Trading Places: If I were Dr Evil...
One of the curious things about 9-11, that has vanished into media amnesia, are the reports of anomalous option trading of airline company shares, and companies with a WTC presence.
Someone made a lot of money, and we have not been told who, nor what investigations revealed, to my knowledge, although chasing movements of that large an amount should have been relatively straightforward, at least initially, and, one would think, something the full persuasive powers of the USA would be used to follow through on. Of course a number of young billionaires did die suddenly not long afterwards, but that is clearly coincidence, since if they had been involved they'd have been charged and brought to justice, not silently killed by 3rd parties.
Anyway, if I were Dr Evil, and clearly I am not, this would seem like a good ploy - you plan an operation that if successful would lead to a major impact on some large financial sector. Like, say ports this time.
You then engineer a two pronged move - the public move would be to get a plausible cash rich operator to make a perfectly legitimate takeover bid of a major player, pushing up the share price sharply.
At the same time, an anonymous operator with moderate funds would bid against the takeover, effectively gambling on it failing and the share price falling heavily on some short fixed time scale, say 6 months.
Then, BOOM, deal is up, operations and profits are wrecked, and you get a twofer, a strike on economic faciltiies, and shitloads of money.
But clearly this is wildly implausible and would never happen in real life, if nothing else the anomalous pattern of option trading would be easily seen by all the people in the US government assigned to tracking anomalous financial activity as predictors of terrorist activities, you know, since that is what they did last time...
Phew, I feel safer now.
Someone made a lot of money, and we have not been told who, nor what investigations revealed, to my knowledge, although chasing movements of that large an amount should have been relatively straightforward, at least initially, and, one would think, something the full persuasive powers of the USA would be used to follow through on. Of course a number of young billionaires did die suddenly not long afterwards, but that is clearly coincidence, since if they had been involved they'd have been charged and brought to justice, not silently killed by 3rd parties.
Anyway, if I were Dr Evil, and clearly I am not, this would seem like a good ploy - you plan an operation that if successful would lead to a major impact on some large financial sector. Like, say ports this time.
You then engineer a two pronged move - the public move would be to get a plausible cash rich operator to make a perfectly legitimate takeover bid of a major player, pushing up the share price sharply.
At the same time, an anonymous operator with moderate funds would bid against the takeover, effectively gambling on it failing and the share price falling heavily on some short fixed time scale, say 6 months.
Then, BOOM, deal is up, operations and profits are wrecked, and you get a twofer, a strike on economic faciltiies, and shitloads of money.
But clearly this is wildly implausible and would never happen in real life, if nothing else the anomalous pattern of option trading would be easily seen by all the people in the US government assigned to tracking anomalous financial activity as predictors of terrorist activities, you know, since that is what they did last time...
Phew, I feel safer now.
posted by Steinn at 1:21 PM
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