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by Mark Hanson

MHanson.com

May 6, 2013

Like so many other epic bubble years’ housing market explosion epicenters, Las Vegas real estate caught fire again pushing prices up 30% YoY vs the 10% national average.  This statement alone should raise a plethora of red flags to anybody remotely familiar with the sector.  But to Wall Street, which has a memory of about 9 months at best, this is what a “housing market recovery” looks like this time around.  I beg to differ.

That’s because there is little about the past year of ‘better’ housing market data that is rooted in economic fundamentals (things that drive “durable housing market expansion).   It’s not like house sales volume, rents, jobs, or income is surging.   It’s not like supply is so ‘low’ because demand is surging;  rather, it’s because 6 million units of supply headed for market was rented back to its’ legacy owners by the banks and gov’t in the form of mods;  several states made it virtually illegal to foreclose;  and foreclosure timelines were being stretched out 15 days for every 30 that passed.

But besides all that, taken in the context of “post-crash” the past year of data are “underwhelming” especially relative to consensus opinion, sentiment, and periods prior to 2007.    That’s because this market is structurally broken. It lacks the fundamentals horsepower imperative to a “durable” housing market recovery.   And without the fundamentals in the drivers’ seat, the past year of housing market activity is more closely akin to a stock market “short squeeze” than anything else.

Take Vegas for example. It has gotten some interesting contra-recovery press over the past few days from a couple of market observers noticing things just don’t feel or look right there.

“Lack of Supply” is mostly commonly referenced as the reason house prices in Vegas “v” bottomed.

And with:

• 10% unemployment
• 57% of all homeowners Zombified;  underwater, over-levered renters of their own houses (70% in many regions)
• 25% of all homeowners on modifications and workouts so exotic they would make Angelo Mozillo blush
• 12% of all houses in default or foreclosure
• a 50% increase in construction permits
• Falling Rents – about to get really bad
• MASSIVE SFR rental supply coming online (some 55k units) and multi-family starts back to 2006 highs.
• and only 3000 to 4000 sales on avg per month (down YoY for several months running I might add)

it certainly isn’t housing market “fundamentals” pushing up prices.

Bottom line:  With a fundamentals backdrop as portrayed by the metrics above, Las Vegas — and dozens of other legacy bubble years regions around the nation — should not be performing so well.   Yes, last year there was a transitory supply shortage amidst numerous wildly over-supplied housing markets, as investor demand collided with massive loan mod intervention and new laws outlawing foreclosure all together.  But that’s neither durable nor a positive…rather, it makes it highly questionable whether the recent performance even can be durable.  It makes more sense that these regions have turned highly volatile and house prices stand just as strong of a chance of declining 10% over the next year as increasing.

Read the entire article HERE.

The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix

by Matt Taibbi

April 25, 2013 1:00 PM ET

Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.

You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”

That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.

Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.

It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia

Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.

“It’s a double conspiracy,” says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s the height of criminality.”

The bad news didn’t stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. “Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry,” CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.

But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’ incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.

“A farce,” was one antitrust lawyer’s response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.

“Incredible,” says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.

All of these stories collectively pointed to the same thing: These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation’s GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it’s increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

If true, that would leave us living in an era of undisguised, real-world conspiracy, in which the prices of currencies, commodities like gold and silver, even interest rates and the value of money itself, can be and may already have been dictated from above. And those who are doing it can get away with it. Forget the Illuminati – this is the real thing, and it’s no secret. You can stare right at it, anytime you want.

theeconomiccollapseblog.com

If you want to figure out what is going to happen next in the financial markets, carefully watch what the insiders are doing.  Those that are “connected” have access to far better sources of information than the rest of us have, and if they hear that something big is coming up they will often make very significant moves with their money in anticipation of what is about to happen.  Right now, Wall Street insiders and central banks all around the globe are making some very unusual moves.  In fact, they appear to be rapidly preparing for something really big.  So exactly what are they up to?  In a previous article entitled “Are The Government And The Big Banks Quietly Preparing For An Imminent Financial Collapse?“, I speculated that they may be preparing for a financial meltdown of some sort.  As I noted in that article, more than 600 banking executiveshave resigned from their positions over the past 12 months, and I have been personally told that a substantial number of Wall Street bankers have been shopping for “prepper properties” this summer.  But now even more evidence has emerged that quiet preparations are being made for an imminent financial collapse.  That doesn’t guarantee that something will happen or won’t happen.  Like any good detective, we are gathering clues and trying to figure out what the evidence is telling us.

Why Is George Soros Selling So Much Stock And Buying So Much Gold?

I am certainly not a fan of George Soros.  He has funneled millions upon millions of dollars into organizations that are trying to take America in the exact wrong direction.

However, I do recognize that he is extremely well connected in the financial world.  Soros is almost always ahead of the curve on financial matters, and if something big is going to go down George Soros is probably going to know about it ahead of time.

That is why it is very alarming that he has dumped all of his banking stocks and that he is massively hoarding gold.  The following is from shtfplan.com….

In a harbinger of what may be coming our way in the Fall of 2012, billionaire financier George Soros has sold all of his equity positions in major financial stocks according to a 13-F report filed with the SEC for the quarter ending June 30, 2012.

Soros, who manages funds through various accounts in the US and the Cayman Islands, has reportedly unloaded over one million shares of stock in financial companies and banks that include Citigroup (420,000 shares), JP Morgan (701,400 shares) and Goldman Sachs (120,000 shares). The total value of the stock sales amounts to nearly $50 million.

What’s equally as interesting as his sale of major financials is where Soros has shifted his money. At the same time he was selling bank stocks, he was acquiring some 884,000 shares (approx. $130 million) of Gold via the SPDR Gold Trust.

