hardly unusual in flotations: they're often referred to as "leaving cash on the table" – the cash being for the investment banks managing the sale and their mates at other banks and funds who buy some of the shares. If an estate agent asked you to sell your house for £100,000 less than it was really worth, so that they could offer it around their mates in the building trade, you'd probably be straight on the phone to Watchdog. Yet when it comes to flotations, I am still waiting for the BBC report that notes how much the bankers scooped alongside the founders.
Let's also look at the company's story. I spent my weekend reading Hatching Twitter, by Nick Bilton, a biography of the business based on hundreds of hours of interviews with key participants. One of Bilton's achievements is to show how the credit for the idea can be split several ways. First, Jack Dorsey floated the notion of updating friends on one's whereabouts, while Noah Glass championed it and gave the application its name, then Biz Stone was asked to help with building the program by a still-reluctant Evan Williams. Yahoo! tells the minnow team that it's "simply just a messaging service" and a "few engineers could do the same thing in a week".
Look at which of the Twitter team did best from the flotation and the answer is: Evan Williams, who, in Bilton's telling, initially had least to do with the program, and Jack Dorsey. Those two are now worth over a billion dollars apiece. But the other members of the fab four are not even listed as major recipients of company stock. Who is? Typically, finance guys who took big stakes in the business when they could see how it might pay off.
And none of the founders are now anywhere near managing the company: within a few years of it getting off the ground, they'd all been cleared out for managers from big business. I'm not playing a violin for the four founders; but Twitter is hardly an advertisement for the rewards of starting up your own company.
Finally, look at Twitter's business. Or rather, look at its own assessment of its business, as stated in its S-1 stockmarket filing. Early on comes the delicious admission: "Our success depends on our ability to provide users of our products and services with valuable content, which in turn depends on the content contributed by our users." Read that again: Twitter is in the business of selling us to us – our news and views and idle banter. Without those, without us, it is nothing. As with Facebook and Tumblr and all the other social media, we're also part of Twitter's workforce. But I bet you haven't seen any stock options, either.
Wednesday, 9 January 2013
Saturday, 28 April 2012
The maths formula linked to the financial crash
Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash
It's
not every day that someone writes down an equation that ends up
changing the world. But it does happen sometimes, and the world doesn't
always change for the better. It has been argued that one formula known
as Black-Scholes, along with its descendants, helped to blow up the
financial world.
Black-Scholes was first written down in the early 1970s but
its story starts earlier than that, in the Dojima Rice Exchange in 17th
Century Japan where futures contracts were written for rice traders. A
simple futures contract says that I will agree to buy rice from you in
one year's time, at a price that we agree right now. By the 20th Century the Chicago Board of Trade was providing a marketplace for traders to deal not only in futures but in options contracts. An example of an option is a contract where we agree that I can buy rice from you at any time over the next year, at a price that we agree right now - but I don't have to if I don't want to.
You can imagine why this kind of contract might be useful. If I am running a big chain of hamburger restaurants, but I don't know how much beef I'll need to buy next year, and I am nervous that the price of beef might rise, well - all I need is to buy some options on beef.
But then that leads to a very ticklish problem. How much should I be paying for those beef options? What are they worth? And that's where this world-changing equation, the Black-Scholes formula, can help.
"The problem it's trying to solve is to define the value of the right, but not the obligation, to buy a particular asset at a specified price, within or at the end of a specified time period," says Professor Myron Scholes, professor of finance at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and - of course - co-inventor of the Black-Scholes formula.
The young Scholes was fascinated by finance. As a teenager, he persuaded his mother to set up an account so that he could trade on the stock market. One of the amazing things about Scholes is that throughout his time as an undergraduate and then a doctoral student, he was half-blind. And so, he says, he got very good at listening and at thinking.
When he was 26, an operation largely restored his sight. The next year, he became an assistant professor at MIT, and it was there that he stumbled upon the option-pricing puzzle.
One part of the puzzle was this question of risk: the value of an option to buy beef at a price of - say - $2 (£1.23) a kilogram presumably depends on what the price of beef is, and how the price of beef is moving around.
But the connection between the price of beef and the value of the beef option doesn't vary in a straightforward way - it depends how likely the option is to actually be used. That in turn depends on the option price and the beef price. All the variables seem to be tangled up in an impenetrable way.
Scholes worked on the problem with his colleague, Fischer Black, and figured out that if I own just the right portfolio of beef, plus options to buy and sell beef, I have a delicious and totally risk-free portfolio. Since I already know the price of beef and the price of risk-free assets, by looking at the difference between them I can work out the price of these beef options. That's the basic idea. The details are hugely complicated.
"It might have taken us a year, a year and a half to be able to solve and get the simple Black-Scholes formula," says Scholes. "But we had the actual underlying dynamics way before."
The Black-Scholes method turned out to be a way not only to calculate value of options but all kinds of other financial assets. "We were like kids in a candy story in the sense that we described options everywhere, options were embedded in everything that we did in life," says Scholes.
But Black and Scholes weren't the only
kids in the candy store, says Ian Stewart, whose book argues that
Black-Scholes was a dangerous invention.
"What the equation did was give everyone the confidence to trade options and very quickly, much more complicated financial options known as derivatives," he says.
Scholes thought his equation would be useful. He didn't expect it to transform the face of finance. But it quickly became obvious that it would.
"About the time we had published this article, that's 1973, simultaneously or approximately a month thereafter, the Chicago Board Options Exchange started to trade call options on 16 stocks," he recalls.
Scholes had just moved to the University of Chicago. He and his colleagues had already been teaching the Black-Scholes formula and methodology to students for several years.
"There were many young traders who either had taken courses at MIT or Chicago in using the option pricing technology. On the other hand, there was a group of traders who had only intuition and previous experience. And in a very short period of time, the intuitive players were essentially eliminated by the more systematic players who had this pricing technology."
That was just the beginning.
"By 2007 the trade in derivatives worldwide was one quadrillion (thousand million million) US dollars - this is 10 times the total production of goods on the planet over its entire history," says Stewart. "OK, we're talking about the totals in a two-way trade, people are buying and people are selling and you're adding it all up as if it doesn't cancel out, but it was a huge trade."
The Black-Scholes formula had passed the market test. But as banks and hedge funds relied more and more on their equations, they became more and more vulnerable to mistakes or over-simplifications in the mathematics.
"The equation is based on the idea that big movements are actually very, very rare. The problem is that real markets have these big changes much more often that this model predicts," says Stewart. "And the other problem is that everyone's following the same mathematical principles, so they're all going to get the same answer."
