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Martin Shkreli indictment [pdf]

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Re: Martin Shkreli indictment [pdf]

#101

Post by FireBeyond »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #65
JayHost wrote: post #43

My first reaction to his arrest was joy and then I saw comments about him getting "beat up in jail" to put it lightly. People who say those kinds of things are no better than him. Possibly worse. The solution to dealing with people like him is to be able to separate them from society or fix the system so it can no longer be exploited so "easily". He may have hurt a lot of people but it's been through proxy as far as…

>Like Morgan on the Walking Dead. I do believe Martin is a good guy on the wrong path. Not sure how you can defend that with this floating around. I’m definitely the real fucking deal. This is not a fucking act. I threatened that fucking guy and his fucking kids because he fucking took $3 million from me and he ended up paying me back. He called my bluff. He said, “You’re not fucking going to go after me.” [I said] “…

I read this and don't think of Shkreli as a powder puff white guy, but as someone who probably needs to puff a little less of the white powder.

Re: Martin Shkreli indictment [pdf]

#102

Post by FireBeyond »

amateur_soclgst wrote: post #18
the_hangman wrote: post #13

> On or about December 2, 2010, Investor 1 [...] asked SHKRELI in an email about, inter alia, the fund's assets under management and the names of its independent auditor and fund administrator. SHKRELI told Investor 1 that MSMB Capital had $35 million in assets under management and that the fund's independent auditor and administrator were Rothstein, Kass & Company, P.C. and NAV Consulting Inc., respectively. At the…

I found it funnier how they tried to short sell $1M of stock and somehow got $7M in the hole. Must have been some leverage on that deal :v

Maybe he could launch a GoFundMe like that guy that lost $100K on E*trade shorting stocks. Although either he or GoFundMe at least had the good conscience to delete that campaign...

Re: Martin Shkreli indictment [pdf]

#103

Post by spinlock »

nayshins wrote: post #48
prdonahue wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm, you know how short sales work right? You're borrowing shares to sell them at current prices and then have to return the shares later. If the price rises, you are out the difference between what you sold at and what you repurchase at for when the call to cover comes in.

From Wikipedia: "Naked short selling, or naked shorting, is the practice of short-selling a tradable asset of any kind without first borrowing the security or ensuring that the security can be borrowed, as is conventionally done in a short sale." It is really easy to lose your shirt with a naked short.

Naked shorting doesn't do much to exacerbate the downside of shorting a security. Even if you have borrowed the security, you still have an unlimited downside (i.e. the stock price _can_ go to infinity).

Naked shorting is more of a systemic problem because you can put downward pressure on a stock even when the market is not willing to sell at the price you are pretending to sell at. It also makes it hard to keep track of voting shares and you can see many more votes than actual shares.

Re: Martin Shkreli indictment [pdf]

#105

Post by dustingetz »

Isn't Martin doing exactly what the rest of the pharma industrial complex is doing - extracting money from insurance companies by working the healthcare system? You can't personify the pharma industrial complex, Pfizer doesn't have a human face or name, but Martin does, so we direct our hatred of the complex at him. Am I wrong? Misplaced hatred does nobody any good, and none of the social media commentary I've seen has expressed a nuanced understanding of why singling out Martin is justified.

Re: Martin Shkreli indictment [pdf]

#106

Post by chipsy »

Disruptive_Dave wrote: post #69
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Like Morgan on the Walking Dead. I do believe Martin is a good guy on the wrong path. Not sure how you can defend that with this floating around. I’m definitely the real fucking deal. This is not a fucking act. I threatened that fucking guy and his fucking kids because he fucking took $3 million from me and he ended up paying me back. He called my bluff. He said, “You’re not fucking going to go after me.” [I said] “…

I don't know, I take that as a nerdy white dude who desperately seeks attention trying to impress the hip hop heads out there (that kind of talk is extremely common in the rap game).

I disagree with this form of dismissal as a rule.

If someone says something and then says "it was a joke", "it was a game", "I was just making a point", that doesn't cancel out the words and their impact - social atmosphere is not an intellectually pristine environment. You will change the atmosphere by yelling "fire" in a crowded theater and once it's done, there is no going back.

Likewise, if we dismiss someone's statement because "it was attention seeking", "they didn't really mean it", "something was misunderstood", "it's just part of the culture", that also doesn't cancel it out.

