Posted on 12/17/2011 8:38:03 PM PST by blam
Liquidation Of Customer Stored Gold And Silver Bullion From MF Global
Commodities / Gold and Silver 2011
Dec 17, 2011 - 12:27 PM
By: Jesse
The bottom line is that apparently some warehouses and bullion dealers are not a safe place to store your gold and silver, even if you hold a specific warehouse receipt. In an oligarchy, private ownership is merely a concept, subject to interpretation and confiscation.
Although the details and the individual perpetrators are yet to be disclosed, what is now painfully clear is that the CFTC and CME regulated futures system is defaulting on its obligations. This did not even happen in the big failures like Lehman and Bear Sterns in which the customer accounts were kept whole and transferred before the liquidation process.
Obviously holding unallocated gold and silver in a fractional reserve scheme is subject to much more counterparty risk than many might have previously admitted. If a major bullion bank were to declare bankruptcy or a major exchange a default, how would it affect you? Do you think your property claims would be protected based on what you have seen this year?
You always have counter-party risk if you hold gold and silver through another party, even if they are a Primary Dealer of the Federal Reserve. As Ben said, the Fed offers no seal of approval.
If a Bankruptcy Trustee can pool your bullion into the rest of the paper assets and then liquidate it at prices that are being front run by the Street, you will have to accept whatever paper settlement that they give you.
The customer money and bullion assets are not lost, or rehypothecated or anything else. This is a pseudo-legal fig leaf, a convenient rationalization.
The customer assets were stolen, and given to at least one major financial institution by MF Global to satisfy an 11th hour margin call in the week of their bankruptcy, even as MF Global was paying bonuses to its London employees. And now that powerful financial institution does not want to give the customer money back. And they are so powerful that the Trustee and the Court is reluctant to try and claw it back. And so in the great Wall Street tradition they are trying to force the customers and the public to take the loss. The regulators and the exchange are aghast, and are trying to imagine how to resolve and spin this to preserve investor confidence and prevent a run on the system.
'Let them eat warehouse receipts.'
For many this would have been unthinkable only a few months ago. They had been cautioned and warned repeatedly, but chose to trust the financial system. And now they are suffering loss and anxiety, frozen assets, and the misappropriation of their wealth.
How more plainly can it be said? The US financial system as it now stands cannot be trusted to observe even the most basic property rights as it continues to unravel from a long standing culture of fraud.
Get your money as far away from Wall Street as is possible. And if you want to own gold and silver, take delivery and store it in a secure private facility outside the fractional reserve system.
Barrons
The Silver Rush at MF Global
By ERIN E. ARVEDLUND
December 17, 2011
It's one thing for $1.2 billion to vanish into thin air through a series of complex trades, the well-publicized phenomenon at bankrupt MF Global. It's something else for a bar of silver stashed in a vault to instantly shrink in size by more than 25%.
That, in essence, is what's happening to investors whose bars of silver and gold were held through accounts with MF Global.
The trustee overseeing the liquidation of the failed brokerage has proposed dumping all remaining customer assets—gold, silver, cash, options, futures and commodities—into a single pool that would pay customers only 72% of the value of their holdings. In other words, while traders already may have paid the full price for delivery of specific bars of gold or silver—and hold "warehouse receipts" to prove it—they'll have to forfeit 28% of the value.
That has investors fuming. "Warehouse receipts, like gold bars, are our property, 100%," contends John Roe, a partner in BTR Trading, a Chicago futures-trading firm. He personally lost several hundred thousand dollars in investments via MF Global; his clients lost even more. "We are a unique class, and instead, the trustee is doing a radical redistribution of property," he says.
Roe and others point out that, unlike other MF Global customers, who held paper assets, those with warehouse receipts have claims on assets that still exist and can be readily identified.
The tussle has been obscured by former CEO Jon Corzine's appearances on Capitol Hill. But it's a burning issue for the Commodity Customer Coalition, a group that says it represents some 8,000 investors—many of them hedge funds—with exposure to MF Global. "I've issued a declaration of war," says James Koutoulas, lead attorney for the group, and CEO of Typhon Capital Management.
At stake is an unspecified, but apparently large, volume of gold and silver bars slated for delivery to traders through accounts at MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 31. Adding insult to the injury: Of the 28% haircut, attorney and liquidation trustee James Giddens has frozen all asset classes, meaning that traders have sat helplessly as silver prices have dropped 31% since late August, and gold has fallen 16%. To boot, the traders are still being assessed fees for storage of the commodities...
