Financial companies often hold bonds from issue to maturity. Traditionally, to keep market manipulators from shredding their books, accountants had always carried these securities at cost, not adjusting for interim price swings. That’s appropriate. In a well-run insurance operation, for example, amounts recorded this way make actuarial assumptions possible, rendering market gyrations a sideshow, having nothing to do with anything really, as nature intended.
For the Apocalypse however, short-sellers got our scribes to throw all that out, forcing the financial sector to mark bonds to market quotes gamed by short-sellers. An appropriate principle sheltering balance sheets from bear attack was dropped, driving an already precipitous crash into the murky abyss we probed during the Godless years of 2008 and 2009.
Thanks to fractious deregulation, investors had no chance to see it coming.
Pencil-pushers have been herded back to reality since then, dumping the bond “mark-to-market” shinola into the trash bin of history, but unfortunately not in time to stop investors from losing a bundle on financials in the horrific final demolition caused by massive short-selling that the Securities and Excuses Commission tells us wasn’t caused by massive short-selling.
If not, it was a bottomless pit needlessly carved out by bookkeeping demon spawn in some kind of undisclosed satanic SEC lair our own CPA had not been told of before.
Today, one hears here and there that persons of interest are scheming to bring “mark-to-market” devastation back again, and, as we interpret a recent Bloomberg TV heads-up, even got the SEC to investigate Warren Buffett over the issue.
The Oracle of Omaha had to face the holocaust head on himself, running a company with major holdings in the financial arena, then bottom fishing for more at the absolute nadir. The SEC wanted to know why his Berkshire Hathaway carried common stocks at cost that he’d bought kind of high back in the glory days, values now above current market prices.
Under standard accounting procedure, common stocks have always been marked to current, what I’ll call, “free market” prices, but what about the gamed market conditions we now have to live with? Gurus at The MacDougal Post have been wondering whether it isn’t time to start valuing all securities at cost, given the huge increase in hedge fund assets earlier this century, pouring Godzillions into a broken short-selling based business model that's hell bent on the ruination of fair market principles through coordinated mass manipulation to a degree Mother Capitalism never anticipated, let alone encountered before.
These short-selling vehicles are the playthings of careless people retreating into their vast carelessness, to shamelessly butcher F. Scott Fitzgerald in a time and place where his niche grasp is sorely needed. A rotten crowd. Our readers are worth the whole damn bunch put together. With the super careless now holding 75% of the nation’s wealth, up from 35% just a piddling time ago and still growing, it’s terrifying to contemplate where the new high-speed computerized stock market pricing mechanism could be flash crashing us to. If you and I have to indulge the vastness of this careless bear participation, perhaps ignoring their interim impact on everyone’s reported financial position is the only way to go.
Kudos to the Oracle for dropping this segue in our laptop.
Bloomberg didn’t say how the Buffett inquiry turned out, but to paraphrase their talking head, the country’s leading investor oracled that he was in his stocks for the long haul, believing Kraft and whatever to be great companies, and Berkshire wouldn’t be selling them here, hence had no inclination to price them here either.
God on High, praise be Warren Buffett.
In the earliest days of accounts keeping, when crooks were crooks and half of them got nabbed skulking around in Government positions, books were maintained at transaction values. The true historical record was the only thing stopping the felonious from running paper swindles. We may well be back there again.
One wishes the accounting profession would apply Mr. Buffett’s well-reasoned approach to our reported financial position too, helping insulate all long term investors from ursine maulings. Pricing assets with stock quotes that mobsters control is madness, and that’s what you find at every short-selling crime scene, be it a marketplace, sector, industry, or just one gangbanged issue on a particularly careless afternoon.
Remember, during the Apocalypse it was short-sellers who stuffed their own pockets at what became, in fact, all mankind’s expense, creating fraudulent paper for mass distribution and betting against clients buying it, then exacerbating the widespread human suffering that this caused with a mark-to-market scam misrepresenting the financials of public companies. Viewed in the context of their catastrophic global bloodletting, these are thrill killers, serial murderers seeking out the countless deaths they cause as well as all the collateral illness, homelessness, poverty, and despair still menacing God’s children in the misbegotten misery and hopelessness that continues, by their hand, to smother the civilized world and Iceland to this day.
Furthermore, who got the SEC to make the Buffett inquiry anyway, and how much time do our regulatory hotshots spend doing the short-seller’s bidding?
Why can’t we put this ridiculous agency down. Clearly, the small investor would be better off without it.