Why would you dump over a million shares of stock in major banks and purchase more than 100 million dollars worth of gold?

Well, it would make perfect sense if you believed that a collapse of the financial system was about to happen.

Earlier this year, George Soros told the following to Newsweek….

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

It looks like he is putting his money where his mouth is.

Perhaps even more disturbing is what he believes is coming after the financial collapse….

As anger rises, riots on the streets of American cities are inevitable. “Yes, yes, yes,” he says, almost gleefully. The response to the unrest could be more damaging than the violence itself. “It will be an excuse for cracking down and using strong-arm tactics to maintain law and order, which, carried to an extreme, could bring about a repressive political system, a society where individual liberty is much more constrained, which would be a break with the tradition of the United States.”

That doesn’t sound good.

George Soros has told us what he believes is going to happen, and now he is making moves with his money that indicate that he is convinced that it is actually about to start happening.

But he is not the only one that has been busy accumulating gold.

Billionaire John Paulson (the one that made 20 billion dollars on the subprime mortgage meltdown) has been buying gold like crazy and his company now “has 44 percent of its $24 billion fund exposed to bullion.”

So why are Soros and Paulson buying up so much gold?

Central Banks Are Also Hoarding Gold

According to the World Gold Council, the amount of gold bought by the central banks of the world absolutely soared during the second quarter of 2012.  The 157.5 metric tons of gold bought by the central banks of the world last quarter was an increase of 62.9 percent from the first quarter of 2012 and a 137.9 percent increase from the second quarter of 2011.

Prior to 2009, the central banks of the world had been net sellers of gold for about two decades.  But now that has totally changed, and last quarter central banks stocked up on gold in quantities that we have not seen before….

At 157.5 metric tons, gold buying among central banks came in at its highest quarterly level since the sector became a net buyer of the precious metal in the second quarter of 2009, data in the organization’s quarterly Gold Demand Trends report show.

So why have the central banks of the world become such gold bugs?

Is there something they aren’t telling us?

Rampant Insider Selling

Wall Street insiders have been dumping a whole lot of stock this year.

In my previous article, I linked to a CNN article from back in April….

First quarter earnings have been decent, if not spectacular. And many corporate executives are issuing cautiously optimistic guidance for the rest of the year.

But while insiders’ lips are saying one thing, their wallets are saying another. The level of insider selling among S&P 500 (SPX) companies is the highest in nearly 10 years. That is not good.

A lot of insiders appear to be getting out at the top of the market while the getting is still good.

Other insiders appear to be bailing out before the bottom falls out from beneath them.

Just check out what has been happening to Facebook stock.  It hit another new record low on Thursday as insiders dumped stock.  The following is from a CNN article….

Facebook’s life as a public company has been a nightmare from day one, and the pain continued on Thursday as some company insiders got their first chance to dump shares.

Facebook stock hit a new intra-day low of $19.69 Thursday morning, and ended the day 6.3% lower at $19.87.

Sadly, Facebook has now lost close to half of its value since the IPO.

Will Facebook end up being the poster child for the irrational stock market bubble that we have seen over the past couple of years?

Overall, retail investors have been very busy pulling money out of stocks in recent weeks.

The following are the net inflows to equity funds over the past five weeks (in millions of dollars) according to ICI….

7/11/2012: -537

7/18/2012: 637

7/25/2012: -2,999

8/1/2012: -6,866

8/8/2012: -3,684

According to the figures above, more than 10 billion dollars has been pulled out of equity funds over the past two weeks alone.

So does this mean anything?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

But it is very interesting and it bears watching.

Why Does The U.S. Government Need So Much Ammunition?

In my previous article, I also noted that the U.S. government appears to be very rapidly making preparations for something really big.

This week, it was revealed that the Social Security Administration plans to buy 174,000 hollow point bullets which will be delivered to 41 different locations all over America.

Now why in the world does the Social Security Administration need 174,000 bullets?

And why do they need hollow point bullets?  Those bullets are designed to cause as much damage to internal organs as possible.

But of course this is only the latest in a series of very large purchases of ammunition by U.S. government agencies.  The following is from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson….

Back in March, Homeland Security purchased 450 million rounds of .40-caliber hollow point bullets that are designed to expand upon entry and cause maximum organ damage, prompting questions as to why the DHS needed such a large amount of powerful bullets merely for training purposes.

This was followed by another DHS solicitation asking for a further 750 million rounds of assorted bullets, including 357 mag rounds that are able to penetrate walls.

Now why in the world would the government need over a billion rounds of ammunition?

If it was the U.S. military I could understand this.  You can burn through a whole lot of ammunition fighting wars.

But this makes no sense – unless they believe that big trouble is coming.

Personally, I wouldn’t blame them for getting prepared.  Our economy continues to fall apart and there are signs of social decay everywhere around us.

The American people are more frustrated and more angry than at any other time in modern history.  This upcoming election is only going to cause Americans to become even more angry and even more divided.

All it would take is just the right “spark” to cause this country to erupt.

It could be the upcoming election.

It could be the collapse of the financial system.

Or it might be something else.

But the conditions are definitely there for it to happen.

Unfortunately, the American public is never told to prepare because authorities never want “to panic” the general population.

We are always the last to know, and that stinks.

So don’t wait for someone to come on the television and announce that a crisis is happening.

If you wait that long, it will be too late.

Instead, open up your eyes and think for yourself.

We all need to work hard to get prepared for the coming crisis while we still can.

As you can see, Wall Street insiders, the U.S. government and the central banks of the world are busy getting prepared.

Don’t put your head in the sand.

The warning signs are there and time is running out.

Read the entire article HERE.

Mac Slavo
August 16th, 2012
SHTFplan.com

In a harbinger of what may be coming our way in the Fall of 2012, billionaire financier George Soros has sold all of his equity positions in major financial stocks according to a 13-F report filed with the SEC for the quarter ending June 30, 2012.

