Today 21 April a suspect in the 11 April 2017 bomb attack on the Borussia Dortmund football/soccer team has been arrested in the town where I work.
Is this a first or are there other examples where crimes of violence have been done in order to depress a stock’s value, for the perpetrator to profit?
It might be the first time it’s been done primarily for that motive, but just prior to the September 11 attacks, there were some individuals heavily short-selling airline stock (that is to say, betting that something would cause airline stock to drop dramatically in price).
That’s a plot line in Grand Theft Auto V. Only in the game you had to buy a bunch of shares, assassinate the competitor’s CEO, wait a week or so to avoid suspicion, and then profit! I figure most of that game is an extreme version of real life crimes. Which makes me think there were at least one or two real life crimes with similar motives that inspired the game. But maybe someone just had a devious imagination.
According to Snopes, there was no nefarious motivation behind short-selling of airline stock prior to 9/11.
“Nefarious” meaning pre-knowledge of the attacks or being an actual conspirator.
Just a couple of months ago a guy was arrested for a plan to bomb Target stores in an attempt to depress their stock prices so he could buy it low and (later) sell it high. He got as far as crafting IEDs and giving them to an associate for deployment. Said associate instead promptly went to the authorities.
There was an incident just 2 months ago, when someone was arrested for planning to bomb Target stores, allegedly to manipulate its stock price.
I do wonder sometimes if some of the bigger hacks of credit card databases and customer data are due to people who just want to the corporation in question to take a PR hit, rather than people who want to use all those CC numbers and customer addresses.
Depending on what counts as “crimes of violence” and whether you care if the perpetrator acted alone or was part of a corporation, there are plenty of examples.
The “Banana wars” might count.
Interesting idea.
But for that to work the bad guys would have to ensure the word gets out. Historically businesses would do all they could to cover those breaches up. I’m not up on the current status of legislation requiring prompt and complete disclosure. Nor the enforcement of same. I’m also not all that confident every big business could detect such a theft. You can’t admit to something you genuinely haven’t discovered.
If the bad guys wanted to profit on stock manipulation they need to control the timing of the publicity about the discovery.
Bad guys issuing a press release “Neener neener, we have 50 million credit cards we filched from Walmart” solves the timing problem but runs the risk of the press release becoming the clue that leads back to the bad guys.
This guy has a really poor idea about how the stock market works.
There was a suggestion in the media many many moons ago that the infamous “Tylenol tampering” which killed several people back in the 1980’s was done so someone could profit off the anticipated stock drop. I don’t recall there was any concrete proof of that. The net result is that we got tamper-proof sealed products.
Every time I see the Borussia Dortmund bomb story, I think of the Name Game song. Russia, Russia, Borussia, fee, fi …
Sorry, I’ll let you return to serious discussion.
FTR: OP is exactly a main plank in over a century of anti-Semitic myth making. Imagine the example of Chronos but held as a certainty that ALL major wars (“crimes of violence”) and subsequent market forces have been abetted by Rothschilds and other Jews, including me.
Why would it not have worked? If a dozen bombs go off, with a gap of a few days between each one, wouldn’t shareholders be expected to sell (thereby depressing share prices), given their expectation that fearful shoppers would stay out of stores?
To be fair, it might not have been a very big drop. Worst case, maybe several percent if it’s a sustained bombing campaign. So he would have expected to make only those few percent after the share price rebounds (and he sells his cheaply bought shares).
Wait, did I just answer my own question? :dubious:
suggestion? the guy admitted that was why he did it it … the person who turned him in also said that’s why he did it…
From Wikipedia:
Because the best way to profit from that kind of thing isn’t to buy cheaply after the event and wait for recovery, the way to profit from that is by using options before the event. You can buy puts before the event and make many times the profit that can be made by buying the stock afterwards.
9/11? :rolleyes::rolleyes:
that’s a floating theory among conspiracy theorists…
But on a serious note, some more knowledgable dopers can confirm that there was insider trading of airline stocks. Don’t know whether that’s true or not.
A big put like that will stand out like a sore thumb to the regulators, though. Buying stock after the fact probably has a better chance of sneaking under the radar.
Putting out a large short ahead of the bombing would be suspicious and traceable. Buying a dip after the event (and then presumably stopping the bombing campaign) would be far less suspicious, because anyone might take the view that the selloff made the stock a bargain. So that element seems reasonable.
But there are 1,800 Target stores. How would you convince the market of the notion of a massive highly specific anti-Target bombing campaign? A one-off attack would likely be interpreted as terrorism against generic mall targets, with little to be read into the particular store that was attacked.
I could speculate on more effective ways to spook the market by violent action, but I’m not going to.
ETA: ninja-ed by Rysto.