Stock Manipulation Quotes

Never pay the slightest attention to what a company president ever says about his stock.

Like the stocks of both Berkshire and Wesco to trade within hailing distance of what we think of as intrinsic value. When it runs up, we try to talk it down. That's not at all common in Corporate America, but that's the way we act.

The activists play the balance sheet by selling a division to buy back stock and leveraging the balance sheet and buying back more stock.

The only beef Enron employees have with top management is that management did not inform employees of the collapse in time to allow them to get in on the swindle. If Enron executives had shouted, "Head for the hills!" the employees might have had time to sucker other Americans into buying wildly over-inflated Enron stock. Just because your boss is a criminal doesn't make you a hero.

Yes! We finally captured Martha Stewart. You know, with all the massive and almost completely unpunished fraud perpetrated on the public by companies like Enron, Global Crossing, and Tyco we finally got the ring leader. Maybe now we can lower the nation's terror alert to periwinkle.

Excessive hype, bankruptcy, cash burning like autumn leaves - such is the stuff of short-selling.

Federal authorities have informed Martha Stewart's lawyers she will be indicted for her role in the ImClone insider trading scandal. Good news for Martha - stripes are back in this year.

AOL had a very strong motive to create the appearance of high revenues for PurchasePro because the value of the warrants AOL had received in the deal depended on PurchasePro's performance.

Buy cheap and sell high is a rule of business, and when you control enough money and enough banks you can always manage that a stock you want shall be temporarily cheap. No value is destroyed for you - only for the original owner.

Martha Stewart denied allegations that she had been given inside information to sell 4,000 shares of a stock in a biotech firm. Stewart then showed her audience how to make a festive, quick-burning yule log out of freshly-shredded financial documents.

Wouldn't it be great if all of Osama bin Laden's money was tied up in Enron stock?

But if you look at WorldCom, which is the biggest failure to date, they grew dramatically, they were buying companies that were bigger than they were and they were doing it off inflated stock.

When you give chief executives too much compensation in stock options, they concentrate too much on the stock price, and there is a perverse incentive to raise the stock price, particularly when the chief executive wants to exercise his own options.

Speculation in oil stock companies was another great evil ... From the first, oil men had to contend with wild fluctuations in the price of oil. ... Such fluctuations were the natural element of the speculator, and he came early, buying in quantities and holding in storage tanks for higher prices. If enough oil was held, or if the production fell off, up went the price, only to be knocked down by the throwing of great quantities of stocks on the market.

To a bystander like me, those who made 190 million pounds deliberately underselling the shares of HBOS, in spite of its very strong capital base, and drove it into the bosom of Lloyds TSB Bank, are clearly bank robbers and asset strippers.

No share-pusher could vend his worthless stock, if he could not count on meeting, in his prospective victim, an unscrupulous avarice as vicious as his own, but stupider. Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.

Being short and seeing a promoter take the stock up is very irritating. It's not worth it to have that much irritation in your life.

Artificial inflation of stocks must be considered a crime as serious as counterfeiting, which it closely resembles.

A lot of share-buying, not bargain-seeking, is designed to prop stock prices up. Thirty to 40 years ago, it was very profitable to look at companies that were aggressively buying their own shares. They were motivated simply to buy below what it was worth.

To prop up the stock price, managers have to turn down the screws on everybody. That forces them to cancel all the projects that would lead to future growth in order to drop money to the bottom line. This is HP's dilemma today. Once a company's growth has stopped, the game as we have known it is over. It's a scary thing.

I'm not short, so I can make a speech and drive the stock down and cover the stock. That's not what I do.

Even a casual reader of the financial pages knows that microcaps are a perennial headache for regulators and, above all, for investors because they have been prone to abuse by stock manipulators.

Very few of the heroes of the Golden Age of American finance had much interest in the solid realities of what underlay their structure of stocks and bonds and credits. Later on, a Henry Ford might introduce an era of intensely production-minded captains of industry, but the Harrimans, Morgans, Fricks, and Rockefellers were far more interested in the exciting manipulation of huge masses of intangible wealth than in the humdrum business of turning out goods.

As I have said a thousand times, no manipulation can put stocks down and keep them down.

When Martha gets out she'll be under house arrest in her big $40 million mansion in Bedford. Boy, that'll teach her. She's only allowed out of the house for doctors visits, grocery shopping, or to dump more stock.