Friday, February 13, 2009

A small cog in a larger machine


Well nail me to the floor and call me Ethel, look what just popped up on the front page of Yahoo Finance (with auto-horntoot extract pasted below):

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by Mick Weinstein

".............As Dalmady dug deeper, he found lots of problems with Stanford's products, documented them in a report called "Duck Tales" (if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck...), then uploaded that report to the 'net for public consumption. Dalmady published the report in a Venezuelan econo-mag, but noticed that his work on Stanford only "really exploded once it hit the blogs. Miguel Octavio's The Devil's Excrement [at Salon.com] took up the story on Monday the 9th, as did Caracas Gringo."

Salon's Octavio noted at the time: "For many years, I have been hearing stories about SIB. When most banks paid 3% in deposits, SIB paid 6-8%. No amount of digging or understanding would clarify what it was they were doing, much like Madoff did in the US, where he managed to trap some very smart people."

Latin American blog Inca Kola News carried the torch further on Tuesday: "I really stopped what I was doing and pulled the Stanford filings...and looked again. The fact that the bank has missed two relatively small recent payments while supposedly boasting a large liquid asset base is rather strange..."

Then Felix Salmon, blogging at Portfolio.com, pulled together more yada yada continues here