Just hearing about that rotten crowd at play is a damn waste of time.
October 30, 2010
October 27, 2010
Where?
Where do short-sold shares come from?
Securities lending is the new media explanation, replacing "locating", which was cited by the SEC fairly recently as the actual business practice since short-sellers weren't really "borrowing" like they said they were. In "locating", a Crime Family simply tells each inquiring short-seller its wise guys have enough shares in inventory to meet his need, and mobsters keep no running total, so all the inquiries can accumulate into many more shares than actually exist. In securities lending, racketeers muscle pension fund managers and them into “loaning” shares to short-sellers or else getting slammed with higher custodial fees, all the while threatening to levy killer exit fees if managers freak and want to find a new Crime Family to get swindled by.
Getting a handle on all the explanations is like listening to the party of her part frolic through world class divorce high jinks. All one can do is try and keep up. In reality, despite what they try to say, short-sellers create brand new phony shares. It’s the same old bookkeeping entry. Credit bogus shares and debit short-seller’s cash with booty swindled from an uninformed investor. They just try and throw a second and misleading entry in too, pretending to cover up bogus with real ones short-sellers don‘t even own until the cons fold up their sting and clear out of town.
With securities lending, we’re thinking that the mob has just been collecting inquiry fees without actually getting to the part about the securities lending. We can't make sense of the "locating" explanation otherwise.
Whatever, the NY Times, which recently broke the story maybe 16 months after Forbes did, followed up with a 10/22/10 editorial. Editors only focused on losses incurred when pension fund managers “lending” shares invested the charges they collected from short-sellers “borrowing” them. Totally overlooked was the hit their pensioners took after their Bank of America shares were handed over to short-sellers at 55 and taken back at 3.
At times like this, we’re half convinced the media caused the financial meltdown all by itself. They’ve had since at least October 1929 to figure this stuff out. I mean, how difficult is it to subtract 3 from 55, and then look around for the real loss here.
The catastrophic, worldwide apocalypse rendering loss.
Concurrently, our own brokerage account was switched from one arm of a gargantuan financial institution to another arm this month, and in the process morphed from cash to margin. Without notice. Apparently margin is the default in the land of the megaliths. Margin accounts are also where the bloodsucking thieves go when they want to lend shares to short-sellers, and we called yet another of Gargantua’s countless arms to get our cash account back as soon as we saw what arm 2 was doing to us.
Anyone not trading uncovered options or selling short himself might want to make sure he has a cash account. The Forbes piece says there’s little chance of your Crime Family passing their loss along to your margin account if their securities lending business goes awry, but little is hardly no chance at all, which is where cash accounts stand, and you do agree to let the Family itself put your investments at risk by signing up for a margin account.
Besides, folks still reading our blog after all these months may not want to help short-selling thugs bludgeon their investments into smithereens.
55 down to 3. For some of us, that part is hard to forget.
“Welcome, valued customer. My name is David. How can I help you today.“
“Hi David, is my account margin or cash?”
“Margin.”
“Change it. I want a cash account, David.”
“Just takes a moment, Sir.”
That, valued readers, is all you’d have to do.
Securities lending is the new media explanation, replacing "locating", which was cited by the SEC fairly recently as the actual business practice since short-sellers weren't really "borrowing" like they said they were. In "locating", a Crime Family simply tells each inquiring short-seller its wise guys have enough shares in inventory to meet his need, and mobsters keep no running total, so all the inquiries can accumulate into many more shares than actually exist. In securities lending, racketeers muscle pension fund managers and them into “loaning” shares to short-sellers or else getting slammed with higher custodial fees, all the while threatening to levy killer exit fees if managers freak and want to find a new Crime Family to get swindled by.
Getting a handle on all the explanations is like listening to the party of her part frolic through world class divorce high jinks. All one can do is try and keep up. In reality, despite what they try to say, short-sellers create brand new phony shares. It’s the same old bookkeeping entry. Credit bogus shares and debit short-seller’s cash with booty swindled from an uninformed investor. They just try and throw a second and misleading entry in too, pretending to cover up bogus with real ones short-sellers don‘t even own until the cons fold up their sting and clear out of town.
With securities lending, we’re thinking that the mob has just been collecting inquiry fees without actually getting to the part about the securities lending. We can't make sense of the "locating" explanation otherwise.
