Paul Singer sent 115 analysts to figure out Bank of America's balance sheet - they found $75 trillion in derivatives on $150 billion of equity: "I challenge anybody in the room, outside of the room,come tell me what that looks like"
this is him explaining why no one - not regulators, not investors, not even the banks themselves - knows the real financial condition of any major bank, and why the next crisis will be worse than 2008
"$150 billion of equity, $2 trillion of assets on the balance sheet. but here's the problem - $75 trillion, that's with a T, of derivatives. that makes the financial condition of Bank of America completely and utterly opaque"
"I challenge anybody in the room, outside the room - come tell me what that looks like. what we found in '08 is the insiders didn't understand what was on their own balance sheets. Stan O'Neal, Dick Fuld, Chuck Prince - billions of fake AAA garbage"
bookmark & watch the full conversation ↓
🚨 Robinhood was fined $65 million for lying about how they make money...
The SEC found that RH customers paid so much in hidden fees due to payment for order flow — that retail investors lost $34.1 million MORE than if they had paid a $5 commission per trade.
If it's free you are the product.
South Korea isn't messing around when it comes to Naked Shorting.
Aside from prison time, market manipulators are subject to criminal fines of up to 4-6 times the profit generated/loss avoided.
Quite severe compared to the "cost of business" fine model in U.S. markets.
The Hollow Men
American capitalism is rotting from the head down. We have replaced the "Owner-Operator"—the risk-taker-with a new, parasitic class of corporate bureaucrat: The Risk-Free Insider.
By "Insider," I am not referring to a specific title. I am referring to the entire administrative state that has captured the modern corporation. This includes the Directors who exist solely to collect fees, the Executives who exist solely to collect bonuses, and the Managers who exist solely to hire consultants.
These are the hollow men of the boardroom. They are masters of PowerPoint. They wear the right suits. They say the right buzzwords about "governance" and "ESG." But they are mercenaries fighting a war with someone else’s ammunition.
In a functioning economy, authority is tied to liability. If you make a bad decision, you lose your own money. That fear of loss is the only thing that keeps a business honest. It forces you to cut waste, obsess over the customer, and stay late to fix what is broken.
Today, we have severed that link.
We have rigged the game so that heads, the Insider wins; tails, the shareholder loses.
If the stock goes up, the Insider collects a massive performance bonus. If the stock crashes due to their own incompetence, they are fired with a "Golden Parachute" worth tens of millions. They are gambling with the house’s money, and they never leave the table poorer than they arrived.
This looting starts in the boardroom.
We have normalized a "Country Club" culture where directors are selected based on social profiling rather than their ability to build a business. The modern board member is often a professional tourist—paid an average of $350,000 a year.
Let’s be brutally honest about what that number represents. The average director is paid nearly five times the GDP per capita of the United States. They earn more for attending four quarterly lunches than the vast majority of Americans earn in five years of hard labor.
And for what?
Most of these directors are "over-boarded," sitting on three or four boards simultaneously. They treat directorships as a gig economy for the elite. They fly in, rubber-stamp a compensation package they didn't read, and fly out. They collect checks from companies they do not understand, do not use, and certainly do not love.
They are not there to ask hard questions. They are there to be collegial. They are there to protect the other Insiders.
And what happens when these boards hire executives who also have no personal capital at risk?
We get the Delegation Economy.
When a Risk-Free Insider faces a crisis—bloated expenses, a broken supply chain, or a stale product—they do not roll up their sleeves. They hire a consultant. They pay a strategy firm millions of shareholder dollars to produce a 100-page deck telling them what they already know.
This is not management. It is intellectual money laundering.
They use shareholder capital to buy an insurance policy for their own careers. If the plan fails, they can blame the consultants. They delegate the work because they are terrified of the responsibility. They would rather preside over a slow, comfortable decline than risk a bold mistake.
While American Insiders are busy optimizing their severance packages, our global competitors are optimizing their products. They are not slowed down by bureaucracy. They are not waiting for a slide deck. They are outworking us.
If we continue to fill our C-suites with administrators instead of operators, we will lose our edge. We will see iconic American franchises hollowed out by fees, managed for the benefit of the Insiders, while the true owners—the shareholders—are left holding the bag.
The time for polite governance is over.
If we want to save the American economy from mediocrity, we must demand a return to the "Owner’s Mentality." We need leaders who treat shareholder capital with the same reverence they treat their own savings. The era of the Risk-Free Insider must end.
THE WALL STREET PLAYBOOK FOR BANKRUPTING A PUBLIC COMPANY EXPLAINED TO JEFFREY EPSTEIN!
Naked short a bleeding company into oblivion, forcing them to hyper dilute in order to raise money & go bankrupt.
DK-Butterfly (BBBY) was a victim of this vicious playbook in 2023.
The guy who wanted to slip his wife antibiotics for STDs he contracted on Epstein Island was entrusted to force us all to take vaccines.
Let that sink in.
BREAKING🚨 ANN VANDERSTEEL WILL HOLD A PRESS CONFERENCE IN FRONT OF THE SEC ON JAN 12TH DEMANDING TRANSPARENCY FOR RETAIL INVESTORS
- Ann urges members of Congress to stand with her in demanding accountability for the SEC’s failure to protect retail investors $MMTLP $GME $AMC