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In the midst of sparsely filled giant office buildings in the financial district and the eerily quiet atmosphere of the Upper East Side, a change is brewing. The once thriving capital markets, which served as the engine of innovation, have been compromised by a system that no longer works in the best interest of the common investor.

As the CEO and Chairman of Creatd (OTCQB: VOCL) and a financial markets veteran of three decades, I was horrified as I watched Janet Yellen dismiss short-selling in an interview with CNBC’s Sara Eisen on ‘Closing Bell Overtime’.

As the world becomes increasingly globalized, investors are looking for ways to diversify their portfolios and access markets beyond their own borders.

The cryptocurrency market is known for its volatility, and investors often experience highs and lows.

Silicon Valley Bank's (SVB) failure has caused widespread concern in the tech industry, with over $42 billion being withdrawn by depositors following the bank's announcement that it needed to raise $2.25 billion to shore up its balance sheet. The FDIC has taken over and will cover up to $250,000 per depositor, but the vast majority of SVB's customers are businesses that had kept far greater uninsured amounts at the bank. Venture capital firms, including Accel, Cowboy Ventures, Greylock, Lux Capital, and Sequoia, have signed a joint statement vowing to do business again with SVB if it is "purchased and appropriately capitalized."

Shorting a stock can be a profitable strategy for investors looking to capitalize on a company's declining stock price.

Hello there, fellow investors! Today, let's talk about a common issue in the stock market - the "fail to deliver" (FTD).

In September 2022, Alpine Securities Corporation received unwelcome news from the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) that deficiencies had been observed in the company's portfolio, causing it to fall below its backtesting target.

Twitter Space explainer and discussion on Reverse Splits with Jeremy Frommer.

CEOBloc's weekly Town Hall with Jeremy Frommer.

I arrived in Washington DC on January 27th, and one by one I met the men and women who had gathered on that cold winter night at the Dubliner Restaurant in the Phoenix Park Hotel. It was an apropos spot for a meeting of like-minded individuals committed to a cause. We were gathered at two long tables in a room off to the side of the main bar. It felt like a room where a friendly town hall meeting might take place. Each person in attendance was willing to spend the next two days standing on a sidewalk as the wind whipped off the imposing glass edifice of the Washington DC headquarters of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), adding a sharp wind chill to the already frigid temperatures. They were here protesting the injustice of manipulative and deceptive trading practices, including naked shorting. These practices are just the tip of the iceberg for a broader systemic problem facing a corrupted financial services industry and had impacted every person in the room. 

For the better part of the past two decades, public companies from microcap penny stocks to Nasdaq-traded Overstock.com have had to do battle with the bears, in the form of short-sellers. The two questions every CFO wants answered are: Who’s shorting our stock? and How can we stop them?

I heard CV Payne say it. I put aside all judgment. We all need to do that to move forward as a nation. He was right though, Ken Griffin is smoking a cigar and laughing at the 99%. He was on a live feed with the organizer of the first Occupy SEC 2023, Mike “The Marine”. He was discussing the plight of the retail investor in today's capitalist-driven society.

Before we head off to D.C. and join the #OccupySEC2023 initiative, we wanted to make sure we addressed this community and articulated in more detail what we perceive the event is all about and what CEOBLOC aims to achieve with its participation and support of the cause.

So began Jon Stewart’s interview with Gary Gensler, held in March 2022 for his podcast 'The Problem with Jon Stewart'. In it, the veteran journalist and media personality grilled the SEC Chairman about his organization’s shortcomings, specifically in their investigation of the short squeeze scandal that occurred in early 2021.

Recap of the CEO Roundtable LIVEstream, where we discussed strategies for combating naked short selling. Please share with your CEO, Board & Investors!

The movie that tells the story about how Wall Street ripped off America is here.

As a journalist and breaking news reporter in NYC, I have always had an interest in and followed the ever evolving story of Wall Street and the capital markets.

It’s been an eventful week. On Monday I had a conversation with John Brda, the ex-CEO of Torchlight, where he shared his story of fighting naked short sellers and taking his company’s share price from $0.30 to $11.00 raising $183 million and merging with Meta at a $1.9 billion market cap. All in six months!

I got into investing late in my life, almost at the age of 40, and I decided to start researching companies to figure out how to invest in stocks, and which stocks to invest in. Through that, I found other folks that were looking to invest in stocks utilizing social media through places like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Discord, and so on. As a community, we started to learn together as we shared information and did due diligence on the companies. That’s when I found out about AMC and GameStop and started to learn about these heavily shorted manipulated stocks. The longer I stayed in those communities, the more information I obtained; the more corruption I discovered in the stock market.

Market manipulation of emerging or small-cap companies is pervasive on Wall Street and according to the SEC has increased significantly in the last decade. 

This transcript is an excerpt from an interview I did with r/Superstonk Live. In the interview, which took place in May 2021, Dave Lauer hosted and Redditor u/jsmar18 moderated a discussion with questions influenced by and taken directly from the AMA post on r/Superstonk.

2022 was a year of devastation both in the traditional and cryptocurrency markets. The stock market tumbled and the IPO and SPAC markets ground to a halt. The crypto winter became an all-out crypto freeze. Billions were lost or locked in bankruptcy actions as TerraUSD, Celsius Network, 3AC, Voyager, BlockFi and FTX imploded.

Our capital markets are under attack, not by terrorists or hostile foreign countries, but by brokerage firms, their hedge fund clients and large institutional investors who engage in Naked Short Selling.

My attorney's words hurt like a pain that you don't want to get up from. But then I visualized all the carnage that comes along with you giving up. I dug so deep, I didn't know that I had that depth, burying any emotional obstacles and zeroing in on one singular idea. Survival. I had to cauterize the wound and move on as fast as I could. There were too many people depending on me–investors, employees, vendors, clients, friends and family.