Whatever, the NY Times, which recently broke the story maybe 16 months after Forbes did, followed up with a 10/22/10 editorial. Editors only focused on losses incurred when pension fund managers “lending” shares invested the charges they collected from short-sellers “borrowing” them. Totally overlooked was the hit their pensioners took after their Bank of America shares were handed over to short-sellers at 55 and taken back at 3.
At times like this, we’re half convinced the media caused the financial meltdown all by itself. They’ve had since at least October 1929 to figure this stuff out. I mean, how difficult is it to subtract 3 from 55, and then look around for the real loss here.
The catastrophic, worldwide apocalypse rendering loss.
Concurrently, our own brokerage account was switched from one arm of a gargantuan financial institution to another arm this month, and in the process morphed from cash to margin. Without notice. Apparently margin is the default in the land of the megaliths. Margin accounts are also where the bloodsucking thieves go when they want to lend shares to short-sellers, and we called yet another of Gargantua’s countless arms to get our cash account back as soon as we saw what arm 2 was doing to us.
Anyone not trading uncovered options or selling short himself might want to make sure he has a cash account. The Forbes piece says there’s little chance of your Crime Family passing their loss along to your margin account if their securities lending business goes awry, but little is hardly no chance at all, which is where cash accounts stand, and you do agree to let the Family itself put your investments at risk by signing up for a margin account.
Besides, folks still reading our blog after all these months may not want to help short-selling thugs bludgeon their investments into smithereens.
55 down to 3. For some of us, that part is hard to forget.
“Welcome, valued customer. My name is David. How can I help you today.“
“Hi David, is my account margin or cash?”
“Margin.”
“Change it. I want a cash account, David.”
“Just takes a moment, Sir.”
That, valued readers, is all you’d have to do.
October 24, 2010
Whistleblower Project
Are you a former wise guy? Somebody the mob laid off during the financial apocalypse? If so, you could square things and pull down a bundle ratting out Wall Street under the Federal whistleblower program. The Post has prepared a submission you can use. Just go to the link below, find the online form, and fill it out using the statement printed here.
We’re not asking you to touch base with us or anything. When the story hits the airwaves, we’ll know our whistleblower project has been successful.
Just note the size of your Federal whistleblower reward before making a decision.
U.S. Office of Special Counsel
http://www.osc.gov/
Wall Street racketeering assisted by malfeasance within the Securities and Exchange Commission has defrauded investors for generations, using the same scam over and over again. Their swindle works like this:
Investors value equities largely by comparing stock prices to earnings per share estimates (EPS) that security analysts at Wall Street firms calculate and publish. EPS is based on the number of shares issued by a public corporation as reported in its audited financial statements, adjusted to reflect various corporate transactions.
Meanwhile, when the time is right, traders in another department of those same Wall Street firms coordinate attacks with others in the financial community to issue counterfeit shares to themselves and sell them to the public, adding more and more and more of these phony shares to the number of real shares in those audited financial statements, driving EPS lower and lower and lower. Investors who are being sold fake shares are never told that somebody's being hoodwinked into holding bookkeeping transactions here, not real company stock recorded with the corporate registrar. The public doesn’t know that published EPS estimates are made a fiction by this clever racket. As part of the sting, sellers of the bogus shares even pay, out of their own pockets, dividends on the fake stock that they issue to themselves and then dump into public hands, filling out the deception.
At market bottoms, there can be a hundred phony shares being offered for sale for every one real share looking to be bought, in effect, bringing an EPS estimate of, say, $4.00 down to $0.04. That stock price really should fall from 40, or whatever, to 40 cents because its value has been gamed by financial racketeers flooding the point of purchase/sale with illicit faux paper that doesn’t belong there.
To drop EPS that much, financial wise guys don’t have to mix 100 times as many bogus shares in with real ones. Just keep that 100:1 ratio going at the intersection where buyers and sellers meet, which becomes easy to do when your criminal activities bully buyers into fleeing the marketplace.
In Vegas parlance, the balance between buyer and seller, which determines the price, gets fixed.
This is called short-selling, and the racket has been covered up for generations by the Securities and Exchanges Commission, whose sole role appears to be focused on explaining everything away. Public investors buying phony shares aren’t told that somebody's stock isn’t recorded in the registrar’s books here, so victims only buying a bookkeeping transaction never know they‘re not paying for a genuine transfer of real shares of stock. SEC staffers flat out ignore the effect fraudulent shares have on EPS, and they themselves join perps in making and restating excuses for counterfeit shares, sometimes saying phony shares are “borrowed“ from some undisclosed party or place, other times that they are “located“ there, wherever there is and whatever “located” means. Fraudulent dividends are labeled “payments in lieu of dividends” and allowed to look like the real thing when paid into victims‘ accounts.