In an oligarchy, your life is merely a concept, subject to interpretation and confiscation.
Well, if it weighs 500 lbs...
You called it.
I think thats what we used to call ‘theft’........
Pure corruption for sure. Best thing these traders could have done is to have gold bullets made.
They are trying to crash the system, no doubt about it.
That’s been my suspicion about the “why” behind MF Global when I first read about their client’s missing money.
Sounds like a serious heist.. convert to gold(precious metals) and they “disappear”...
Could a new genre of heisting.. “black collar crime”...
Convert company assets to gold and the gold evaporates.. like down a black hole..
Congratulations sir. You get it.
It grow worse and worse.
Precisely. It's the natural outcome of an outlook that sees human beings as nothing more than things, animals or machines.
Oh the bullion is still there, the trustee wants to use some of it to pay other creditors, thus continuing the theft of customer assets.
Oh the bullion is still there, the trustee wants to use some of it to pay other creditors, thus continuing the theft of customer assets.
Ayn Rand once said, “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.” In this case, the only premise that makes sense is that the SEC and other oversight agencies deliberately ignored the evidence handed to them on a silver platter. The question then becomes, "To what end?"
The answer to that question pops into perspective if we take a look at the outcomes of Bernie Madoff's crimes, which are in the final analysis, no different from those committed by Corzine and his cronies. In brief, the damage they did went far beyond the theft of peoples' life savings and investments. First of all, they did enormous damage to a number of charitable, cultural and civic organizations, deeply impairing their ability to function. Second - and I believe that this was the primary goal - to damage the fundamental trust that people held in common.
Let's take a look at the notion of trust from Francis Fukuyama's point of view. There is much that one can dispute about Fukuyama's analysis of trust, but if we look at what Corzine and Madoff actually did, they broke down the degree of trust necessary for what Fukuyama characterized as a 'high-trust' society. According to Fukuyama, a high trust society permitted the development of modern capitalist structures. Virtually every transaction we make depends upon the trust that we hold in common that our contracts will be honored, from the simple handshake to the most complex of legal agreements. Undermine that trust and you get... what? Chaos? Lawlessness? Sure, Fukuyama's a stopped clock who's right twice a day. But he is right in this case.
And then the question becomes, "Qui bono?" The answer will be found on the Gramsci-Alinsky axis and Quigley's Pakistani-Peruvian Axis. The destruction of trust, the pervasive corruption that many now almost dismiss with a shrug - it's part of the second phase of Gramsci's method what he termed "destabilization". Again, qui bono?.
Finally, the question that should haunt us all is, "then what?" No one seems to want to answer that one, much less think about it. For it requires you to think the unthinkable, doesn't it?
Jim Sinclair is saying they crashed MF on purpose because they were the “clearing house” for funds that were aimed towards futures options on gold and silver which were settleable in November.
So many funds, in fact, that Comex and CME would have defaulted - they didn’t have enough metal.
Look how Celente got burned! They basically stole his money that he was standing for delivery with!
That’s been the game all along. The futures market is so rigged, it’s ridiculous.
Operative words: "Global Failure"
yitbos
Few understand Gramsci or Alinsky tactics and agendas..
Cloward-Piven although Beck championed displaying it/them.. is not displayed even on FOX..
Nowhere is this talked about.. Newt mentioned it “in passing”..
This stuff is radio-active.. no one wants to mention it..
Probably because they do not understand it fully..
There is need for “someone” to simplify this stuff..
Beyond it is a nasty and poisonous malfeance..
On FOX probably O’Really would block any mention of it..
The following is from http://www.barnhardt.biz
On Sychophants, Process Servers & Decoupling
Posted by Ann Barnhardt - December 15, AD 2011 9:38 PM MST
[The BASIS is the relationship between the cash market and the futures market and is very simply defined as (CASH minus FUTURES)].
“The lynchpin that is holding this dynamic together and keeping the futures markets tied to the underlying cash market is the fact that the futures contracts are deliverable, and a trader can either deliver or take delivery of actual physical silver via his futures position.”
***********************************
This crashes the system, doesn’t it?
Pretty much, yup.
At least it destroys any idea of the futures market being a reliable “price discovery mechanism” that it is often touted as.
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