Posted on 02/11/2009 3:03:27 AM PST by Halfmanhalfamazing
$100 bills are subject to much scrutiny.
Most people will accept a $20 bill, but a $50 or $100 will get the Governmental highlighter swipe.
Plus one soldier FReeper informed me that a $20USD is accepted worldwide.....just in case you decide to flee to a Country where democracy reigns.
My mind is open to evidence of a Soros hit on the market...I don’t see it right now, but I am always open to new evidence. I wold like to see it investigated then devolve into a yet another conspiracy theory...
Explain the part of Kanjorski’s comment that it happened over the period of a couple of hours?
Even SNL had a skit that implicated Soros....It was pulled in two days from public view.
OK, no problem.
While there are some of us who are somewhat more experienced in the market and are paying attention to a trading terminal throughout the day, most people aren’t. So this wasn’t a run created by the retail investor.
Hedge fund managers, however, are paying attention all day, every day. Asset managers (ie, running managed accounts for high net worth people) are in the trading terminal all day. Managers at investment banks, brokerages, etc - all paying attention to the same news feeds - they all have Bloomberg terminals on their desks. If they’re watching CNBC, it is with the sound down, mostly for the view of the tight, low-cut sweaters, not any news content. The Bloomberg terminal is their real news and analysis feed, and this is what almost all professionals use. If you get to see a Bloomberg terminal, check it out. It is a very, very powerful tool and when you see what is available, you’ll see how the professionals are much better informed than the retail investors.
My point is, most professional money shops are all using the same source of news.
The Bloomberg terminals had been coughing up a steady stream of headlines stemming from the Lehman collapse since the night of Sunday, Sep. 14th. When people came into work on Monday morning, I’m sure they were already looking like deer in the headlights. It had finally happened - one of the Big Five investment banks - over 150 years old - went down in flames in the space of a couple weeks. Probably only 10 days prior, the thought have been so inconceivable, that most people who didn’t know the debt portfolio of Lehman would have laughed it off.
eg, look at people like Jim Cramer telling his viewers that they’d be crazy to pull their money out of Bear Sterns... only days before it went under.
When Lehman tipped over, and word went out that the funds broke the buck the next day, fund managers all over the country started looking at what money market funds they were using. Hedge funds especially, because European and UK hedge funds had been burned BADLY earlier in the year by a money market fund in Europe taking severe losses from having client money in illiquid debt investments which tanked.
As soon as word went out that Reserve broke a buck, the pro’s acted independently, but all with the same thought at the same time: “Holy *(&^*&^ - we can’t trust ANYTHING. SELL. NOW.” They had been primed for this by Lehman tipping over - and Lehman was counterparty to a whole lot of bond transactions. AIG was teetering - and they were insuring a whole lot more paper.
These “professionals” all think alike. I say “professional” in quotes because one of the marks of distinction that “financial professionals” like to claim is that they’re the “smart money.” This, it turns out, is far from the truth. They offer very little unique between each other. Many of them went to the same schools, have the same degrees, studied out of the same textbooks. They largely think alike - which is what got us here in the first place, after all — too many of them chased yield, believed that borrowers with low FICO scores could somehow pay down their mortgage in a way that resulted in a “AAA” rating by virtue of being deadbeats from all over the country combined into one CDO. That sort of thinking.
It was a whole lot of “financial professionals” who got us into this jam. It wasn’t the retail investor. It was people who like to call themselves “financial engineers” and the like. Never mind that real engineers wouldn’t have allowed this much risk to build up in the system. They like to call themselves “financial engineers” because it sounds cool — like they’re designing something slick — sorta like a banana peel on a linoleum floor, I guess.
So when you get a bunch of people like this, who think alike... and they see the same event (one of the oldest money market funds in the US breaking a buck), from the same data/news source, they all do the same thing at once: sell, sell, by God sell NOW.
No co-ordination, no conspiracy, no need for Freemasons, Jews or Illuminati need to be involved, and while I’m sure there are more than a couple Masons or Jews working on Wall Street, they weren’t doing all this selling after meeting at the lodge/temple for three-whisky or three-martini lunch, hatching a plan and then going back to their desks to bring down the world around us.
This was just blind, herd-mentality panic.
I can not see the “panicked people” of this country coming together in an 1 1/2 to 2 hours to pull this off. It doesn’t make the least bit of sense. We all need to demand that our government tell us the truth.
It was pulled because the two people (a couple named Herb and Marion Sandler) who had sold a sub-prime origination bank in California (Golden West Financial, purchased by Wachovia in one of the most stunningly stupid deals of the sub-prime melt-down) threatened to sue NBC for libel, not because of Soros. The Sandlers are not “public” people, so NBC’s parody of their sale of the bank, and the subsequent melt-down of Wachovia being presented as being the fault of the Sandlers was libelous.
Sit in front of a trading terminal some day.
You can see dozens to hundreds of actors on Wall Street act in concert with no more co-ordination than the price and volume movements they see on the screen in front of them.
My wife and I were part of that near collapse.
I got word about the money fund in trouble on 9/17, the first warning may have come from this site.
I immediately put a sell on a large amount of our Fido regular money funds and their federal reserve money fund in our IRAs.
On 9/18, the money was dumped into the short term, medium term and a few long term CDs that we could buy via Fido.
On 9/18, I cashed out enough cash from our remaining money markets to handle the bills and extras into this month and had it deposited into our checking acct, in case the system crashed. As soon as that cash arrived, it was transferred to a internet bank with a high interest CD on the internet. That will be closed out this week as their rates are dropping and some other flags showed up.
The evening of 9/18, I convinced my wife to roll about 98% of her current 401k into her Fido Ira to buy Cds, Gld and other hopefully more secure paper. That process took until Mid November. All of her 401k was in the money markets due to the stock hits in July 2007. In May/June of 2007, because of the Pelosi/Reid bs, I had tried to convince her to get out of her 401k’s mutual funds. She didn’t want to do it as the funds I had picked for her had a good run. We went on a cruise the first part of that July, and she lost about 10-12% per fund in less than two weeks. So we moved all of her 401k into their money fund.
This August, we bought a fair chunk of GLD in case total disaster happened. She has added more since then. Through her job, she knows a successful investment couple for themselves and the formerly rich winos. They got totally into GLD and hard gold from Aug through November and have the rest in CDs in various banks.
We both own the following etf’s with sell orders changed at least once a week to protect any major losses: SHY, TlO, LTH.
When the inflation cycle starts to kick up, after this kamakazi bailout, I may sell TLO/TLH and buy TIP and ETF’s that short the DOW or S&P 500.
But it certainly does make sense.
Good advice the $20’s.
We will start storing and hiding a few $20 bills each week.
They are easy to get from the ATM. So we will just add a few extra 20’s each time we use our ATM for cash, about 4 times per month.
Maybe it was both. A coordinated blow and actions by a lot of investors like me with a few bucks in our IRA money funds.
Below is a little summary of my actions that day and the next day. I’m that I was not by myself. Also, I’m not on George $oreA$$’s special email list.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2183027/posts?page=131#131
But the conspiracy!! Such fun!!! Anyway, thank you for your thoughtful response.
Remember reading about short selling originating in Pakistan, India or Indonesia shortly after all this happened....Is there information out there regarding this or was it just talk.
SOROS and friends
I can not see the “panicked people” of this country coming together in an 1 1/2 to 2 hours to pull this off
_____________________________________________
Of course not, why is the government hiding it. We have a right to know.
I understand that. I still can’t see $550 Billion going that fast in such a short amount of time. Maybe it can happen but why has it never happened before?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.