Now these were known problems. What was not clear was whether the problems were small enough to ignore, or well enough understood to fix. And then in the late 1990s, two remarkable things happened.
"The inventors got the Nobel Prize for Economics," says Stewart. "I would argue they thoroughly deserved to get it."
Fischer Black died young, in 1995.
When in 1997 Scholes won the Nobel memorial prize, he shared it not with
Black but with Robert Merton, another option-pricing expert.
Scholes' work had inspired a generation of mathematical wizards on Wall Street, and by this stage both he and Merton were players in the world of finance, as partners of a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management.
"The whole idea of this company was that it was going to base its trading on mathematical principles such as the Black-Scholes equation. And it actually was amazingly successful to begin with," says Stewart. "It was outperforming the traditional companies quite noticeably and everything looked great."
But it didn't end well. Long-Term Capital Management ran into, among other things, the Russian financial crisis. The firm lost $4bn (£2.5bn) in the course of six weeks. It was bailed out by a consortium of banks which had been assembled by the Federal Reserve. And - at the time - it was a very big story indeed. This was all happening in August and September of 1998, less than a year after Scholes had been awarded his Nobel prize.
Stewart says the lessons from Long-Term Capital Management were obvious. "It showed the danger of this kind of algorithmically-based trading if you don't keep an eye on some of the indicators that the more conventional people would use," he says. "They [Long-Term Capital Management] were committed, pretty much, to just ploughing ahead with the system they had. And it went wrong."
Scholes says that's not what happened at all. "It had nothing to do with equations and nothing to do with models," he says. "I was not running the firm, let me be very clear about that. There was not an ability to withstand the shock that occurred in the market in the summer and fall of late 1998. So it was just a matter of risk-taking. It wasn't a matter of modelling."
This is something people were still arguing about a decade later. Was the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management an indictment of mathematical approaches to finance or, as Scholes says, was it simply a case of traders taking too much risk against the better judgement of the mathematical experts?
Ten years after the Long-Term Capital Management bail-out, Lehman Brothers collapsed. And the debate over Black-Scholes and LTCM is now a broader debate over the role of mathematical equations in finance.
Ian Stewart claims that the Black-Scholes equation changed the world. Does he really believe that mathematics caused the financial crisis?
"It was abuse of their equation that caused trouble, and I don't think you can blame the inventors of an equation if somebody else comes along and uses it badly," he says.
"And it wasn't just that equation. It
was a whole generation of other mathematical models and all sorts of
other techniques that followed on its heels. But it was one of the major
discoveries that opened the door to all this."
Black-Scholes changed the culture of Wall Street, from a place where people traded based on common sense, experience and intuition, to a place where the computer said yes or no.
But is it really fair to blame Black-Scholes for what followed it? "The Black-Scholes technology has very specific rules and requirements," says Scholes. "That technology attracted or caused investment banks to hire people who had quantitative or mathematical skills. I accept that. They then developed products or technologies of their own."
Not all of those subsequent technologies, says Scholes, were good enough. "[Some] had assumptions that were wrong, or they used data incorrectly to calibrate their models, or people who used [the] models didn't know how to use them."
Scholes argues there is no going back. "The fundamental issue is that quantitative technologies in finance will survive, and will grow, and will continue to evolve over time," he says.
But for Ian Stewart, the story of Black-Scholes - and of Long-Term Capital Management - is a kind of morality tale. "It's very tempting to see the financial crisis and various things which led up to it as sort of the classic Greek tragedy of hubris begets nemesis," he says.
"You try to fly, you fly too close to the sun, the wax holding your wings on melts and you fall down to the ground. My personal view is that it's not just tempting to do that but there is actually a certain amount of truth in that way of thinking. I think the bankers' hubris did indeed beget nemesis. But the big problem is that it wasn't the bankers on whom the nemesis descended - it was the rest of us."
Additional reporting by Richard Knight
Wednesday, 21 March 2012
Insider trading 9/11 ... the facts laid bare
AN ASIA TIMES
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE INVESTIGATION
By Lars Schall
Is there any truth in the allegations that informed circles made substantial profits in the financial markets in connection to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States?
Arguably, the best place to start is by examining put options, which occurred around Tuesday, September 11, 2001, to an abnormal extent, and at the beginning via software that played a key role: the Prosecutor's Management Information System, abbreviated as PROMIS. [i]
PROMIS is a software program that seems to be fitted with almost "magical" abilities. Furthermore, it is the subject of a decades-long dispute between its inventor, Bill Hamilton, and various people/institutions associated with intelligence agencies, military and security consultancy firms. [1]
One of the "magical" capabilities of PROMIS, one has to assume, is that it is equipped with artificial intelligence and was apparently from the outset “able to simultaneously read and integrate any number of different computer programs or databases, regardless of the language in which the original programs had been written or the operating systems and platforms on which that database was then currently installed." [2]
And then it becomes really interesting:
This seems all the more urgent if you add to the PROMIS capabilities "that it was a given that PROMIS was used for a wide variety of purposes by intelligence agencies, including the real-time monitoring of stock transactions on all the world´s major financial markets". [4]
We are therefore dealing with a software that
a) Infiltrates computer and communication systems without being noticed.
b) Can manipulate data.
c) Is capable to track the global stock market trade in real time.
Point c is relevant to all that happened in connection with the never completely cleared up transactions that occurred just before September 11, [5] and of which the former chairman of the Deutsche Bundesbank Ernst Weltke said "could not have been planned and carried out without a certain knowledge". [6]
I specifically asked financial journalist Max Keiser, who for years had worked on Wall Street as a stock and options trader, about the put option trades. Keiser pointed out in this context that he "had spoken with many brokers in the towers of the World Trade Center around that time. I heard firsthand about the airline put trade from brokers at Cantor Fitzgerald days before." He then talked with me about an explosive issue, on which Ruppert elaborated in detail in Crossing the Rubicon.
On September 12, the chairman of the board of Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, Mayo A Shattuck III, suddenly and quietly renounced his post, although he still had a three-year contract with an annual salary of several million US dollars. One could perceive that as somehow strange.
A few weeks later, the press spokesperson of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at that time, Tom Crispell, declined all comments, when he was contacted for a report for Ruppert´s website From the Wilderness, and had being asked "whether the Treasury Department or FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] had questioned CIA executive director and former Deutsche Bank-Alex Brown CEO [chief executive officer], A B 'Buzzy' Krongard, about CIA monitoring of financial markets using PROMIS and his former position as overseer of Brown's 'private client' relations." [8]
Just before he was recruited personally by former CIA chief George Tenet for the CIA, Krongard supervised mainly private client banking at Alex Brown. [9]
In any case, after 9/11 on the first trading day, when the US stock markets were open again, the stock price of UAL declined by 43%. (The four aircraft hijacked on September 11 were American Airlines Flight 11, American Airlines Flight 77 and UAL flights 175 and 93.)