Soros, who manages funds through various accounts in the US and the Cayman Islands, has reportedly unloaded over one million shares of stock in financial companies and banks that include Citigroup (420,000 shares), JP Morgan (701,400 shares) and Goldman Sachs (120,000 shares). The total value of the stock sales amounts to nearly $50 million.

What’s equally as interesting as his sale of major financials is where Soros has shifted his money. At the same time he was selling bank stocks, he was acquiring some 884,000 shares (approx. $130 million) of Gold via the SPDR Gold Trust.

When a major global player with direct ties to the White House, Wall Street, and the banking system starts off-loading stocks and starts stacking gold, it suggests a very serious market move is set to happen.

While often lambasted for his calls to centralize global banking, increase government intervention in the economy and his support of what he has called an “emergence of the new world order,” if there’s anyone with an inside track of where things are headed next it’s Soros.

Soros, who has written extensively of a coming global paradigm shift  in his book The Crash of 2008 and What It Means, calling the current economic and political model ”an end of an era,” has recently suggested that the financial and economic situation across the world is so serious that Europe could soon descend into chaos and conflict. He also notes that the world is entering “one of the most dangerous periods in modern history”, and foresees violent riots in America and a brutal clamp-down by the government that will dramatically curtail civil liberties.

This is an individual who not only predicted the collapse of 2008 and took action to insulate himself, he also proposed the various fixes that governments in Europe and the US would eventually implement in order to stave off a deflationary depression. In his aforementioned book he suggested that central banks infuse the system with massive amounts of monetary expansion, but also warned that not injecting enough money would simply extend the onset of deflation and printing too much could lead to hyperinflationary currency collapse.

Based on recent activity in Soros’ US held accounts, it seems that governments and central banks have failed at those efforts to stabilize the system. As such, Soros is getting out of those companies which are most at risk should the financial system buckle like it did in 2008 and he’s shifting his assets into what may be the only asset class left standing when it’s all said and done.
Read the entire article HERE.

by Bix Weir

The Road To Roota Letters

The silver markets are rigged. Every day. Every trade. Every option. Every derivative. The silver markets have been rigged since the early 1970′s when Alan Greenspan introduced computer market trading systems to the world beginning the long term commodity market rigging operation.

http://www.roadtoroota.com/public/101.cfm

Since that time there has not been a day when the silver markets have been “freely traded”. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, knows the true “Fair Market Value” of silver!

But like all price suppression schemes, the silver manipulation must come to an end and we are on the brink of that moment. The only remaining question should be “What is the true value of silver in terms of money?”

First a little background to set the stage.

Computer Commodity Trading

Beginning in the early 1970′s, computers were introduced to control the order flow in financial markets. Order processing was drastically changed with the New York Stock Exchange’s “designated order turnaround” system (DOT, and later SuperDOT) which routed orders electronically to the proper trading post to be executed manually, and the “opening automated reporting system” (OARS) which aided the specialist in determining the market clearing opening price (SOR; Smart Order Routing).

Today we have algorithmic trading, auto trading, algo trading, black-box trading, robo trading…and the list goes on. Algorithmic Trading is widely used by pension funds, mutual funds, and other buy side institutional traders, to divide large trades into several smaller trades in order to manage market impact, and risk. Sell side traders, such as market makers and hedge funds, claim to provide “liquidity to the market”, generating and executing orders automatically. In “high frequency trading” (HFT) computers make the decision to initiate orders based on information that is received electronically, before human traders are even aware of the information.

Over the years computers have played an increasingly important role in everything related to our “free and open market system” such that today’s financial markets CANNOT function without computers. The Federal Reserve, US Treasury, Wall Street insiders and the Exchanges were all instrumental in the integration of computers but they also gained access to secret trading information before the order hit the open market. This information coupled with the fastest computers on earth made market manipulation easy.

This power, the power to control markets, was too much for anyone to resist. Over time those who were given the official key to the back office operations have used and abused their position to its manipulative fullest. Although some of the time they used this power in an official capacity (for the good of the country), more often than not it was used in an unofficial capacity… for the good of themselves.

Bernie Madoff, the ex-head of the NASAQ, was a great example of this public to private transition as his private trading firm was all computer algorithm based market rigging operations. There are many other ex-Exchange/Wall Street officers that went on to open computer trading operations. Many continue to thrive such as EWT, LLC which became a dominant trading/market making firm using “state-of-the-art technology and algorithmic models”. EWT was founded by Vincent Viola (ex NYMEX Chairman) and David Salomon (reported to Robert Ruben at Goldman Sachs) and are also an “Authorized Participant” in the iShares Silver ETF (SLV).

Are you beginning to see the problem? He who has the biggest, fastest and smartest computers (or programmers) can set the price and will ALWAYS WIN! No longer is there any kind of true supply/demand factors related to commodity exchanges or prices. Computer trading should be outlawed…the convenience and efficiency it provides does not offset the detrimental effects and potential for total and complete market manipulation.

CFTC Created to Cover Up the Manipulation

When the computer rigging programs were implemented there needed to be some kind of cover to ensure secrecy and maintain a false confidence in free markets. In 1974 Congress passed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Act that overhauled the Commodity Exchange Act and created the CFTC as an independent agency with powers greater than those of its predecessor agency, the Commodity Exchange Authority.

