My Loss: Whose Gain? A Case of Disappearing Stock

When I graduated, my father gave me 15 shares of Schering-Plough stock. It seemed like a rock-solid move. My father was getting older and appreciated the relevance of pharmaceuticals that could only get stronger as we baby boomers ripened into our golden years...

Several career changes later, I had lived all over the world, kissed under Tokyo cherry blossoms, endured the August heat of Dubai. Back in the west, I recently called the Bank of New York (BONY), where my shares were last seen.

I was told that when Merck & Co. merged with Schering-Plough in 2009, it had turned its shares over to Wells Fargo, the bank now managing Merck shares.

Wells Fargo did not agree. "That account number isn't one from our system," a Wells Fargo representative told me. "We have different account numbers." The stock was not at Wells Fargo. "We must not have been able to get in touch with you over an extended period," the representative explained.

Since when is stock something that you have to check on every year? Stocks are touted as instruments that you put away and forget about while they grow.

Not so, the representative said. If the bank cannot verify your whereabouts, it turns the stock over to the government. 

I do not have my stock anymore. Don't tell me it just disappeared--poof. Who has the 'missing' money? Greedy bankers? The US government? The NYPD? Like the losses taxpayers are now struggling to replace, it went somewhere.

Escalating the issue, I was told that if I wanted to pursue it, I could pay $35 for a government search, whereas, the way I saw it, the bank was responsible for holding the stock for me until my retirement, and was therefore responsible for finding it. Stalemate.

This development should not have come as such a shock to me, considering that taxpayers are now being held responsible to pay for lawsuits that might arise should New York Police Department (NYPD) officers working directly for banks commit a crime against those very taxpayers.

Yes, on the ground on Wall Street, banks have, indeed, really hired the NYPD officers in a response to the Occupy movement. Through a mechanism called "the Paid Detail Unit," banks are employing armed NYPD officers in uniform, to serve banks' interests, rather than as the "public servants" their uniforms and badges imply.

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." --Benito Mussolini

Too dry for your taste? The protagonist in "Occupy's first bestselling novel," Trading Dreams, experiences the candy-coated version of this phenomenon trading with the U.S. mega-banks where the gambling is done in their own rigged casino. I show her getting set up as a scapegoat while watching where the money goes as the $1.7 quadrillion derivatives market takes its bets off the table.

The novel resonated with Amnesty International, since instead of getting married and living happily ever after, she gets arrested, saying, "They steal the money and throw us in jail."

The fact that banks can hire uniformed and armed public servants and hand taxpayers the bill for potential legal fees raises a lot of questions.

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