With his background as a former options trader, Keiser explained an important issue to me in that regard.
Open interest describes contracts which have not been settled (been exercised) by the end of the trading session, but are still open. Not hedged in the stock market means that the buyer of a (put or call) option holds no shares of the underlying asset, by which he might be able to mitigate or compensate losses if his trade doesn't work out, or phrased differently: one does not hedge, because it is unnecessary, since one knows that the bet is one, pardon, "dead sure thing." (In this respect it is thus not really a bet, because the result is not uncertain, but a foregone conclusion.)
In this case, the vehicle of the calculation was "ridiculously cheap put options which give the holder the ‘right' for a period of time to sell certain shares at a price which is far below the current market price - which is a highly risky bet, because you lose money if at maturity the market price is still higher than the price agreed in the option. However, when these shares fell much deeper after the terrorist attacks, these options multiplied their value several hundred times because by now the selling price specified in the option was much higher than the market price. These risky games with short options are a sure indication for investors who knew that within a few days something would happen that would drastically reduce the market price of those shares." [11]
Software such as PROMIS in turn is used with the precise intent to monitor the stock markets in real time to track price movements that appear suspicious. Therefore, the US intelligence services must have received clear warnings from the singular, never before sighted transactions prior to 9/11.
Of great importance with regard to the track, which should lead to the perpetrators if you were seriously contemplating to go after them, is this:
In addition, there are also ways and means for insiders to veil their tracks. In order to be less obvious, "the insiders could trade small numbers of contracts. These could be traded under multiple accounts to avoid drawing attention to large trading volumes going through one single large account. They could also trade small volumes in each contract but trade more contracts to avoid drawing attention. As open interest increases, non-insiders may detect a perceived signal and increase their trading activity. Insiders can then come back to enter into more transactions based on a seemingly significant trade signal from the market. In this regard, it would be difficult for the CBOE to ferret out the insiders from the non-insiders, because both are trading heavily." [13]
The matter which needs clarification here is generally judged by Keiser as follows:
So far, so good. In the same month, however, the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper reported that the SEC took the unprecedented step to deputize hundreds, if not even thousands of key stakeholders in the private sector for their investigation. In a statement that was sent to almost all listed companies in the US, the SEC asked the addressed companies to assign senior staff for the investigation, who would be aware of "the sensitive nature" of the case and could be relied on to "exercise appropriate discretion". [15]
In essence, it was about controlling information, not about provision and disclosure of facts. Such a course of action involves compromising consequences. Ruppert:
By Lars Schall
Is there any truth in the allegations that informed circles made substantial profits in the financial markets in connection to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, on the United States?
Arguably, the best place to start is by examining put options, which occurred around Tuesday, September 11, 2001, to an abnormal extent, and at the beginning via software that played a key role: the Prosecutor's Management Information System, abbreviated as PROMIS. [i]
PROMIS is a software program that seems to be fitted with almost "magical" abilities. Furthermore, it is the subject of a decades-long dispute between its inventor, Bill Hamilton, and various people/institutions associated with intelligence agencies, military and security consultancy firms. [1]
One of the "magical" capabilities of PROMIS, one has to assume, is that it is equipped with artificial intelligence and was apparently from the outset “able to simultaneously read and integrate any number of different computer programs or databases, regardless of the language in which the original programs had been written or the operating systems and platforms on which that database was then currently installed." [2]
And then it becomes really interesting:
What would you do if you possessed software that could think, understand every major language in the world, that provided peep-holes into everyone else’s computer "dressing rooms", that could insert data into computers without people’s knowledge, that could fill in blanks beyond human reasoning, and also predict what people do - before they did it? You would probably use it, wouldn't you? [3]Granted, these capabilities sound hardly believable. In fact, the whole story of PROMIS, which Mike Ruppert develops in the course of his book Crossing the Rubicon in all its bizarre facets and turns, seems as if someone had developed a novel in the style of Philip K Dick and William Gibson. However, what Ruppert has collected about PROMIS is based on reputable sources as well as on results of personal investigations, which await a jury to take a first critical look at.
This seems all the more urgent if you add to the PROMIS capabilities "that it was a given that PROMIS was used for a wide variety of purposes by intelligence agencies, including the real-time monitoring of stock transactions on all the world´s major financial markets". [4]
We are therefore dealing with a software that
a) Infiltrates computer and communication systems without being noticed.
b) Can manipulate data.
c) Is capable to track the global stock market trade in real time.
Point c is relevant to all that happened in connection with the never completely cleared up transactions that occurred just before September 11, [5] and of which the former chairman of the Deutsche Bundesbank Ernst Weltke said "could not have been planned and carried out without a certain knowledge". [6]
I specifically asked financial journalist Max Keiser, who for years had worked on Wall Street as a stock and options trader, about the put option trades. Keiser pointed out in this context that he "had spoken with many brokers in the towers of the World Trade Center around that time. I heard firsthand about the airline put trade from brokers at Cantor Fitzgerald days before." He then talked with me about an explosive issue, on which Ruppert elaborated in detail in Crossing the Rubicon.
Max Keiser: There are many aspects concerning these option purchases that have not been disclosed yet. I also worked at Alex Brown & Sons (ABS). Deutsche Bank bought Alex Brown & Sons in 1999. When the attacks occurred, ABS was owned by Deutsche Bank. An important person at ABS was Buzzy Krongard. I have met him several times at the offices in Baltimore. Krongard had transferred to become executive director at the CIA. The option purchases, in which ABS was involved, occurred in the offices of ABS in Baltimore. The noise which occurred between Baltimore, New York City and Langley was interesting, as you can imagine, to say the least.Under consideration here is the fact that Alex Brown, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank (where many of the alleged 9/11 hijackers handled their banking transactions - for example Mohammed Atta) traded massive put options purchases on United Airlines Company UAL through the Chicago Board Option Exchange (CBOE) - "to the embarrassment of investigators", as British newspaper The Independent reported. [7]
On September 12, the chairman of the board of Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, Mayo A Shattuck III, suddenly and quietly renounced his post, although he still had a three-year contract with an annual salary of several million US dollars. One could perceive that as somehow strange.