From that moment the CFTC has been run by board appointees that showcased a revolving door of Wall Street insiders ensuring that the computer market rigging operations were not interfered with. The only notable exception is Brooksley Born who was fired by President Clinton when she found out the truth about our supposed “free markets” and tried to warn everyone. (see The Warning)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/warning/view/

Listen to Brooksley Born explain the problems in her own words when she accepted her JFK Profiles in Courage Award in August 2009.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dVcic7czQ8&feature=channel

A while back I gave up my fight against the CFTC as I determined that they were NOT protecting the best interest of the investor but rather they were protecting the computer market rigging operations and the people involved. Here is one of my last articles on the subject:

Road to Roota III — Who’s the little man behind the curtain?

http://www.roadtoroota.com/public/133.cfm

Now that you have some background let’s get back to $8,000 Silver!

Historically, when any price rigging operation stops the violence of the ensuing price changes are determined by the length and scale of the manipulation as well as the underlying fundamentals of the item being rigged. Take for example the famous 1980′s case of the Hunt brothers trying to corner the silver market. From early 1974 the Hunt brothers started accumulating silver which ultimately drove the price from $6/oz to $50/oz until January 21, 1980 when the CFTC finally pulled the plug on their operation. Within 2 months the price of silver plummeted from $50/oz to $10/oz and the silver price was back under control of the US Government and Banking Cabal. An excellent account of what transpired can be found here:

http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_04/laborde012704.html

This account shows what can happen to the price of a manipulated commodity when the price manipulation is ended. In the case of the Hunt Brothers the manipulation lasted 6 years and involved approximately 130M oz of physical silver and 90M oz of COMEX silver contracts. This was an attempt at a Long Silver price manipulation but it was going on while the Short Silver Official manipulation was going on trying to keep the price down. The only way the Hunt’s accumulated so much silver without the price heading into the many thousands of dollars was the official computer price suppression operation.

The manipulation was ended when the CFTC stopped all COMEX Silver purchases and allowed only silver liquidation sales instantly driving the price down. In 1980 the US Government held 3B oz of silver and in order to maintain the lower silver price levels they sold the entire stock of silver into the market over the next 25 years. That excess supply combined with other governments divesting their silver was enough to continue the price suppression scheme for almost 40 years. That supply is now gone.

One Bank has the Hot Potato

So here we are 40 years after the official manipulation of silver began and the world is finally awakening to the situation. The CFTC, having investigated silver manipulation allegations twice previously, has had an open investigation into silver market manipulation for over 3 years. They have even stated that the investigation was moved to the “Enforcement Division” within the CFTC which pretty much tells you what the conclusion of the investigation revealed. The FBI has separately stated that they are investigating JP Morgan for silver market manipulation.

These two facts and the absolute SILENCE from JP Morgan were strong indicators that the long term manipulation of silver was about to end but on April 5, 2012 JP Morgan broke their silence about silver manipulation. The “Wicked Witch” of silver, Blythe Masters, (the head of JPM Commodities and the creator of the mammoth Credit Default Swaps complex) came on a scripted CNBC interview and denied that JP Morgan manipulates the silver price.

JPMorgan Not Speculating on Commodities: Blythe Masters

Of course she is lying through her teeth when she claims that JP Morgan only has neutral positions. The obvious “tell” is that JPM booked almost $3 BILLION in revenue from their commodities division in 2011! Either they have the highest commission structure in human history or she is LYING THROUGH HER TEETH! As a matter of fact, Blythe’s boss Jamie Dimon recently claimed that they need to get rid of the Volcker Rule so they can continue to offer their customers THE LOWEST prices possible…

Dimon on Price Wars, Volcker Rule, Stock Prices

Here’s the specific quote just over 2:00 into the piece: “When the client calls up JP Morgan, if we don’t give them the best price then we don’t get the business.”

So tell me Blythe…how did you make $3B off your commodity clients by offering them “the best price” and NOT trading for your own book?!

Looks like Blythe has cracked the age old secret for turning lead into gold…PILE ON THE PAPER DERIVATIVES!

*The REASON that Blythe gave this article is that they are about to be BUSTED for silver market manipulation and she is trying to start the defense early…nice try Blythe but you are about to be MELTED!

Ted Butler of Butler Research has been exposing the official manipulation of Silver for the past 25 years. His research was instrumental in exposing the gold/silver leasing operations and the massive concentrated short positions in both gold and silver. On September 3, 2008 Butler published a report entitled Fact Versus Speculation where he showed how one bank, JP Morgan Chase, took over the Bear Stearns Silver COMEX Short position of 30,000 contracts or 150M oz.

http://www.investmentrarities.com/ted_butler_comentary09-02-08.shtml

Since this report was published JP Morgan has continued its silver market rigging antics in an effort to get out of this precarious short position. After Butler exposed JPM as the culprit there have been wild orchestrated swings in the price of silver as JPM attempts to cover their massive COMEX short position. The price of silver has risen from $13 to currently over $30 in this time frame and the size of the short position held by JP Morgan has gyrated wildly between 30k and 40k contracts as they desperately try to shake the longs to cover their shorts. But even with this rise in price the short position is STILL around 20k contracts according to the CFTC’s latest Bank Participation Report.

http://www.cftc.gov/dea/bank/deaApr12f.htm

Add to this various silver market manipulation tools such as naked shorting silver ETF’s, falsifying COMEX warehouse data, unallocated silver, leasing and swapping metal and you have a situation that dwarfs the Hunt brothers case.

Of course, JP Morgan is no ordinary bank because they are also the LARGEST derivative holder in the WORLD at over $75 TRILLION! Do remember Warren Buffett calling derivatives “Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction”? Well, JP Morgan holds the mother load when it comes to silver too with over $19 BILLION of Silver derivative contracts!

http://www.occ.treas.gov/topics/capital-markets/financial-markets/trading/derivatives/dq311.pdf

(OCC Report table 9: Classified as “PREC METALS”… might be a little platinum but not much).

