quality post and crazy coincidence. last night i was thinking about just this, specifically the idea of Achilles’ heel and how all things, even things that are perceived to be infinitely powerful, have weaknesses. it is a great analogy.
sometimes, certain entities may appear permanent and indestructible. The Titanic was often described as unsinkable and this was believed by many at the time prior to its sinking.
But, nothing is permanent. Nothing is indestructible. All things eventually cease. This includes things that might be perceived to be “too big to fail” like the major banks of Wall Street and other big Wall Street players like Citadel.
Bernie Madoff, as a career conman (confidence man), was held in high confidence by many. He was a huge Wall Street player, and though some were rightly skeptical of him, he was generally held in the highest of regards on Wall Street. It was considered an exclusive privilege to be able to invest with Madoff. To all of these people that had high confidence in somebody who was actually conman the whole time, the notion that Bernie Madoff could have been a fraud was inconceivable, that there was simply no way that somebody as successful as Madoff could be defeated.
A great example of this was kind of sentiment of Thierry Magon de La Villehuchet which was dramatized in scene in the Netflix series MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street , Episode 3 ‘See No Evil’, shortly after the 32 minute mark:
Frank Casey narrates:
“As we built a business relationship together, I became close to Thierry. And we would have cocktails in his office.
One time, I met him when I was down in New York, and we talked a little bit.
And I keep coming back all the time in this relationship, ‘What if Harry and I, you know, and this Madoff, it doesn’t make…’,
and he [Thierry] goes: ‘Oh my god, you and Madoff. Would you drop that bone? My gosh’, he says ‘you know that I do my homework and that I trust this man explicitly. We even did handwriting analysis on this guy, and he passed. And so, what else could I possibly do?’ I said, ‘But if Harry and I are correct, and you are wrong, what happens to you?’ And he said, ‘Let me put it to you this way Frank. I have all of my money in it. I have most of my family’s money in it. I have every private banker that I have groomed as a relationship in Europe in it. And I probably have half the royalty of Europe in it. I have no out if I am wrong. If you and Harry are correct, and I am wrong, I am a dead man.’”After Madoff’s fraud was exposed, Thierry committed suicide.
This example demonstrates the kinds of sentiments that can exist in our world, a high degree of confidence and certainty about something that appeared invincible from a certain perspective but in fact had major weaknesses.
Everything has a weakness, even the mightiest players on Wall Street. They are powerful but they are not infinitely powerful. Somewhere in their systems exist weaknesses.
The abuse in the stock market has become so egregious that the consequences are starting to be too large to be ignored. The rampant naked short selling and failures to deliver were bound to inevitably be discovered. The GameStop sneeze of January 2021 was the event that sparked a lot of interest and drew a lot of attention by many people, and the hive mind has since been restlessly pursuing this.
There is no going back to a time when hundreds of thousands of individual household investors are not aware of the giant problem on Wall Street of naked short selling and failures to deliver, and its solution of DRS. The cat is out of the bag, this is not something that can be unlearned.
Really it doesn’t appear that there is any way out for those that are naked short on GME. They are searching for an outcome where they get to win and keep the system in tact, but the only way for that to happen is for GameStop to go bankrupt, which frankly isn’t going to happen.
And slowly but surely, DRS continues to tighten the noose that is around their necks. It is a something that is a fundamental weakness to their fraud, it is the Achilles’ heel.