A few weeks later, the press spokesperson of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at that time, Tom Crispell, declined all comments, when he was contacted for a report for Ruppert´s website From the Wilderness, and had being asked "whether the Treasury Department or FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] had questioned CIA executive director and former Deutsche Bank-Alex Brown CEO [chief executive officer], A B 'Buzzy' Krongard, about CIA monitoring of financial markets using PROMIS and his former position as overseer of Brown's 'private client' relations." [8]
Just before he was recruited personally by former CIA chief George Tenet for the CIA, Krongard supervised mainly private client banking at Alex Brown. [9]
In any case, after 9/11 on the first trading day, when the US stock markets were open again, the stock price of UAL declined by 43%. (The four aircraft hijacked on September 11 were American Airlines Flight 11, American Airlines Flight 77 and UAL flights 175 and 93.)
With his background as a former options trader, Keiser explained an important issue to me in that regard.
Max Keiser: Put options are, if they are employed in a speculative trade, basically bets that stock prices will drop abruptly. The purchaser, who enters a time-specific contract with a seller, does not have to own the stock at the time when the contract is purchased.Related to the issue of insider trading via (put or call) options there is also a noteworthy definition by the Swiss economists Remo Crameri, Marc Chesney and Loriano Mancini, notably that an option trade may be "identified as informed" - but is not yet (legally) proven - "when it is characterized by an unusual large increment in open interest and volume, induces large gains, and is not hedged in the stock market". [10]
Open interest describes contracts which have not been settled (been exercised) by the end of the trading session, but are still open. Not hedged in the stock market means that the buyer of a (put or call) option holds no shares of the underlying asset, by which he might be able to mitigate or compensate losses if his trade doesn't work out, or phrased differently: one does not hedge, because it is unnecessary, since one knows that the bet is one, pardon, "dead sure thing." (In this respect it is thus not really a bet, because the result is not uncertain, but a foregone conclusion.)
In this case, the vehicle of the calculation was "ridiculously cheap put options which give the holder the ‘right' for a period of time to sell certain shares at a price which is far below the current market price - which is a highly risky bet, because you lose money if at maturity the market price is still higher than the price agreed in the option. However, when these shares fell much deeper after the terrorist attacks, these options multiplied their value several hundred times because by now the selling price specified in the option was much higher than the market price. These risky games with short options are a sure indication for investors who knew that within a few days something would happen that would drastically reduce the market price of those shares." [11]
Software such as PROMIS in turn is used with the precise intent to monitor the stock markets in real time to track price movements that appear suspicious. Therefore, the US intelligence services must have received clear warnings from the singular, never before sighted transactions prior to 9/11.
Of great importance with regard to the track, which should lead to the perpetrators if you were seriously contemplating to go after them, is this:
Max Keiser: The Options Clearing Corporation has a duty to handle the transactions, and does so rather anonymously - whereas the bank that executes the transaction as a broker can determine the identity of both parties.But that may have hardly ever been the intention of the regulatory authorities when the track led to, amongst others, Alvin Bernard "Buzzy" Krongard, Alex Brown & Sons and the CIA. Ruppert, however, describes this case in Crossing the Rubicon in full length as far as possible. [12]
In addition, there are also ways and means for insiders to veil their tracks. In order to be less obvious, "the insiders could trade small numbers of contracts. These could be traded under multiple accounts to avoid drawing attention to large trading volumes going through one single large account. They could also trade small volumes in each contract but trade more contracts to avoid drawing attention. As open interest increases, non-insiders may detect a perceived signal and increase their trading activity. Insiders can then come back to enter into more transactions based on a seemingly significant trade signal from the market. In this regard, it would be difficult for the CBOE to ferret out the insiders from the non-insiders, because both are trading heavily." [13]
The matter which needs clarification here is generally judged by Keiser as follows:
Max Keiser: My thought is that many (not all) of those who died on 9/11 were financial mercenaries - and we should feel the same about them as we feel about all mercenaries who get killed. The tragedy is that these companies mixed civilians with mercenaries, and that they were also killed. So have companies on Wall Street used civilians as human shields maybe?According to a report by Bloomberg published in early October 2001, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began a probe into certain stock market transactions around 9/11 that included 38 companies, among them: American Airlines, United Airlines, Continental Airlines, Northwest Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Boeing, Lockheed Martin Corp., American Express Corp., American International Group, AXA SA, Bank of America Corp., Bank of New York Corp., Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Morgan Stanley, General Motors and Raytheon. [14]
So far, so good. In the same month, however, the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper reported that the SEC took the unprecedented step to deputize hundreds, if not even thousands of key stakeholders in the private sector for their investigation. In a statement that was sent to almost all listed companies in the US, the SEC asked the addressed companies to assign senior staff for the investigation, who would be aware of "the sensitive nature" of the case and could be relied on to "exercise appropriate discretion". [15]
In essence, it was about controlling information, not about provision and disclosure of facts. Such a course of action involves compromising consequences. Ruppert:
What happens when you deputize someone in a national security or criminal investigation is that you make it illegal for them to disclose publicly what they know. Smart move. In effect, they become government agents and are controlled by government regulations rather than their own conscience. In fact, they can be thrown into jail without a hearing if they talk publicly. I have seen this implied threat time after time with federal investigators, intelligence agents, and even members of United States Congress who are bound so tightly by secrecy oaths and agreements that they are not even able to disclose criminal activities inside the government for fear of incarceration. [16]Among the reports about suspected insider trading which are mentioned in Crossing the Rubicon/From the Wilderness is a list that was published under the heading "Black Tuesday: The World's Largest Insider Trading Scam?" by the Israeli Herzliyya International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism on September 21, 2001:
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Concerning the statements of the former chairman of the Deutsche Bundesbank Ernst Welteke, their tenor in various press reports put together is as follows: German central bank president Ernst Welteke later reports that a study by his bank indicates, "There are ever clearer signs that there were activities on international financial markets that must have been carried out with the necessary expert knowledge," not only in shares of heavily affected industries such as airlines and insurance companies, but also in gold and oil. [Daily Telegraph, 9/23/2001] His researchers have found "almost irrefutable proof of insider trading". [Miami Herald, 9/24/2001] "If you look at movements in markets before and after the attack, it makes your brow furrow. But it is extremely difficult to really verify it." Nevertheless, he believes that "in one or the other case it will be possible to pinpoint the source". [Fox News, 9/22/2001] Welteke reports "a fundamentally inexplicable rise" in oil prices before the attacks [Miami Herald, 9/24/2001] and then a further rise of 13 percent the day after the attacks. Gold rises nonstop for days after the attacks. [Daily Telegraph, 9/23/2001] [18]Related to those observations, I sent a request via e-mail to the press office of the Deutsche Bundesbank on August 1, 2011, from which I was hoping to learn: How did the Bundesbank deal with this information? Did US federal agencies ask to see the study? With whom did the Bundesbank share this information? And additionally: 1. Can you confirm that there is such a study of the Bundesbank concerning 9/11 insider trading, which was carried out in September 2001? 2. If Yes: what is the title? 3. If Yes: who were the authors? 4. If Yes: has the study ever been made available to the public? On August 2, I was then informed: "Your mail has been received by us and is being processed under the number 2011 / 011551." Ultimately, however, the press office of the Deutsche Bundesbank was only available for an oral explanation on the phone. With this explanation, I then turned to the press office of the federal financial regulator in Germany, the Bundesanstalt fur Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht, BaFin, with the following e-mail - and that because of obvious reasons: Yesterday, I sent a request (see end of this e-mail) to the press office of the Deutsche Bundesbank relating to insider trading connected to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and respectively relating to an alleged study carried by the Deutsche Bundesbank. The request carries the reference number 2011 / 011551.The next day I did indeed receive an e-mail concerning this topic from Anja Engelland, the press officer of the BaFin in which she answered my questions as follows: 1. Yes, the former Bundesaufsichtsamt fur Wertpapierhandel, BAWe (federal supervisory for securities trading), has carried out a comprehensive analysis of the operations.Then I wrote another brief note to BaFin, "in order to prevent any misunderstanding: your answers refers, as far as I understand, solely to the financial markets in Germany and Frankfurt, or not?" The reply from BaFin: The answers refer to the German financial market as a whole and not only on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. In terms of the assessment of foreign financial markets, the relevant authorities are the competent points of contact.In my inquiries, I mentioned, among other things, a scientific study by US economist Allen M Poteshman from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which had been carried out in 2006 regarding the put option trading around 9/11 related to the two airlines involved, United Airlines and American Airlines. Poteshman came to this conclusion: "Examination of the option trading leading up to September 11 reveals that there was an unusually high level of put buying. This finding is consistent with informed investors having traded options in advance of the attacks." [19] Motivated by the fact that there had been many media reports about possible insider trading prior to 9/11 in the option markets, the authors looked in this study at the Standard & Poor's 500 Index (SPX Index Options), in particular with a focus on strategies emanating from a bear market, namely those under the labels AN ASIA TIMES ONLINE EXCLUSIVE INVESTIGATION Insider trading 9/11 ... the facts laid bare By Lars Schall Another scientific study was conducted by the economists Wong Wing-Keung (Hong Kong Baptist University, HKBU), Howard E Thompson (University of Wisconsin) and Kweehong Teh (National University of Singapore, NUS), whose findings were published in April 2010 under the title "Was there Abnormal Trading in the S&P 500 Index Options Prior to the September 11 Attacks?" Motivated by the fact that there had been many media reports about possible insider trading prior to 9/11 in the option markets, the authors looked in this study at the Standard & Poor's 500 Index (SPX Index Options), in particular with a focus on strategies emanating from a bear market, namely those under the labels "Put Purchase," "Put Bear Spread" and "Naked ITM Call Write", as each of these are in accordance with the assumption that one would be betting on a general bear market if one wanted to profit in anticipation of the 9/11 event. [20] Along these lines, the authors refer to an article which Erin E Arvedlund published on October 8, 2001, in Barron's, the heading of which suggested precisely that thesis: "Follow the money: Terror plotters could have benefited more from the fall of the entire market than from individual stocks." [21] Basically, Wong, Thompson and Teh came to the conclusion "that our findings show that there was a significant abnormal increase in the trading volume in the option market just before the 9-11 attacks in contrast with the absence of abnormal trading volume far before the attacks". More specifically, they stated, "Our findings from the out-of-the-money (OTM), at-the-money (ATM) and in-the-money (ITM) SPX index put options and ITM SPX index call options lead us to reject the null hypotheses that there was no abnormal trading in these contracts before September 11th." Instead, they found evidence for "abnormal trading volume in OTM, ATM and ITM SPX index put options" for September 2001, and also in "ITM-SPX index call options" for the same month. "In addition, we find that there was evidence of abnormal trading in the September 2001 OTM, ATM and ITM SPX index put options immediately after the 9-11 attacks and before the expiration date. This suggests that owning a put was a valuable investment and those who owned them could sell them for a considerable profit before the expiration date." From all of this, they took the position that whilst they couldn't definitively prove that insiders were active in the market, "our results provide credible circumstantial evidence to support the insider trading claim". [22] Disambiguation: "in the money" means that the circumstances arise on which the owner of a put option is betting - the market price of the underlying asset, for example a stock (or in this case an index of shares), is lower at that moment compared to the price at the time when the transaction took place. "At the money" means that the price of the underlying asset has remained equal or nearly equal. And "out-of-the-money" means that the price of the underlying asset has gone up, so the opposite of what the owner of the put option was betting on took place. "In the money": win. "Out of the money": loss. There are also ITM, ATM and OTM options both for trading strategies with put and call options, depending on which kind of risk one would like to take. For example, according to Wong, Thomson and Teh, the "Put-Purchase Strategy" in the case of a downward movement of the underlying asset "is a cheaper alternative to short-selling of the underlying asset and it is the simplest way to profit when the price of the underlying asset is expected to decline". The use of the OTM put option compared to the ITM put option, however, offers "both higher reward and higher risk potentials (...) if the underlying asset falls substantially in price. However, should the underlying asset decline only moderately in price, the ITM put often proves to be the better choice (...) because of the relative price differential." That is why speculators would fare best, if they bought ITM put options, "unless the speculators would expect a very substantial decline in the price of the underlying asset." [23] After they calculated such strategies in the light of the available trading data in the CBOE relating to 9/11, the three economists ultimately do not accept a possible counter-argument that their results could be attributed to the fact that the stock markets were generally falling and that there had already been a negative market outlook. Finally they pointed out: "More conclusive evidence is needed to prove definitively that insiders were indeed active in the market. Although we have discredited the possibility of abnormal volume due to the declining market, such investigative work would still be a very involved exercise in view of the multitude of other confounding factors," such as confusing trading strategies, "intentionally employed by the insiders" in order to attract less attention. [24] That would be - and if only to invalidate these scientific results once and for all - primarily a task for the SEC, the