There are plenty of young, impressionable folks who latch on to ideas unthinkingly because they cannot take anything seriously at their age and level of maturity. But that is not usually the case with a 32-year-old adult like Shkreli, or people in hiphop culture, or people in actual street gangs.

Posturing language exists to make a claim to credibility. It serves a real purpose and is used in an instrumental way, for the purpose of conducting business on the terms of those who use it. The people who exploit this language the best contain in their personality some particular combination of motivation and lack of restraint, enabling their threats to be real to some degree.

Shkreli already displays such a personality among multiple facets. There is no reason to deny him the possibility of simply being a bad human being who is in need of careful monitoring by society.

Re: Martin Shkreli indictment [pdf]

#107

Post by stephenboyd »

JayHost wrote: post #43

My first reaction to his arrest was joy and then I saw comments about him getting "beat up in jail" to put it lightly. People who say those kinds of things are no better than him. Possibly worse. The solution to dealing with people like him is to be able to separate them from society or fix the system so it can no longer be exploited so "easily". He may have hurt a lot of people but it's been through proxy as far as…

He doesn't understand why people hate him because he can't step down from his ego trip enough to honestly consider the consequences of his actions. Of all the maligned people in the news deserving of sympathy, an unrepentant Wall Street CEO gloating about profiting by unconscionable means shouldn't rise to consideration.

The reason there's so much antipathy lately toward white-collar criminals is backlash against judges and prosecutors being sympathetic and lenient toward their fellow clean-cut professionals. That antipathy has only manifested in angry protests and op-eds by the powerless, not the prosecutorial and judicial decisions that Shkreli is in the hands of now.

You could say we're all good guys on some kind of path. The typical third-world warlord is 'just being "successful" as it was always defined to him.'

Everyone should get society's best attempt at impartial justice and a compassionate, non-violent, and restorative treatment. But poor folks like Eric Garner are the ones who've been lacking this justice. Shkreli will probably get probation, a fine, and some community service like the handful of executives offered up after the last financial crisis.

Re: Martin Shkreli indictment [pdf]

#108

Post by homulilly »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #85
homulilly wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on the jail comments not being appropriate but doing something through proxy doesn't make you less culpable. drone pilots still get ptsd (the ones with a conscience at least). Shkreli isn't a good guy on the wrong path, he's an actual psychopath and while I honestly don't think any non-violent criminals "deserve" the hell that is US prison, if it keeps him from exploiting and harming more people it's…

it's a net gain for society and that's what's important https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_monster (Assumes cardinal utility, but it still works.)

Not talking about utilitarianism, I'm talking about social stability.

Re: Martin Shkreli indictment [pdf]

#109

Post by peckrob »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #86
peckrob wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were investigating him but he was largely unknown outside of some financial and biotech circles. After Daraprim and the subsequent public outrage, not to mention his grating "bro" public persona, he became one of the most hated men in America. They were going to nail him for something as a result of that investigation. Remember, they got Al Capone in the 1930s for tax evasion - not all the other things he was ce…

Charging someone for what you can prove != 'political motivation.'

Correct, but who's to say where the investigation would have stopped if they didn't uncover anything at first? If he wasn't so publicly reviled, it may have been dropped if wrongdoing wasn't immediately uncovered. But because he was so out there in public and so publicly reviled, he may have insured that investigators kept looking at him until they did find something they could make stick.

I would note that I have no knowledge of the investigation beyond what's being reported (and only a cursory knowledge of that). I could be totally wrong. Maybe these charges were immediately obvious to investigators and it's just taken them almost a year to get their ducks in a row. I'm just theorizing here based on some historical knowledge of famous criminals and how they were eventually brought down (see my comments above on gangsters in the 20s and 30s).

Re: Martin Shkreli indictment [pdf]

#110

Post by kaonashi »

danso wrote: post #29

Seriously disappointing news. Shkreli seemed like such an obvious troll in how he defended his price gouging by saying that a CEO's role is to maximize profit for the benefit of shareholders...and yet did so in such an unnecessarily obnoxious way that if he truly were the uber-capitalist, he would know that bragging and drawing attention to what an asshole you are does not achieve the true capitalist goal. I would've…

Alternative hypothesis: the institutional arrangements in place since deregulation have made it exceptionally easy for such people to gain power.
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