Three researchers from the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Mass. (http://necsi.edu/) -- Vedant Misra, Marco Lagi, and Yaneer Bar-Yam -- last month published a research paper identifying what seems to have been an enormous short-side manipulation of Citigroup stock in November 2007. While that was five years ago, the study indicates how easy it is for large financial institutions to manipulate markets in the absence of rigorous oversight by market regulators, particularly after the repeal of the "uptick" rule for short sales.
That is, anyone with access to enough money can rig any market at all, a principle whose application to the commodity markets and central banks may have been first articulated by the British economist Peter Warburton in his 2001 essay, "The Debasement of World Currency -- It Is Inflation But Not As We Know it":
http://www.gata.org/node/8303
The New England Complex System Institute's study is titled "Evidence of Market Manipulation in the Financial Crisis" and it's posted in PDF format at the institute's Internet site here:
http://necsi.edu/research/economics/bearraid.pdf
