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Did I Say I Was Innocent Of All Wrongdoing, and Call Patrick A Liar and A Cheat? -->
Location: Blogs Bob O'Brien's Sanity Check Blog
Posted by: bobo 10/14/2008 4:10 AM Remember Gradient? This was the firm that accused Patrick of being every sort of liar, cheat, scumbag, lowlife, etc. etc. When he sued them, along with Rocker Partners (now Copper River), they began a multi-year campaign of mud-slinging, and using every dirty trick in the book to stall, waffle, avoid discovery, and generally dodge the coming bullet of a day in court.
In their counter suit, they leveled every ugly claim they could manage, making Patrick and the directors of Overstock seem like a den of thieves.
Well guess what?
They lied.
Yup. They don't call it lying, of course. Even as they settle with Overstock, it's more that they were "mistaken" when they issued countless reports smearing every aspect of the company's management, accounting, business practices, and ethics.
Several articles have come out, and nobody in the financial press can apparently bring themselves to point out the obvious - when Gradient said all those nasty things, none of the them were true, meaning that Overstock's claims were.
Even as CNBC proffered countless opportunities for the Gradient defenders to mount a full on smear campaign, it was all lies.
Ya don't hear CNBC having Patrick on to comment about it, do you? Isn't that odd? I mean, they give hundreds of hours to Herb and Gradient's attack dogs, offering up absurd free speech arguments for slandering the company with false info, but when Gradient admits it was, uh, mistaken, not a peep. How unexpected.
Here's a relatively balanced article describing the settlement. Note, however, that it can't help but repeat the ugly allegations made by Gradient, even as it reports that, well, those SIXTY or so reports on OSTK were false and misleading. Hey, ya think maybe the ugly allegations might be false, too? Nah. Best to just give them as much play as possible.
How's this for a deadpan beauty: "Utah-based Overstock sued Gradient and New York hedge fund Rocker Partners LP, now known as Copper River Management, in August 2005 in a California state court, alleging they “orchestrated a wide-scale predatory campaign of knowingly distributing false, and covertly biased, written reports about Overstock in order to disparage Overstock and enrich themselves.”
And the other shoe: "Gradient admitted that it had issued mistaken reports about Overstock, wrongly concluding that some of its directors were not independent. It said that it has reviewed and improved its internal communication processes."
Mistaken. No doubt due to lousy internal communication processes. "Hey, Don, Herb and Dave are on the line, and want you to punch up the parts in the latest where you conclude that the company's a Ponzi scheme designed to cheat widows and orphans out of their cash. They want it more negative. Can you get the word nazi, heroin addict, or cannibal, anywhere in the analysis?" Yesssss. I can just imagine that internal communication process review. Musta been a doozy.
Reading the sparse coverage, it seems more as though the company said, oops, er, maybe when we called everyone liars, scumbags, cheats, etc. we got it kinda, uh, a little out of focus, fuzzy, really. But you can bet the rest of our coverage and reports are accurate. Yessireeee. Those SIXTY reports were atypical of the rest of our fine work. We are not just a hatchet shop for hedge fund predators, engaged to bash whatever the target du jour is. Not at all. The quality of our work speaks for itself.
Ya gotta love it. Wonder whether Rocker and Cohodes are booking flights to the Caymans in preparation for their day in court? Nah. They too have indicated time and time again that they are innocent as the driven snow, and eagerly await their opportunity to clear their good names in court.
continued at The Sanity Check http://www.TheSanityCheck.com
The Easter Bunny hangs out over there.
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Oh, and DO NOT MISS TED COHEN's Editioral published in today's Burlington Times.
return to Overstock.com, Inc. message board , top of board Msg: 26159 of 26163 10/14/2008 12:23:14 PM Author: nopullnoshow send pm · add member to favs · ignore · recommend  Recs: 4 Awesome online kudos to our efforts By "warlord" a frequent poster on the dndn board. Great job, war! * * * * * With Permission to Reprint from Ted They didn’t get it: Signs of looming financial disaster ignored By THEODORE J. COHEN When I was 11 years old, my mother brought home a mongrel puppy. Mickey, as we named him, was not my father’s favorite addition to the household, and he said he’d only allow the pup to stay if I took care of his every need. That Mickey had frequent “accidents” on my bedroom rug did not help the situation. And despite my efforts to walk him frequently, it soon became apparent that his days in the Cohen household were numbered. Finally, after yet another accident in the bedroom, my mother gently but firmly took his face and rubbed his nose in the mess. Mickey “got it!” From that day on, there was no question when he wanted to go out. Even my dad came to love the old dog, which is saying a lot! Based on what has transpired over the last two months in the financial markets, it’s pretty obvious that Mickey was smarter than the financial media, Congress, and the SEC put together! They just didn’t “get it!” This is decidedly not a case of hindsight being 20-20. On the contrary, all the signs pointing to the coming of the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression were out there for all to see as early as 2005, if not sooner. There is no end to the number of people who rubbed the “noses” of the media, Congress and the SEC in the mess that blew up this September. The “mess” began with the implosion of the subprime mortgage market. But it led directly to the rapid demise of Bear Stearns as a result of aggressive shortselling of its stock, including naked short-selling, by other market participants as rumors of the company’s demise spread rapidly on Wall Street. On Feb. 8, 2005, for example, the National Coalition Against Naked Shorting (NCANS) published an open letter to President Bush that stated in part: “ ‘Naked’ short shares have, in effect, been counterfeited. They are as different from normal short shares as fake money is from real money. The ability to print counterfeit shares at will allows a hedge fund to destroy a company’s value over time by creating an artificial (and fraudulent) supply of stock. If this were cash, computers, or jewelry, the perpetrators would be behind bars. Yet apparently the rules are different for Wall Street — the SEC, the NYSE, and the NASDAQ exact no meaningful penalties, thereby allowing the practice to continue.” In November 2005, Patrick Byrne, president of Overstock.com, stated that, “Continued abusive short-selling practices pose strong potential for a systemic Wall Street meltdown that will undermine our capital system and our economic strength.” That same month, he predicted that, “We’re going to see something that’s going to make the stock market crash of 1929 look like a tea party.” The financial media treated him as a something out of a circus freak show! Watch and listen to the interviews conducted with Byrne by so-called “financial journalists” on Fox, Bloomberg, and CNBC Closing Bell (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIH w7C73s3E). Congress had its head in the sand, as well. Letters to my congressman and senators in the matter of naked short selling, if answered at all over the last two years, merely promised to keep my views in mind. Frankly, I doubt if anyone on any of their staffs even understood the issue. And the SEC? A recent article published in The New York Sun places the blame squarely on the SEC for the current crisis in the financial markets. According to former SEC official Lee Pickard, the SEC, in 2004, “...allowed five firms — the three that have collapsed plus Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — to more than double the leverage they were allowed to keep on their balance sheets and remove discounts that had been applied to the assets they had been required to keep to protect them from defaults.” There you have it ... the financial media, Congress, and the SEC: dumb, dumber, and dumbest. They just didn’t get it. Somewhere, Mickey is chasing a ball and having the last laugh. He got the message when his nose was pushed in it!
THEODORE J. COHEN Ph.D., Middletown, is a research scientist. http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/322-10142008-1605337.html |
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