FBI and other governmental authorities of the United States. However, we will have to wait for this in vain. I think that not less worthy of a mention is an article that the French financial magazine Les Echos published in September 2007 about a study conducted by two independent economics professors from the University of Zurich, Marc Chesney and Loriano Mancini. Journalist Marina Alcaraz summarized the content of the findings in Les Echos with these words and with these explanations by Professor Chesney, which I for the first time translated into German (and do now translate from French into English): "The atypical volumes, which are very rare for specific stocks lead to the suspicion of insider trading." Six years after the attacks on the World Trade Center this is the disturbing results of a recent study by Marc Chesney and Loriano Mancini, professors at the University of Zurich. The authors, one of them a specialist in derivative products, the other a specialist in econometrics, worked on the sales options that were used to speculate on the decline in the prices of 20 large American companies, particularly in the aerospace and financial sector.As Alcaraz continued to state for Les Echos, the study by Chesney/Mancini about possible insider trading related to the 9/11 attacks was not the first of its kind; but it was in sharp contrast to the findings of the US Securities and Exchange Commission SEC and the 9/11 Commission, since they classified the insider trading as negligible - the trades in question had no connection to 9/11 and had "consistently proved innocuous". Different in the assessment is also the scientific work that Chesney and Mancini had published together with Remo Crameri in April 2010 at the University of Zurich, "Detecting Informed Trading Activities in the option markets." In the segment that is dedicated to the terror attacks of 9/11, the three authors come to the conclusion, that there had been notable insider trading shortly before the terrorist attacks on September 11 that was based on prior knowledge. Without elaborating on the detailed explanation of the mathematical and statistical method, which the scientific trio applied during the examination of the put option transactions on the CBOE for the period between 1996 and 2006, I summarize some of their significant conclusions. "Companies like American Airlines, United Airlines, Boeing" - the latter company is a contractor of the two airlines as aircraft manufacturer - "and to a lesser extent, Delta Air Lines and KLM seem to have been targets for informed trading activities in the period leading up to the attacks. The number of new put options issued during that period is statistically high and the total gains realized by exercising these options amount to more than $16 million. These findings support the results by Poteshman (2006) who also reports unusual activities in the option market before the terrorist attacks." [26] In the banking sector, Chesney, Crameri and Mancini found five informed trading activities in connection to 9/11. "For example the number of new put options with underlying stock in Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch issued in the days before the terrorist attacks was at an unusually high level. The realized gains from such trading strategies are around $11 million." [27] For both areas, the aviation and the banking sector, the authors state that "in nearly all cases the hypothesis", that the put options were not hedged, "cannot be rejected". [28] Regarding the options traded on EUREX, one of the world's largest trading places for derivatives, which in 1998 resulted from the merger between the German and Swiss futures exchanges DTB and SOFFEX, Chesney, Mancini and Crameri focused on two reinsurance companies, which incurred costs in terms of billions of dollars in connection with the World Trade Center catastrophe: Munich Re and Swiss Re. On the basis of EUREX trading data provided by Deutsche Bank, the three scientists detected one informed option trade related to Munich Re, which occurred on August 30, 2001. The authors write: "The detected put option with underlying Munich Re matured at the end of September 2001 and had a strike of € 320 (the underlying asset was traded at € 300, 86 on August 30th). That option shows a large increment in open interest of 996 contracts (at 92.2% quintile of its two-year empirical distribution) on August 30th. Its price on that day was € 10, 22. ... On the day of the terrorist attacks, the underlying stock lost more than 15% (the closing price on September 10th was € 261, 88 and on September 11th € 220, 53) and the option price jumped to € 89, 56, corresponding to a return of 776% in eight trading days. ... The gains ... related to the exercise of the 996 new put options issued on August 30th correspond to more than 3.4 million." Similar is true, according to the authors, for one informed option trade on Swiss Re on August 20, 2001 with "a return of 4,050% in three trading weeks", or "more than € 8 million." [29] In a new version of their study that was published on September 7, 2011, the authors stuck to their findings from April 2010. They added the emphasis that in no way the profits gained with the put options to which they point could have been achieved due to sheer fortunate coincidence, but that in fact they were based on prior knowledge which had been exploited. [30] With those results in terms of what went on at the EUREX according to Chesney, Crameri and Mancini, I again addressed the BaFin, which had written to me that for the financial centers in Germany insider trading around 9/11 could be excluded, and asked: How does this go with your information that the federal supervisory for securities trading (BAWe) could in its comprehensive analysis not find evidence for insider trading? Do the authors, so to speak, see ghosts with no good reason?In addition, I stated: If it is true what Chesney, Crameri and Mancini write, or if you at the BaFin cannot (ad hoc) refute it, would this then cause the BaFin to thoroughly investigate the matter again? If the findings of Chesney, Crameri, and Mancini were true, this would constitute illegal transactions relating to a capital crime, which has no status of limitations, or not?In case that a need for clarification had arisen at the BaFin, I added Professor Chesney to my e-mail-inquiry in the "carbon copy" - address field, as because these were the results of his scientific work. The response that I received from BaFin employee Dominika Kula was as follows: As I already told you in my e-mail, the former federal supervisory for securities trading (BAWe) carried out a comprehensive analysis of the operations in 2001. As a result, no evidence of insider trading has been found. For clarification purposes, I wish to point out that violations of statutory provisions of securities or criminal law can never be excluded with absolute certainty. In order to pursue and prosecute such matters concrete evidence of an unlawful act is required ... Such evidence does not exist here.In addition, I turned to the EUREX with three questions: 1. How do you as EUREX comment on the findings of Messrs Chesney, Mancini and Crameri? 2. Did you at EUREX perceive the particular trading in Munich Re and Swiss Re it in any way as strange? 