This report was for the quarter ending September 2011 when the price of silver was slammed down to $30 from $42/oz at the beginning of Sept. Interesting: Had silver NOT been slammed down almost 30% in Sept 2011 then JPM would have had to declare silver derivative of close to $25B instead of just $19B. Talk about “painting the tape”!

At $30/oz silver the JPM $19B silver derivative position is representative of over 630M ounces of paper silver.

COME ON PEOPLE! I’m starting to think my $8,000/oz silver call is too conservative!

What’s going to happen when JP Morgan’s derivative monument comes crashing down?

Here’s where I get to $8,000 per oz for silver.

1) I know silver has not been freely traded in 40 years so today’s price if irrelevant.

2) I, like many, estimate there is only about 1B ounces in above ground physical silver for investment purposes.

3) I, like many, estimate there is only 5B ounces of above ground physical gold for investment purposes.

4) If the price of gold is not manipulated, like the banks claim, then the price of silver should be 5x the price of gold due to its supply/demand fundamentals.

CONCLUSION: The price of gold is around $1,600/oz so the true Fair Market Value of Silver should be around 5x the price of gold or $8,000/oz in a FREE market!

It’s simple, if you remove ONE BANK from the supply side of the equation the price of silver will SKYROCKET overnight.

ONE BANK controls the price of silver.

ONE BANK controls the fate of our monetary system.

ONE BANK is behind the curtain pulling the silver manipulation levers.

ONE BANK has control over a nation that was founded by “We the People”.

ONE BANK MUST GO AWAY TO SAVE OUR LIBERTY!

May the Road you choose be the Right Road.

Read the entire article HERE.

by Tyler Durden
January 1, 2012
ZeroHedge

When it comes to the fabled President’s Working Group on Capital Markets, also known as the Plunge Protection Team, the myths about the subject are certainly far greater than any underlying reality. To be sure, vast amounts of popular folkflore has been expounded into the public arena, with most of it being shot down simply due to it assuming conspiracy theories of such vast scale that the human mind is unable to grasp the complexity, and ultimately the inverse Gordian Knot makes an appearance with the claim that vast conspiracies are largely untenable simply because it is impossible to keep a secret from so many people for so long. Yet what if the secret is not a secret at all but is fully out in the open, and is only a matter of interpretation, and contextualizing? Why just 3 years ago it would appear preposterous to allege the capital markets are a ponzi and that the Fed does everything in its power to keep stocks higher. Well, what a difference three years make: now the Chairman himself in a Washington Post OpEd has admitted that the sole gauge of Fed success is the loftiness of the Russell 2000, neither unemployment nor inflation really matter now that the Fed’s third mandate has been fully whipped out. Furthermore, Keynesian economics, and the entire top echelon of the educational system have also been represented as a paradigm which merely perpetuates the status quo as the alternative is the realization that the whole system is a house of cards. As for the global capital markets being nothing short of a ponzi, we merely point you to the general direction of Europe, the ECB and its bank, where the monetary interplay is nothing short of the world’s biggest pyramid scheme. Yet the PPT, or whatever it is informally called, does not exist? Consider further that only recently did it become known that the former SecTres Hank Paulson himself was exposed as presenting material non-public information to a bevy of Goldman arb desk diaspora hedge funds, headed by with none other than the head of the President’s Working Group on Capital Markets Asset Managers committee David Mindich. So, if contrary to all the evidence that there is some vast underlying pattern, if not a conspiracy per se, one were to take the leap of faith and take the next step, where would one end up? Well, most likely looking at the Exchange Stabilization Fund, or ESF, which Eric deCarbonnel has spent so much time trying to unmask. Is it possible that the ESF, located conveniently at the nexus between US monetary policy, foreign policy and last but not least, a promoter of the interests of the US military-industrial complex, is precisely the organization that so many have been trying to expose for years? Watch and decide for yourself.

As a reminder deCarbonnel is not some tinfoil hat clad sub-basement dweller – it was his input that led us to the realization that in attempting to control the Treasury curve, the Fed will, and already has, experiment with selling puts on various Treasury maturities in an attempt to generate reflexivity whereby the synthetic determines the value of the underlying (something ETFs are now doing oh so well), the value naturally always being higher, higher, higher irrelevant of what underlying demand there is (and as we showed last week, with a record amount of international outflows in the past month, the demand, at least from abroad, is just not there). So what does Eric assert?

Quite a bit as it turns out.

After months of work, the video series on the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund is finally finished!

Why you should watch these five videos:

It is impossible to understand the world today without knowing what the ESF is and what it has been doing. Officially in charge of defending the dollar, the ESF is the government agency which controls the New York Fed, runs the CIA’s black budget, and is the architect of the world’s monetary system (IMF, World Bank, etc). ESF financing (through the OSS and then the CIA) built up the worldwide propaganda network which has so badly distorted history today (including erasing awareness of its existence from popular consciousness). It has been directly involved in virtually every major US fraud/scandal since its creation in 1934: the London gold pool, the Kennedy assassinations, Iran-Contra, CIA drug trafficking, HIV, and worse…

So while nursing that New Year’s Day hangover, take some time and watch this series of videos. If nothing else, they even if merely the extended ramblings of some person that one can quickly dismiss as merely the latest lunatic, they do present an alterantive reality to what so many may be accustomed to. After all at the end of the day imagination, the ability to think outside the box, and to see patterns where previously there were none, is the greatest threat to the ending status quo by far.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Read the entire article HERE.

by Gonzalo Lira
December 27, 2011
ZeroHedge

Nine weeks after its bankruptcy, the general public still hasn’t quite realized the implications of the MF Global scandal.

My own sense is, this is the first tremor of the earthquake that’s coming to the global financial system. And how the central banks and financial regulators treated the “Systemically Important Financial Institutions” that had exposure to MF Global—to the detriment of the ordinary, blameless customer who got royally ripped off in its bankruptcy—is both the template of how the next financial crisis will be handled, and an accelerator that will make the next crisis happen that much sooner.

