Do you Know Why?
2 The owner doesn't support my candidate.
3 FR won't "upgrade" to "Like" buttons and blinky crap.
4 Someone else will donate.
5 My friend was zotted.
6 I lost my job and have no income.
most dire.
bump
Corzine was the trigger man. It’s as if he walked into a Chicago barber shop on orders from his boss Obama, and shot the futures and options markets in the head at point blank range and tossed the untracable revolver to the side. With insider trading in Congress, Obama’s myriad of green scandals, and this latest brazen act of grand larceny squared, one can only conclude that this administration is acting like little more than a crime syndicate on a massive scale.
Check out Anns web site, scroll down to “ we the wipped” it’s a must read.
Oh, yeah. The S is definitely hitting the F in the options and futures world. This could lead to a broad lack of confidence in banks and other financial institutions. The FDIC does not have the money to cover everyone’s deposits.
Looks like Ann Barnhardt has read Ayn Rand.
“That base was the sacrosanct segregation of customer funds from clearing firm capital, with additional emergency financial backing provided by the exchanges themselves.”
Well, that works just as well as controls in place to enforce it - and this is an industry that has undertaken a two decade-long effort to reduce such controls and to intimidate those charged with enforcing them.
So now, they’re pretty much hoist on their own petard: they preached the gospel of self-regulation with market forces as a backup, with results absolute predictable to anybody who’s studied financial history.
And now they’re looking very, very hard to find somebody else to blame for the fact that the operation of the combination of absolutely predictable human self-delusion and greed absolutely guarantee absolutely massive misbehavior by some participants, that when there vast amounts of money to be made by misbehavior, you can never, ever trust that 100% of the participants are going to play even by their own rules.
This is a case where “trust and verify” should’ve been the order of the day, but the financial industry just didn’t want anything to do with that “verify” part when it started interfere with “efficiencies” and “synergies” - and especially the fabulously lucrative payouts to the people involved.
And still, in many cases don’t.
So now we’ll be hearing again about “rogues”, and “unfortunate failures of internal controls”.
And who knows, in this case maybe a few higher-ups will actually been discovered to have been privy to some of it, and will be made suitable examples of.
But nobody in the financial industry - at least anyone who still making any serious money - is going to be talking about the simple truth the individual incentives are set up in such a way that organizations rot simultaneously from a top-down and the bottom up, that for example many people in the mortgage industry. and right on up the food chain that fed on the toxic paper it was producing, from the real estate brokers, to the appraisers, to the underwriters, to their bosses and right on up to the CEOs - everywhere from the street corner to corner office, were breaking the rules because was so damn lucrative to do so.
And how the make incentives coupled with neutered regulators guaranteed that it would just spread and spread: as for example to where that many people in risk management knew perfectly well that the rating agencies were bought, and many people at the rating agencies knew that they were sold.
And the beauty of it was that the people at the very top could make it happen that way with a wink and a nod, and somewhere down the line somebody would perform the actual criminal act, but the boys at the top would walk with 10 or 20 or 50 million, and “clean hands”.
So even if Jon Corzine *is* actually dirty (unlikely, he knows how to play the game) and gets sent to the slammer for 150 years, don’t think it makes a difference.
He’s just playing the same game he he played at Goldman Sachs, as it’s played throughout just about nook ad cranny in the financial sector where there’s this kind of money to be made.
And until sector gets serious cops on the beat - ones they can bribe and they can’t browbeat, and they can’t buy enough politicians to get fired - it’s just going to go on and on and on.
bflr
bkmk
Oh boy.Source: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=197702Look folks, the risks involved here are real.
Rick Santelli was just on CNBC pointing out that there have been no answers forthcoming on the MF Global mess. There are reports that several people who you would never expect to have gotten caught in something like this did, including Gerald Celente.
The reason they got caught is the same reason I would have gotten caught if I had been clearing through MF Global: Despite being around the markets since well before the 2000 crash and having successfully negotiated that and the 2008 mess everyone has believed, right up until MF blew up, that customer funds were in fact segregated and thus this risk would never occur.
Simply put everyone has now discovered that this assumption is wrong.
Nothing that has come out of the CME, the SEC or Washington DC that has restored my confidence that MF Global is, in fact, a one-off situation. In point of fact The Fed is now requiring margin on certain repo transactions where they never did before, implying that there may well be additional snakes in the grass and additional unrecognized and intentionally hidden risks of this sort.
Read Ann's entire missive. Yes, it's highly partisan, but given what has just happened and Obama's continued insistence that "no crimes were committed" (yet no grand juries have been convened to investigate, so how would he know?) it is entirely justified.
Folks, we must insist that the rule of law be brought back into the forefront. We must do this particularly with credit instruments and other OTC derivatives and that has to happen right now. In addition all off-balance sheet BS must be ended immediately.
I have, since 2007, advocated that all credit instruments be forced onto an exchange and that cash margin be required on all underwater positions, marked nightly, without exception or offset. This has been "poo-pooed" as impractical due to bespoke contracts and other considerations.
Now it turns that I was in fact right - there were additional "snakes" in the grass that were cheating. First we had ENRON, then Bear and Lehman and now this.
Here's reality folks: We either fix this problem and do it now or you had better pray that Europe doesn't detonate, because if it does you're going to see the very thing that everyone was talking about back in 2008 happen on a global scale, it's a hundred times the size that Lehman was, and we will not be immune to it here in the United States -- in fact we'll damn near be the "center of the sun!"
There is the potential for an imminent cascade failure on these contracts just as there was in 2008; it has not gone away, it has not been attenuated, it has in fact grown in size since 08 and if we do not act to put a stop to it and the risk becomes realized it will be too late.
Don’t know ‘nothin bout this ‘Tyler Durden’ fella, but sure does seem Ann Barnhardt’s gone ‘John Galt’.
And a little Galt too.
Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate.
This is critical. Why in the world are they frozen when the commodities are still trading? Take a look at silver today, the customers in silver have just lost a lot of money. Will they get an instant margin call when they finally get their accounts back, one they could have avoided if they were able to access their accounts?
Everything Wall Street does is based upon trust, why would anyone give money to anyone they don't trust? This is people's livelyhoods, their retirements, their kid's college funds. If people do not trust Wall Street, they will find some other place to put their money.
The scary part is that I think Wall Street knows this, but there is such a collapse going on that they can't stop it.