Fact is, short-sellers get to use their own play shares and can issue themselves as many as they want. Play shares against real shares held by real investors duped by not being told what’s really going on. Wall Street firms are treated by the SEC as if these wise guys are entitled to rip off everyone’s savings.
Who loaned short-sellers Bank of America stock at 50 in 2008 and took it back at 3 in 2009? Why hasn’t he gone postal on my TV? Is he the beneficiary of a pension fund not telling him they are putting his benefits at risk? Has he simply been conned into keeping securities in a margin account without knowing what that means? Or whose stock was “located” then, and why does “located” even change anything? When were these victims told their investments were being used by somebody else? And who told them what their holdings were being used for? Especially the suckers whose purchases had only been bogus bookkeeping transactions to begin with. Everything about this swindle defrauds the public, and was purposely designed that way.
By Wall Street firms I include major financial service companies with investment research departments and stock trading operations as well as all the hedge funds rubbing our noses in their criminal business model blatantly based on the short-selling swindle. As for public investors, we’re looking at every shareholder in America who’s been menaced or fleeced by the racketeers since markets developed for stocks in the 1800‘s, including market crashes as well as short-selling attacks on market sectors or individual stocks during this period of time.
The misinformation campaign tries to draw a distinction between short-sales held overnight and day trades, which are short-sales closed out in the same market session. There’s no difference to the people being swindled, or in the effect on EPS. This obfuscation just makes it possible for racketeers to claim that shares sold short and bought back the same day aren’t bogus, feeling they can get away with this lie because day trade audit trails aren’t run through a transfer agent’s ledger.
Financial firms account for customer shares as a pool, registering them as owned by some entity that the firm controls. This is done to hide transactions when short-sellers issue fraudulent shares to themselves. If every real owners’ name were printed on stock certificates or registered with the company they‘ve invested in, bogus sales would be segregated and readily classifiable by accountants as illegal.
Furthermore, if these racketeers short-sell somebody else’s stock without telling them, where is the line between borrowed and stolen shares? Employees and retirees included in pension funds, for example, are never told Wall Street racketeers borrow (or locate) shares held in those funds and drub the market with them, and are certainly not asked to let this jeopardize their benefits.
Wall Street racketeering and SEC malfeasance have defrauded investors and crippled world economies to the tune of trillions and trillions of dollars since the the agency was established in the 1930’s to prevent such scams from taking place. I hereby claim the appropriate reward as an outside whistleblower.
Based on conservative assumptions, an accountant at The MacDougal Post says my reward works out to 347 billion dollars.
We’re not asking you to touch base with us or anything. When the story hits the airwaves, we’ll know our whistleblower project has been successful.
Just note the size of your Federal whistleblower reward before making a decision.
U.S. Office of Special Counsel
http://www.osc.gov/
Wall Street racketeering assisted by malfeasance within the Securities and Exchange Commission has defrauded investors for generations, using the same scam over and over again. Their swindle works like this:
Investors value equities largely by comparing stock prices to earnings per share estimates (EPS) that security analysts at Wall Street firms calculate and publish. EPS is based on the number of shares issued by a public corporation as reported in its audited financial statements, adjusted to reflect various corporate transactions.
Meanwhile, when the time is right, traders in another department of those same Wall Street firms coordinate attacks with others in the financial community to issue counterfeit shares to themselves and sell them to the public, adding more and more and more of these phony shares to the number of real shares in those audited financial statements, driving EPS lower and lower and lower. Investors who are being sold fake shares are never told that somebody's being hoodwinked into holding bookkeeping transactions here, not real company stock recorded with the corporate registrar. The public doesn’t know that published EPS estimates are made a fiction by this clever racket. As part of the sting, sellers of the bogus shares even pay, out of their own pockets, dividends on the fake stock that they issue to themselves and then dump into public hands, filling out the deception.
At market bottoms, there can be a hundred phony shares being offered for sale for every one real share looking to be bought, in effect, bringing an EPS estimate of, say, $4.00 down to $0.04. That stock price really should fall from 40, or whatever, to 40 cents because its value has been gamed by financial racketeers flooding the point of purchase/sale with illicit faux paper that doesn’t belong there.