3. Have domestic (eg BAWe and BaFin) or foreign (such as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) authorities ever inquired if there may have been evidence of insider trading via the EUREX in connection with the 9/11 attacks? I subsequently received the following response from Heiner Seidel, the deputy head of the press office of the Deutsche Borse in Frankfurt. We do not give you a public written response on behalf of the Deutsche Börse or Eurex regarding the topics of your inquiry. This is for the following reason: the trade monitoring agency (HüSt) is part of the Exchange, but it is independent and autonomous. Their investigations are confidential and are carried out in close coordination with the BaFin. They are never public, a request which HüSt is therefore not meaningful.I leave it to the reader to draw his/her conclusions from these two replies from the press offices of BaFin and Deutsche Borse. Regarding the topic of option trades related to 9/11, I once more talked with Swiss historian Dr Daniele Ganser ("Operation Gladio"), by asking him this time about the importance of those put options, which were traded shortly before the attacks of September 11, 2001. Daniele Ganser: This is an important point. This is about demonstrating that there was insider trading on the international stock exchanges before 11 September. Specifically put options, ie speculation on falling stock prices were traded. Among the affected stocks were United Airlines and American Airlines, the two airlines involved in the attacks.Interestingly enough, when Dr Ganser points out in his reply that this important data is not published, it is actually only half of the truth. Why? The answer is very simple and odd at the same time: David Callahan, the editor of the US magazine SmartCEO, filed a request to the SEC about the put options which occurred prior to September 11 within the framework of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The SEC informed Callahan in its reply of December 23, 2009 under the number "09 07659-FOIA" as follows: This letter is in response to your request seeking access to and copies of the documentary evidence referred to in footnote 130 of Chapter 5 of the September 11 (9/11) Commission Report... We have been advised that the potentially responsive records have been destroyed. [32]Therefore, we will unfortunately never know exactly how the SEC and the 9/11 Commission came to their conclusions regarding the 9/11 put options trading for their final report, because relevant documents were not only held back, but also destroyed - and that in spite of an agreement between the SEC and the National Archive of the United States, in which the SEC has agreed to keep all records for at least 25 years. [33] Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9 / 11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options - investments that pay off only when a stock drops in price - surged in the parent companies of United Airlines on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10 - highly suspicious trading on its face.The author Mark H Gaffney commented on this finding of Notice ... the commission makes no mention in its footnote of the 36 other companies identified by the SEC in its insider trading probe. What about the pre-9/11 surge in call options for Raytheon, for instance, or the spike in put options for the behemoth Morgan Stanley, which had offices in WTC 2? The 9/11 Commission Report offers not one word of explanation about any of this. The truth, we must conclude, is to be found between the lines in the report's conspicuous avoidance of the lion's share of the insider trading issue.For this translation, I asked Kevin Ryan via e-mail if he could send me a link for his "nice detective work". Ryan, who's in my humble opinion one of roughly 10 people around the world who have to be taken seriously regarding 9/11, replied: You are referring to my paper "Evidence for Informed Trading on the Attacks of September 11." [See here.] The following two references from the paper are relevant to what you are describing. [2] 9/11 Commission memorandum entitled "FBI Briefing on Trading", prepared by Doug Greenburg, 18 August 2003, [22].It is also remarkable what Ryan wrote to me regarding a company on which he did some research, too: Viisage Corp, another high-tech security firm. Kevin Ryan: In late 2005, George Tenet became a director for Viisage, which had been flagged by the SEC for 9/11 trading but never investigated. Viisage was led by Roger LaPenta, formerly of Lockheed.Freeh is nowadays the bankruptcy trustee of the alleged market manipulator MF Global. And about his client, the former Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, I should add that we know for sure that he bankrolled indirectly via his wife two of the alleged would-be 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi. [35] But let's get back to the subject of destruction. On September 11, not only human life, aircraft and buildings were destroyed in New York City, but also data on computers and in archives. For example, several federal agencies occupied space in Building 7 of the World Trade Center, including the Securities and Exchange Commission on floors 11 to 13. Those and other data could have given information about the alleged 9/11 insider trading (though it seems to be very unlikely that no backup existed elsewhere independent of the local computer systems). In fact, some technology companies were commissioned to recover damaged hard disks, which had been recovered from the debris and dust of Ground Zero. One of these companies was the English company group Convar, more precisely: their data rescue center in the German city Pirmasens. Erik Kirschbaum from the news agency Reuters reported in December 2001 that Convar had at that time successfully restored information from 32 computers, supporting "suspicions that some of the 911 transactions were illegal". 'The suspicion is that inside information about the attack was used to send financial transaction commands and authorizations in the belief that amid all the chaos the criminals would have, at the very least, a good head start,' says Convar director Peter Henschel." [36] Convar received the costly orders - according to Kirschbaum´s report the companies had to pay between $20,000 and $30,000 per rescued computer - in particular from credit card companies, because: "There was a sharp rise in credit card transactions moving through some computer systems at the WTC shortly before the planes hit the twin towers. This could be a criminal enterprise - in which case, did they get advance warning? Or was it only a coincidence that more than $100 million was rushed through the computers as the disaster unfolded?" [37] The companies for which Convar was active cooperated with the FBI. If the data were reconstructed they should have been passed on to the FBI, and the FBI, according to its statutory mandate, should have initiated further investigation based on the data to find out who carried out these transactions. Henschel was optimistic at the time that the sources for the transactions would come to light. Richard Wagner, a Convar employee, told Kirschbaum that "illegal transfers of more than $100 million might have been made immediately before and during the disaster. 'There is a suspicion that some people had advance knowledge of the approximate time of the plane crashes in order to move out amounts exceeding $100 million,' he says. 'They thought that the records of their transactions could not be traced after the main frames were destroyed'." [38] Wagner's observation that there had been "illegal financial transactions shortly before and during the WTC disaster" matches an observation which Ruppert describes in Crossing the Rubicon. Ruppert was contacted by an employee of Deutsche Bank, who survived the WTC disaster by leaving the scene when the second aircraft had hit its target. According to the employee, about five minutes before the attack the entire Deutsche Bank computer system had been taken over by something external that no one in the office recognized and every file was downloaded at lightning speed to an unknown location. The employee, afraid for his life, lost many of his friends on September 11, and he was well aware of the role which the Deutsche Bank subsidiary Alex Brown had played in insider trading. [39]I was curious and wanted more information from Convar regarding their work on the WTC-computer hard drives, but also about the statements made by Peter Henschel and Richard Wagner. Thus, I contacted the agency which represents Convar for press matters, with a written request. But their agency "ars publicandi" informed me swiftly: Due to time constraints, we can currently offer you neither information nor anyone on the part of our client to talk to regarding this requested topic.I also approached KrollOntrack, a very interesting competitor of Convar in writing. Ontrack Data Recovery, which also has subsidiaries in Germany, was purchased in 2002 by Kroll Inc - "one of the nation's most powerful private investigative and security firms, which has long-standing involvement with executive protection US government officials including the president. This would require close liaison with the Secret Service." [40] At the time of the 9/11 attacks, a certain Jerome Hauer was one of the managing directors at Kroll Inc. He had previously established the crisis center for the mayor of New York City as director of the Office of Emergency Management (OEM), which occupied office space on the 23rd floor of the WTC Building 7. Hauer helped former FBI agent John O'Neill to get the post of the head of Security Affairs at the WTC, and spent the night of September 11 with O'Neill in New York before the latter lost his life