So first off, what happened with MF Global?

Simple: It went bankrupt—because it made bad bets on European sovereign debt, by way of leveraging positions 100-to-1. Yeah, I know: Stupid. Anyway, they went bankrupt—which in and of itself is no big deal. It’s not as if it’s the first time in history that a brokerage firm has gone bust. But to me, the big deal in this case was the way the bankruptcy was handled.

Now there are several extremely serious aspects to the MF Global case: Specifically, how their customers were shut out of their brokerage accounts for over a week following the bankruptcy, which made it impossible for those customers to sell out of their positions, and thus caused them to lose serious money; and of course how MF Global was more adept than Mandrake the Magician at making money disappear—about $1 billion, in fact, which still hasn’t turned up. These are quite serious issues which merit prolonged discussion, investigation, prosecution, and ultimately jailtime.

But for now, I want to discuss one narrow aspect of the MF Global bankruptcy: How authorities (mis)handled the bankruptcy—either willfully or out of incompetence—which allowed customer’s money to be stolen so as to make JPMorgan whole.

From this one issue, it seems clear to me that we can infer what will happen when the next financial crisis hits in the nearterm future.

Brokerage firms hold clients’ money in what are known as segregated accounts. This is the money that brokerage firms hold for when a customer makes a trade. If a brokerage firm goes bankrupt, these monies are never touched—because they never belonged to the firm, and thus are not part of its assets.

Think of segregated accounts as if they were the content in a safety deposit box: The bank owns the vault—but it doesn’t own the content of the safety deposit boxes inside the vault. If the bank goes broke, the customers who stored their jewelry and pornographic diaries in the safe deposit boxes don’t lose a thing. The bank is just a steward of those assets—just as a brokerage firm is the steward of those customers’ segregated accounts.

But when MF Global went bankrupt, these segregated accounts—that is, the content of those safe deposit boxes—were taken away from their rightful owners—that is, MF Global’s customers—and then used to pay off other creditors: That is, JPMorgan.

(The mechanics of how this was done are interesting, but insanely complicated, and ultimately not relevant to this discussion. To grossly simplify, MF Global pledged customer assets to JPMorgan, in a process known as rehypothecation—customer assets which MF Global did not have a right to. Needless to say, JPMorgan covered its ass legally. Ethically? Morally? Black as night.)

This was seriously wrong—and this is the source of the scandal: Rather than being treated as a bankruptcy of a commodities brokerage firm under subchapter IV of the Chapter 7 bankruptcy law, MF Global was treated as an equities firm (subchapter III) for the purposes of its bankruptcy.

Why does this difference of a single subchapter matter? Because in a brokerage firm bankruptcy, the customers get their money first—because after all, it’s theirs—while in an equities firm bankruptcy, the customers are at the end of the line.

In the case of MF Global, what should have happened was for all the customers to get their money first. Then everyone else—including JPMorgan—would have picked over the remaining scraps. And the monies MF Global had already pledged to JPMorgan? They call it clawback for a reason.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which handled the bankruptcy, should have done this—but instead, the Merc was more concerned with making JPMorgan whole than with protecting the money that rightfully belonged to MF Global’s 40,000 customers.

Thus these 40,000 MF Global customers had their money stolen—there’s no polite way to characterize what happened. And this theft was not carried out by MF Global—it was carried out by the authorities who were charged with handling the firm’s bankruptcy.

These 40,000 customers were not Big Money types—they were farmers who had accounts to hedge their crops, individuals owning gold (like Gerald Celente—here’s his account of what happened to him)—

—in short, ordinary investors. Ordinary people—and they got screwed by the regulators, for the sake of protecting JPMorgan and other big fry who had exposure to MF Global.

That, in a nutshell, is what happened.

Now, what does this mean?

It means that nobody’s money is safe. It means that regulators care more about protecting the so-called “Systemically Important Financial Institutions” than about protecting Ordinary Joe investors. It means that, when crunchtime comes, central banks and government regulators will allow SIFI’s to get better, and let the Ordinary Joes get fucked.

So far, so evil—but here comes the really troubling part: It is an open secret that there are more paper-assets than there are actual assets. The markets are essentially playing musical chairs—and praying that the music never stops. Because if it ever does—that is, if there is ever a panic, where everyone decides that they want their actual asset instead of just a slip of paper—the system would crash.

And unlike with fiat currency, where a central bank can print all the liquidity it wants, you can’t print up gold bullion. You can’t print up a silo of grain. You can’t print up a tankerful of oil.

Now, question: When is there ever a panic? When is there ever a run on a financial system?

Answer: When enough participants no longer trust the system. It is the classic definition of a tipping point. It’s not that all of the participants lose faith in the system or institution. It’s not even when most of the participants lose faith: Rather, it’s when a mere some of the participants decide they no longer trust the system that a run is triggered.

And though this is completely subjective on my part—backed by no statistics except scattered anecdotal evidence—but it seems to me that MF Global has shoved us a lot closer to this theoretical run on the system.

As I write this, a lot of investors whom I know personally—who are sophisticated, wealthy, and not at all the paranoid type—are quietly pulling their money out of all brokerage firms, all banks, all equity firms. They are quietly trading out of their paper assets and going into the actual, physical asset.

Note that they’re not trading into the asset—they’re simply exchanging their paper-asset for the real thing.

Why? MF Global.

“The MF Global scandal has made it clear that the integrity of the system has disappeared,” said a good friend of mine, Tuur Demeester, who runs Macrotrends, a Dutch-language newsletter out of Brugge. “The banks are insolvent, the governments are insolvent, and all that’s left is for the people to realize what’s going on—and that will start a panic.”