To drop EPS that much, financial wise guys don’t have to mix 100 times as many bogus shares in with real ones. Just keep that 100:1 ratio going at the intersection where buyers and sellers meet, which becomes easy to do when your criminal activities bully buyers into fleeing the marketplace.
In Vegas parlance, the balance between buyer and seller, which determines the price, gets fixed.
This is called short-selling, and the racket has been covered up for generations by the Securities and Exchanges Commission, whose sole role appears to be focused on explaining everything away. Public investors buying phony shares aren’t told that somebody's stock isn’t recorded in the registrar’s books here, so victims only buying a bookkeeping transaction never know they‘re not paying for a genuine transfer of real shares of stock. SEC staffers flat out ignore the effect fraudulent shares have on EPS, and they themselves join perps in making and restating excuses for counterfeit shares, sometimes saying phony shares are “borrowed“ from some undisclosed party or place, other times that they are “located“ there, wherever there is and whatever “located” means. Fraudulent dividends are labeled “payments in lieu of dividends” and allowed to look like the real thing when paid into victims‘ accounts.
Fact is, short-sellers get to use their own play shares and can issue themselves as many as they want. Play shares against real shares held by real investors duped by not being told what’s really going on. Wall Street firms are treated by the SEC as if these wise guys are entitled to rip off everyone’s savings.
Who loaned short-sellers Bank of America stock at 50 in 2008 and took it back at 3 in 2009? Why hasn’t he gone postal on my TV? Is he the beneficiary of a pension fund not telling him they are putting his benefits at risk? Has he simply been conned into keeping securities in a margin account without knowing what that means? Or whose stock was “located” then, and why does “located” even change anything? When were these victims told their investments were being used by somebody else? And who told them what their holdings were being used for? Especially the suckers whose purchases had only been bogus bookkeeping transactions to begin with. Everything about this swindle defrauds the public, and was purposely designed that way.
By Wall Street firms I include major financial service companies with investment research departments and stock trading operations as well as all the hedge funds rubbing our noses in their criminal business model blatantly based on the short-selling swindle. As for public investors, we’re looking at every shareholder in America who’s been menaced or fleeced by the racketeers since markets developed for stocks in the 1800‘s, including market crashes as well as short-selling attacks on market sectors or individual stocks during this period of time.
The misinformation campaign tries to draw a distinction between short-sales held overnight and day trades, which are short-sales closed out in the same market session. There’s no difference to the people being swindled, or in the effect on EPS. This obfuscation just makes it possible for racketeers to claim that shares sold short and bought back the same day aren’t bogus, feeling they can get away with this lie because day trade audit trails aren’t run through a transfer agent’s ledger.
Financial firms account for customer shares as a pool, registering them as owned by some entity that the firm controls. This is done to hide transactions when short-sellers issue fraudulent shares to themselves. If every real owners’ name were printed on stock certificates or registered with the company they‘ve invested in, bogus sales would be segregated and readily classifiable by accountants as illegal.
Furthermore, if these racketeers short-sell somebody else’s stock without telling them, where is the line between borrowed and stolen shares? Employees and retirees included in pension funds, for example, are never told Wall Street racketeers borrow (or locate) shares held in those funds and drub the market with them, and are certainly not asked to let this jeopardize their benefits.
Wall Street racketeering and SEC malfeasance have defrauded investors and crippled world economies to the tune of trillions and trillions of dollars since the the agency was established in the 1930’s to prevent such scams from taking place. I hereby claim the appropriate reward as an outside whistleblower.
Based on conservative assumptions, an accountant at The MacDougal Post says my reward works out to 347 billion dollars.
October 21, 2010
The Other Wall Street
A lot of dads come out to watch their kid play ball, and Wall Street CEO’s are no exception. Years ago, I met one with no Gangland affiliation. My mob connection, who had close matrimonial ties to my mother, who was a saint, called this guy a straight arrow.
Turned out the man proved to be an investor pulling clients in on deals that actually financed America, what wise guys said they were doing while financing themselves. His firm never joined in with the bloodsucking thieves around The Street to gangbang markets or sectors or even individual stocks, nor pulled off any nefarious schemes my mob connection could finger him for.
They didn’t have any bloodsucking thieves in the office.
In reading what’s been blogged on our website so far, we realized this part's been left out. Back in the day they weren’t all crooks down there.
Just pretty much everyone doing business with Filch & Finagle.
At least this one firm was the real deal. And still is, we assure you.
October 18, 2010
So Which Is it?