on September 11 in the WTC. Hauer was most likely involved in the planning of "Tripod II", the war game exercise at the port of New York City. [41] Therefore, I found it appealing to uncover some more details of this aspect, or, more accurately to find out if Ontrack or KrollOntrack had received an order in 2001 or after to rescue computer hard drives from the WTC. The answer I received from KrollOntrack said: Kroll Ontrack was not at the site of the data recovery - the devices at the Twin Towers have been completely destroyed or vaporized. The firm Kroll was, however, at that time active in the field of computer-forensic investigations, securing devices in the surrounding buildings.In essence, these two inquiries did not help me at all. If anything, a further question arose: why did KrollOntrack send me a response, where it was really obvious that the content did not match the facts? After all, I had written in my inquiry that Convar had received orders to restore damaged computer hard drives from the World Trade Center. I sent a new inquiry, attaching a link for Erik Kirschbaum's Reuters article and additional cinematic reports on Convar's which showed that some of the WTC disks had not been "completely destroyed or vaporized". I stated to KrollOntrack: "Your answer does not seem to match the facts, when it comes to 'completely destroyed or vaporized'. Will you still stick to your answer?" KrollOntrack then replied that their previously given assessment constituted "not a statement, but an opinion". I do not find this assessment worthless, because it is in line with the knowledge of the general public and can easily be refuted in argumentum in contrario by Convar´s activities. One film report to which I referred to in my second inquiry to KrollOntrack originated from the German television journal Heute-Journal broadcast on March 11, 2002, on ZDF, and the other from the Dutch TV documentary Zembla, broadcast on September 10, 2006. The ZDF report showed that Convar received the WTC disks from the US Department of Defense and that Convar had managed until March 2002 to recover more than 400 hard drives. It also reported that the private companies that employed Convar had paid between $25,000 and $50,000 per hard drive. In the TV documentary Zembla, Convar essentially maintained its position as it had been reported by Erik Kirschbaum in 2001. Obviously, in connection with 9/11 there has not only been insider trading via put options, but there is additional evidence that there have been illegal financial transactions via credit cards through which more than 100 million US dollars were removed from the WTC computer systems. Those occurred shortly before and during the WTC disaster. It remains unclear what the FBI did later on with the data recovered by Convar. On the other hand, it may have been not very much, as can be seen from a memorandum from the 9/11 Commission, which was released in May 2009. The 9/11 Commission asked the FBI about the use of credit cards for insider dealing. On the basis of the information provided by the FBI, the commission came to the conclusion that no such activity occurred because "the assembled agents expressed no knowledge of the reported hard-drive recovery effort or the alleged scheme" - but above all "everything at the WTC was pulverized to near powder, making it extremely unlikely that any hard-drives survived". [42] The activities of Convar, however, prove the exact opposite. But it gets even better. According to Zembla, the FBI was directly involved with the data rescue efforts of Convar. And on top of it, the broadcast of Heute-Journal reported that Convar worked in that "highly sensitive" matter with several federal agencies of the United States government. So there have been ample indications for insider trading based on foreknowledge of the attacks, but there are very few hard facts as Catherine Austin Fitts, a former managing director and member of the board of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co, Inc (now part of UBS), pointed out when I talked with her about this topic. Ms Fitts, what are your general thoughts related to the alleged 9/11-insider trading?Fitts, who had written a longer essay in 2004 related to this, replied to my question about who had benefited from 9/11: Catherine Austin Fitts: 9/11 was extraordinarily profitable for Wall Street, they of course got a kind of "Get Out of Jail Free card" as I've just described. In addition, the largest broker of government bonds, Cantor Fitzgerald, was destroyed, and there was a great deal of money missing from the federal government in the prior four or five years. If you look at the amount of funds involved, it is hard to come to a conclusion other than massive securities fraud was involved, so I find it very interesting that this happened. [44]A short explanation: Cantor Fitzgerald's headquarters were located in the North Tower of the WTC (floors 101-105). On 9/11, the company lost nearly two-thirds of its entire workforce, more than any other tenant in the WTC. (Also two other government bonds brokers, Garbon Inter Capital and Eurobrokers, occupied office space in the WTC towers that were destroyed.) Back to Fitts and the question: "Cui bono 9/11?" Catherine Austin Fitts: In addition, the federal government took the position that they couldn't produce audited financial statements after 9/11, because they said the office at the Pentagon that produced financial statements was destroyed. Now given what I know of the federal set up of financial statements, I am skeptical of that statement.In that category of people who benefit from 9/11 are also the arms manufacturer Raytheon, whose share price gained directly from the 9/11 attacks. Trading of the shares of Raytheon, the producer of Tomahawk and Patriot missiles (and parent company of E-systems, whose clients include the National Security Agency and CIA), experienced an abrupt six-time increase of call option purchases on the day immediately before September 11. [46] The outright purchase of call options implies the expectation that a stock price will rise. In the first week after 9/11, when the New York Stock Exchange opened again, the value of Raytheon actually shot up considerably. Looking at the development of the stock price, the impression is a very weak performance before the attacks - and then, after resumption of trade, a "gap" (at substantial volume) upwards. In other words: just under $25 on September 10, the low in the period between August 20 to September 28, at $31, 50 on September 17 and up to $34, and 80 on September 27, 2001. With regards to government bonds, buyers of US Treasury securities with a maturity of five years were also winners. These securities were traded in an unusually large volume shortly before the attacks. The Wall Street Journal reported at least in early October 2001 that the Secret Service had started an investigation into a suspiciously high volume of US government bond purchases before the attacks. The Wall Street Journal explained: Five-year Treasury bills are the best investments in the event of a global crisis, in particular one like this which has hit the United States. The papers are treasured because of their safety, and because they are covered by the US government, and usually their prices rise if investors shun riskier investments, such as shares. [47]Adding to this phenomenon, the government issues these bonds that serve as a basis of money creation for funding a war such as the immediately declared "war on terror", engaging the Tomahawks from Raytheon. And here it may again be useful to have a quick look at the "cui bono" relationship: The US Federal Reserve creates money to fund the war and lends it to the American government. The American government in turn must pay interest on the money they borrow from the Central Bank to fund the war. The greater the war appropriations, the greater the profits are for bankers. [48]A multi-layered combination, one could say. I also talked about the topic of 9/11 insider trading with one of the world's leading practitioners at the interface between the international capital markets, the national security policy of the US as well as geopolitics, James G Rickards. He gave me some answers in a personal discussion, which I am allowed to repeat here with his expressed approval. Question: Did suspicious trading activities of uncovered put options on futures markets occur shortly before 9/11?Let's sum up a bit at the end. We have, among other things:
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