He hit it on the head: Some of the more sophisticated people—like Tuur, like some of my acquaintances, (like myself, frankly)—have realized that the MF Global scandal means that there is no safety for any paper investment: The integrity of the systems has been completely shattered. If in the face of one medium-sized brokerage firm going under, the regulators will openly allow ordinary people to be ripped off for the sake of protecting the so-called “Systemically Important Financial Institutions”—in this case JPMorgan—what will happen if there is a system-wide run? What if two or three MF Globals happen simultaneously?

Will they protect the citizens’ money? Or will they protect the “Systemically Important Financial Institutions”?

I think we know the answer.

And I think we all know the answer to the question of whether there will be crisis flashpoint in the near-term future: After all, as Demeester pointed out, all the banks and all the governments are broke.

Thus it’s only a matter of time before they come for your money.

At SPG, we’ve been putting together Scenarios for other black swan events which are becoming increasingly likely: What to do if the eurozone breaks up, what to do if you have to leave America, what to do if there is an Israeli-Iranian war, what to do if there is forced dollar devaluation, and so on.

Now, because of this open kleptocracy and cronyism being shown by the financial authorities in the wake of the MF Global bankruptcy, we’ve been obliged to put together a new Scenario, devoted exclusively to preparing for a run on the markets: What to do in order to protect your assets from regulatory malfeasance, if there is a system-wide MF Global-type breakdown and a subsequent run on the entire financial system.

And there will be such a run on the system: It’s only a matter of time. In fact, the handling of the MF Global affair has sped up the timeframe for this run on the system, because the forward-edge players—such as Demeester, myself, and my other acquaintances who understand the implications of the bankruptcy—realize that the regulators will side with the banksters, and not the ordinary investors: So we are preparing accordingly.

Once there is a full-on panic, anyone with money in the system will lose at least a big chunk of it, in one of two ways, or a combination thereof:

• One, the firms—commodities brokerage firms, equity firms, investment banks and commercial banks—will not allow people to withdraw the totality of their money, and/or they will put a withdrawal cap of some sort, enforced by the central banks and other regulatory bodies. (Like they did in Argentina.)

• Two, the central banks will “provide liquidity”—that is, print money—while simultaneously declaring a banking holiday to, quote, “calm the markets”. During that bank holiday, the currency will be devalued by double digits—which will mean that your cash holdings will essentially be taxed to save the banksters—again. (Like they did in Argentina.)

Thus apart from proving that the United States really is Argentina with nukes, the MF Global bankruptcy has proven something crucial: The central banks and government regulators have completely fallen into the trap of confusing the welfare of the “Systemically Important Financial Institutions” with the welfare of the system itself. They don’t seem to realize that the SIFI’s are actors within the system—not the system itself.

We critics of the current, corrupt state of affairs also sometimes confuse the SIFI’s with the system itself, whenever we say, “The whole system is corrupt!”

But the system is not corrupt—it’s the regulators and SIFI’s who are corrupt. If nothing else, the handling of the MF Global bankruptcy has proven that, once and for all. That’s why we’re pulling out our money now—while we still can.

Because once the general public catches on to what we already know . . . oh boy.

Read the entire article HERE.

by Matt Taibbi
December 22, 2011
Rolling Stone

It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.

True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.

But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.

Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”

Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:

Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.

“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”

Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.

“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.

But out of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.

Why? It’s not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.

It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.

The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).

So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enough in our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.  

But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You’ve got it all riding on how well America works.

You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you’d better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.

And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.

The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.

But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.

Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep, and they get it killed.

Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon – the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” – had an excellent method of guaranteeing that the Federal Reserve system’s doors would always be open to him. What he did was, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed.

And in 2008, in that moonlighting capacity, he helped orchestrate a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns. You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout. Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?

Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.

Hmm. Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.

That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.

Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.

Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?

Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.

Just look at how banks like Chase behaved in Greece, for example.

Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” countries like Greece and Italy mask their debt problems for years by selling a similar series of swaps to those governments. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs (who were also major purveyors of those swap deals) to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.

In other words, banks like Chase and Goldman knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.

Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?

Operations like the Greek swap/short index maneuver were easy money for banks like Goldman and Chase – hell, it’s a no-lose play, like cutting a car’s brake lines and then betting on the driver to crash – but they helped create the monstrous European debt problem that this very minute is threatening to send the entire world economy into collapse, which would result in who knows what horrors. At minimum, millions might lose their jobs and benefits and homes. Millions more will be ruined financially.

But why should Chase and Goldman care what happens to those people? Do they have any skin in that game?

Of course not. We’re talking about banks that not only didn’t warn the citizens of Greece about their future debt disaster, they actively traded on that information, to make money for themselves.

People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It’s called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.

But these people don’t have shame. What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls. Just listen to Cooperman, the former Goldman exec from that country club in Boca. According to Cooperman, the rich do contribute to society:

Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be” and the wealthy aren’t “a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot,” Cooperman wrote. They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas…”

Unbelievable. Merry Christmas, bankers. And good luck getting that message out.

