Hook.Line.Sinker

The following story is fiction. Any resemblance to any persons either living or dead is purely coincidental.

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So let’s say there is this company in Japan called the Bank of Marine Organisms (BMO for short). They are the 4th largest fish processing company in Japan. They buy fish, they sell fish, they warehouse fish and they mortgage fish inventories.

The Bank of Marine Organisms also trades Fugu. Fugu is a tasty fish that if cooked incorrectly will kill you. The Japanese government strongly regulates Fugu and only allows carefully trained chefs to prepare it. The livers of the Fugu fish are the most lethal part of the fish, but are also reported to be the tastiest. Like any natural product, Fugu has an expiration date past which it can not be sold.

The Bank of Marine Organisms is a publically traded company. They don’t hide the fact that they deal in Fugu, but they downplay it. Instead, they present themselves to their shareholders as a cut and dried fish operation. Even though Fugu represents less than 1% of the fish BMO sells by volume, it generates a much larger percent of their total profits.

Fugu traders get special treatment at BMO, but nothing compared to the elite traders who trade Fugu livers near their expiration date. These traders ‘swim’ in highly profitable, yet highly toxic waters where a highly regulated precious commodity is on the brink of becoming worthless.

David Eel was one such trader and he was good at his job. The market for near expiration Fugu livers is so small, and Eel’s influence in it was so large, that Eel was able to set the market prices. Things went on this way for a number of years, David Eel made a lot of money for BMO and in turn BMO rewarded David Eel with a huge salary and bonuses.

But nothing so risky runs smoothly forever. A large Fugu hedge fund, aMerInch, collapsed and the market still hadn't fully recovered from the stench caused by EnRoe. The Securities and Exchange Commission was sniffing around fish trader's financial reports, and it was just a bad time to be trading Fugu.... let alone near expiration Fugu liver. David Eel's influence weakened and he was no longer able to make his prices stick in the marketplace.

BMO was worried because they were looking at Eel's huge inventory of near expiration Fugu liver – and over a million dollars worth of the stuff was expiring daily.

Without David Eel’s ability to set and enforce prices, BMO had to dump a lot of their near expiration Fugu livers at a loss. They had some explaining to do. They knew that with the amount of blood they were spilling into the waters Government sharks were gonna be circling.

In an attempt to distract the Government and their own shareholders, BMO fired David Eel and repackaged his diminished influence in the market instead as a fraud. BMO's spin was that Eel had been lying to them when he reported the value of his near expiration Fugu livers inventory rather than saying that Eel had previously been able to set market market prices and now he wasn't. After all, this strategy had worked for them several years earlier when they fired Eel's predecessor under similar circumstances.

Luckily it turned out that David Eel traded a lot of his near expiration Fugu livers through a small brokerage firm called Oceanable. Oceanable was also a publically traded company and its CEO had a public, but not commonly known criminal record. This made Oceanable an easy scapegoat. BMO held a press conference and spun their conspiracy theory which blamed reports from Oceanable based on Eel's valuations as a cause of their losses on near expiration Fugu livers.

When the criminal record of Oceanable’s CEO, Kevin Bassidy was reported, the press, shareholders and even Government agencies swallowed BMO’s story: Hook, Line and Sinker. "Oh, I get it now", came the collective sigh of relief, "there was a Criminal involved - that explains everything". Oceanable’s CEO was arrested and eventually, years later, took a plea deal.

The irony is that Oceanable's reports actually brought more transparency to the near expiration Fugu liver trading market than was previously possible. The toxicity levels were accurately reported and expiration dates were accurately tracked. The only ‘crime’ that happened was that Oceanable accurately reported the valuation of David Eel’s near expiration Fugu livers during the period of time that Eel controlled the market.