did Shkreli ever make money trading or just defrauding

[Sig]

For a bunch of supposed free thinkers I'm surprised how many of you swallow the government line so easily.

You put any one of us on this forum in charge of a moderately complicated financial institution and I guarantee that within a month any one of us would have broken enough federal laws that a determined prosecutor would be able to put us away for a long time. And the Internet would blow up with comments about how we'd had it coming and how evil we are.

That's the way the justice system works here. Create so many laws and regulations so everyone is guilty and then control and use prosecutorial discretion.

I have no idea if he's guilty of what they accuse him of and I don't care. It's hardly relevant. He's getting taken down because there's only publicity upside and career advancement for people involved in doing so.

There's a world of difference between failing to meet an obscure filing deadline and purposely defrauding and misappropriating with full knowledge of what he was doing, as is alleged here. Surely you understand the difference in an alleged crime like his and this nebulous running afoul of complicated federal laws thing you speak of?
Speaking of the "federal laws are too complicated to comply with" meme, it's common among those with a libertarian bent but there's not much truth to it. I ran a financial services and software firm for many years that involved transferring large amounts of money between tens of thousands of customers and never ran into any of these alleged nefarious federal laws. I'd be more than happy to have a determined prosecutor look at everything we/I did and I don't have even the faintest worry that I'd be "put away" for a day, let alone a long time. I think certain news outlets find the one poor guy in North Carolina who inadvertently ran afoul of the structuring laws or the rancher in Nevada who wouldn't pay his grazing fees and turn it into a feeding frenzy about vast out of control bureaucracy, when they aren't representative at all of reality.

 

[schizo]

No one was really to blame for the 2008 market meltdown...

Are you friggin' serious?! If you knowingly engage in an illegal activity for personal gain, like approving subprime mortgage loans to risky borrowers with very poor credit, that's fraud. The mortgage originators, like Countrywide, are especially culpable here because they knew majority of these borrowers had no chance of paying back the loans. However, the biggest culprit is the Wall Street investment banks that pooled these mortgages into CDOs and sold them to unsuspecting investors. To make things worse, these bastards actually insured themselves using credit default swaps while unloading the worthless CDOs.

 

[schizo]

Very true but....

My bet is he will atleast do 100% gains on the Wu-Tang. Brilliant marketing!

Yeah, like that asswipe who robbed a bank and immediately uploaded the entire video he shot to all the social media for the entire world to see. Very smart.

 

[Sig]

Are you friggin' serious?! If you knowingly engage in an illegal activity for personal gain, like approving subprime mortgage loans to risky borrowers with very poor credit, that's fraud. The mortgage originators, like Countrywide, are especially culpable here because they knew majority of these borrowers had no chance of paying back the loans. However, the biggest culprit is the Wall Street investment banks that pooled these mortgages into CDOs and sold them to unsuspecting investors. To make things worse, these bastards actually insured themselves using credit default swaps while unloading the worthless CDOs.

It's a lot easier to prove what Shkreli is alleged to have done than to prove that a banker "knew majority of these borrowers had no chance of paying back the loans." It's a banker's job to determine if a borrower "has a chance of paying back a loan", and you're asking a jury of non-bankers to second guess their professional decision. That's almost impossible to prosecute, absent a smoking gun like emails where bankers specifically say "we're making these loans knowing the borrowers won't pay them back because it will make us a lot of money". It's not to say that there weren't crimes committed in the subprime mortgage debacle, it's just saying that it's a much harder thing to prosecute and a very different thing than the relatively cut and dry case against Shkreli. The only thing they have in common really is that they both occurred in the finance industry, so it's a bit of a non-sequitur to equate the two.

 

[marketsurfer]

Has Marty lost it??

 

[schizo]

Had Shkreli not been so stupid to earn the wrath of the public by raising the price of Daraprim by more than 5000%, especially just ahead of presidential election next year, he would have flown quietly under the Fed's radar. But, surely, Shkrelli can't be the only one on Wall Street who has, is and will be defrauding his investors. So why aren't they yet busted by the Fed? Because they ain't stupid like Shkreli.

Moreover, does Shkreli have a Goldman connection? Probably not. Now you know why I think he's such an asswipe. He should have used his time and money courting the favor of Blankfein & Co. instead of dubbing himself as the wonder boy of Wallstreet.

 

[piezoe]

Right, there are multiple ways to get the money from a short to KBIO and Martin.

The Feds did the same thing with AIG. Feds owned a metric shitton of AIG shares. The shares had warrants attached. The banks orchestrated a squeeze, exacerbated by the warrants, the banks shorted into the squeeze, then covered into the offering, buying the shares from the gov't.

If your Feds refers to the Federal Reserve, that Fed never owned AIG shares except overnight. The Fed simply facilitated the transaction for Treasury. The shares went right to Treasury. Treasury did ultimately make a good bit of money on that one. They lost a bit on the GM deal overall. The entire TARP/bailout business is not complete yet, but it appears as though it will end up not costing the tax payer one red cent. Not even an openly fascist government could have done it any better.

 

[Gambit]

Not one major Wall Street CEO was ever jailed after the 2008 subprime debacle. Not even one went to jail, including Angelo Mozilo, former CEO of now-defunct Countrywide Financial, the nation's largest subprime mortgage lender during the housing boom that led up to the 2008 collapse. Seriously, were there truly nobody accountable for the financial meltdown? To me, the FBI wasn't so hell bent on finding any, let alone arresting the responsible douche bags on Wall Street.

So why is Marty so unlucky? What did he do so egregiously stupid that he rubbed the FBI up the wrong way? There's gotta be only one answer: Daraprim. The government says otherwise, but that's one hard dose to swallow. That's not to say I condone the ugly acts of this scumbag. I believe he likely did misappropriate/embezzle the funds for his personal orgy--who would otherwise throw a friggin' $2M on Wu-Tang? But the less boneheaded question is how come he bought the ire of Uncle Sam while the other bigger and menacing mindfucks on Wall Street got off so easily?

Because he isn't as connected as the others. Wall street donates generously to both parties so moral hazard becomes a non issue for the banks. Marty is a ruthless person but he forgot that the government can be ruthless as well.