Read the entire article HERE.

by Tyler Durden
12/23/2011
ZeroHedge

Yesterday, we breached the topic of the real decoupling that is going on: that between the macro and the micro (not some ridiculous geographic distribution of the US versus the world), by presenting David Rosenberg‘s thoughts on why Q4 GDP has peaked and why going forward it is energy prices that are likely to be a far greater drag on incremental growth than the preservation (not the addition as it is not incremental) of $10 per week in payroll taxes (which only affects those who are already employed), even as company earnings and profit margins have likely peaked. Today, following up on why the micro is about to return with a bang, and why fundamentals are about to become front and center all over again, albeit not in a good way, is, surprisingly, Morgan Stanley’s Mike Wilson, who has issued his loudest warning again bleary eyed optimism for the next year: “Think of 2012 as the “payback” year….when many of the extraordinary things that happened over the past 3 years go in reverse. I am talking about incremental fiscal stimulus, a weaker US dollar, positive labor productivity, and accelerated capital spending.” Said otherwise, 2012 is the year when everything that can go wrong in the micro arena, will go wrong. And this is why Morgan Stanley being bullish on the macro picture! As Wilson says, his pessimistic musing “tells the story for what to expect in 2012 assuming the situation in Europe doesn’t implode. In other words, this is not the macro bear case.” If one adds a full blown European collapse to the mix, then the perfect storm of a macro and micro recoupling in a deleveraging vortex will prove everyone who believes that 2012 will be merely a groundhog year (in same including us) fatally wrong.

Lastly, when it comes to predictions Morgan Stanley (which called the EURUSD short the hour Goldman put it on as a long) should be taken far more seriously than Goldman, which merely wants to be on the other side of its clients.

The complete very troubling forecast from Morgan Stanley:

by Mark H. Melin
December 21, 2011
ZeroHedge

Commodity Customer Coalition founder James Koutoulas is requesting that MF Global bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn investigate three potential legal issues that are said to have occurred in transferring of MF Global assets.  The key issues include the fact that JP Morgan was able to purchase MF Global bonds at a discount without any open bidding process and the assets were apparently sold without disclosure to or approval from the U.S. bankruptcy court or trustees.  The third issue centers on JP Morgan seeking special favors from the Federal Reserve to receive priority treatment over investor segregated fund accounts.

The first such non-transparent movement of assets occurred when JP Morgan is said to have purchased MF Global’s Sovereign Debt at a significant discount without an open bidding process, paying $0.89 and later selling that debt to investor George Soros for $0.95.  No one is going to complain about JP Morgan generating profit.  However, purchasing assets of a bankrupt firm without an open bidding process or disclosure to the bankruptcy court and trustees is where JP Morgan may be in trouble, according to Mr. Koutoulas.  This sale could be subject to clawback provisions, legal experts speculate.  (On December 9, 2011 The Wall Street Journal reported the fact that bonds were moved to KPMG London office, which was the bankruptcy administrator, but at the time the article did not discuss sale details or approval through the bankruptcy process.  See “Corzine’s Loss May Be Soros’s Gain” by Gregory Zuckerman and Dana Cimilluca.)

The key issue is that such transfers is the bonds were purchased at a discount without open bidding and the process was not disclosed to or authorized by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, according to Mr. Koutoulas.  “Who gave JP Morgan permission to purchase those bonds at a discount without open bidding?”

The second questionable movement of assets is said to have occurred when JP Morgan purchased MF Global’s stake in the London Metals Exchange (LME) without proper disclosure.  The event was widely reported at a basic level on November 28, 2011.  The larger issue, however, appears to center on the fact that such a transaction was not approved by the U.S. bankruptcy court and trustee.

“Was this disclosed in court?” Mr. Koutoulas rhetorically asked.  “No.  Was their trustee approval?  No.”

The third issue occurred in congressional testimony Thursday, December 15, 2011 where it was discovered JP Morgan asked the Federal Reserve to write a letter claiming that the segregated funds should not be categorized as client money.

“How many letters like this have they asked for in the past?  I want all the statistics regarding the number and content of letters,” Koutoulas questioned.  “JP Morgan wanted a ‘get out of jail free card’ from the Fed.  Guess what?  That doesn’t fly with me.”

“Their hubris is so severe.  They think we don’t know the industry, like we are Occupy Wall Street radicals or something and don’t have a clue or message,” Mr. Koutoulas said, noting that the CCC is comprised of experienced industry participants who understand the financial services industry from the inside.

Mr. Koutoulas seeks to solve the problem with JP Morgan without dragging the issue through court.  In speaking to JP Morgan, Mr. Koutoulas said “Listen, you are buying vulture MF Global claims at $0.86 ½ on the dollar.   Why don’t you pay a fair price of $0.97 ½ take the customers out of the bankruptcy and we will indemnify you from any class actions resulting from this.”  A vulture claim occurs when an MF Global claimant such as a farmer or small business person is in desperate need of cash and sells their claim to someone such as JP Morgan, who purchases the claim at a lower rate than the value at maturity.  In this example if JP Morgan purchased the claim at $0.87 and all clients were eventually “made good” JP Morgan would receive the par value of $1.00.  With the MF Global bankruptcy proceedings apparently moving along much quicker than expected, JP Morgan stands to potentially make a quick 13% return on such vulture claims.

Mr. Koutoulas reports that JP Morgan would not even discuss the issues.  “I can see that you disagree with me,” said Mr. Koutoulas, whose organization represents over 7,000 MF Global clients, mostly professional investors.  “They won’t even meet with me and talk with me.”

Mr. Koutoulas is currently working Pro Bono and many of the lawyers are working at a highly discounted rates and requested that industry participants donate to help .  “I need professional litigators and bankruptcy attorneys backing me up,” said Northwestern Law School grad Koutoulas who also operates Typhon Capital Management, which is an NFA-registered Commodity Trading Advisor and Commodity Pool Operator.  “We’ve had an outpouring of lawyers who want to help,” Mr. Koutoulas said, sitting with a young Yale Law School grad as we spoke.

In calling on MF Global presiding bankruptcy Judge Glenn to investigate these issues, Mr. Koutoulas is rallying the futures industry to boycott use of JP Morgan.  “Call your FCM and if they are using JP Morgan say ‘We won’t do business with you if you work with JP Morgan,’” he said, requesting that industry participants get on Twitter and follow the #BoycottJPM hash tag.