Please do not be misled.
Deep Capture is one of the most important exposes on the internet and the winner of the 2008 weblogs award for the best business website. It is also a top corruption site and one of the top financial sites, despite its often controversial and colorful material.
The Deep Capture team warned of the financial crisis before it took place.
They've also systematically exposed the corrupt ties between the media and large hedge funds, banks, and regulators.
The team includes a former editor/writer from the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), who has criticized the CJR for having fallen captive to hedge-funds after having received funds from them, and has since been threatened and intimidated.
One of the founders (and funders) of the site, Patrick Byrne, holds a PhD in Developmental Studies and Moral Philosophy from Cambridge and Stanford, and is a former academic, a successful businessman, and the scion of one of America's most respected business families. He has also donated millions to charitable causes, including founding 17 schools in third-world countries and employing thousands of artisans, at a loss to his business. He is a cancer survivor who has been recognized for his personal courage and professional achievements numbers of times.
At the very least, that background suggests a humanitarian streak that undercuts the many exaggerations, half-truths, and outright lies published about him and this site.
Others on the team include a former missionary, concerned small businessmen and investors and shareholder activists, all dismayed by the corruption and fraud in the capital markets and engaged in systematically exposing it.
They've published striking and irrefutable evidence that some dozen or so major journalists have had (and still have) a cozy or corrupt relationship with the banks and hedge-funds they should be monitoring. Some of them also profited financially from those relationships. They've also documented the loopholes that allow large hedge-funds and banks to siphon off money from the system into their own pockets. They've won law suits. They've had the SEC open cases. They've got the FBI interested and had laws put into place.
Naturally that upsets the people who profit from the arrangement.
Naturally, those people hire other people to counter-attack.
Or they confuse novices with revisionist accounts of the story, which are then fed across their networks.
Naturally, the truth gets muddied.
Ask yourself.
With all the banks that have been bailed out at taxpayer expense, with all the crooks that have been caught red-handed and have then turned up as the heroes of magazine articles, with all the CEO's who've had major problems needing tax-payer help, from Vikram Pandit to Richard Fuld, why is it that these journalists spend so much valuable time attacking only one CEO of a relatively small company, with what looks like relatively minor problems (if they are problems)?
And that the CEO also just happens to be the one who exposed their corruption?
Let's even say Byrne is everything that his critics say he is.
So what? How does that change the corruption and fraud that is documented extensively on this site and available freely to the public?
Spend a few hours and read the extensive archives and the links on the site.
Then make up your mind for yourself.
The big names in the media didn't tell you what was going to happen in 2008.
Why would you believe them on anything else?
Full disclosure:
This review was unsolicited and was not paid for by anyone. I gave my honest opinion, based on researching the information at Deep Capture for several months.
This should not be construed as an endorsement of Overstock or of Patrick Byrne, beyond his work in exposing the corruption of the markets.
I have written two books on the media, one of which (written with a noted libertarian author) predicted the financial crisis (published in August 2007).
My other qualifications to speak on this subject are available at http://www.mindbodypolitic.com and at wikipedia.
Lila Rajiva
This review is the subjective opinion of an Investimonials member and not of Investimonials LLC
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