Some investors lost a pile on Bank Of America stock in the 2008/09 financial holocaust when short-sellers buried investors under tons of phony paper. Okay, forget some investors. By now the whole world knows it was me.
From one side of its mouth, Washington tells us that short-sellers borrowed the BAC shares I got scammed with, lent to them by someone in a black hole somewhere, but regulators won’t say who, and out of another side of its mouth, Washington tells short-sellers to pay me dividends on my Bank of America as if short-sellers were the company itself.
In today's paper we read of yet another possibility. Some union guy claims that JP Morgan Chase muscled labor union pension funds into lending shares held in retirement accounts to hedge funds and mutual funds by charging higher fees if they didn't. The bank took 40% of the gains earned on monies that guy's union received from their loans, and walked out on all the losses.
So which is it?
1) Are short-sellers Buckaroo Banzai traders operating across the 8th Dimension of money management, borrowing from the rock people deep inside a mountain in another fold of the time and space continuum? If so, tell us who these rock people are, and inform them that Washington thinks they’re making these loans. Rock people and I both need to know that they were the ones who lent Bank of America to short-sellers over 50 and got it back around 3 so we can commiserate with each other and I can ask them not to do it again.
In fact, I’d bet all the continuums would want to hear about the rock people lending shares to the short-sellers because of what happened to me.
Or
2) Are short-sellers some previously unknown structural part of corporate America, entitled to issue a parallel class of company stock and pay dividends on it just like they really are the company itself even though the shares of this as yet officially undiscovered class never appear on the books of the real issue’s registrar or transfer agent and aren't reported to investors in their annual financials, even though this phony-baloney stock has the effect of increasing total shares issued beyond the number believed to exist, polluting all the per-share data investors base their decisions on? If so, somebody has to tell law enforcement. There are laws to be enforced here.
Real law enforcement, like the Texas Rangers maybe. Or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Investors are being hoodwinked right under the eyes of pretend law enforcement, and true crime fighters need to start tossing some perps in the slammer.
Or
Are short-selling Crime Lords getting stock from some bank-run extortion racket, smashing professional money managers in the knees with exorbitant fees if they don't do what they're told?
Face it, Washingtonians, like Wall Street bankers, speak from many sides of their mouths. Perhaps there’s another explanation they haven’t mentioned, or even come up with yet.
In any case, it’s time to transfer the Securities and Excuses Commission to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has more sides to its mouth than anybody, and has been speaking to Native Americans out of all of them for years.
At least everybody knows who you’re dealing with when you come up against one of their regulatory hotshots.
From one side of its mouth, Washington tells us that short-sellers borrowed the BAC shares I got scammed with, lent to them by someone in a black hole somewhere, but regulators won’t say who, and out of another side of its mouth, Washington tells short-sellers to pay me dividends on my Bank of America as if short-sellers were the company itself.
In today's paper we read of yet another possibility. Some union guy claims that JP Morgan Chase muscled labor union pension funds into lending shares held in retirement accounts to hedge funds and mutual funds by charging higher fees if they didn't. The bank took 40% of the gains earned on monies that guy's union received from their loans, and walked out on all the losses.
So which is it?
1) Are short-sellers Buckaroo Banzai traders operating across the 8th Dimension of money management, borrowing from the rock people deep inside a mountain in another fold of the time and space continuum? If so, tell us who these rock people are, and inform them that Washington thinks they’re making these loans. Rock people and I both need to know that they were the ones who lent Bank of America to short-sellers over 50 and got it back around 3 so we can commiserate with each other and I can ask them not to do it again.
In fact, I’d bet all the continuums would want to hear about the rock people lending shares to the short-sellers because of what happened to me.
Or
2) Are short-sellers some previously unknown structural part of corporate America, entitled to issue a parallel class of company stock and pay dividends on it just like they really are the company itself even though the shares of this as yet officially undiscovered class never appear on the books of the real issue’s registrar or transfer agent and aren't reported to investors in their annual financials, even though this phony-baloney stock has the effect of increasing total shares issued beyond the number believed to exist, polluting all the per-share data investors base their decisions on? If so, somebody has to tell law enforcement. There are laws to be enforced here.
Real law enforcement, like the Texas Rangers maybe. Or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Investors are being hoodwinked right under the eyes of pretend law enforcement, and true crime fighters need to start tossing some perps in the slammer.
Or
Are short-selling Crime Lords getting stock from some bank-run extortion racket, smashing professional money managers in the knees with exorbitant fees if they don't do what they're told?
Face it, Washingtonians, like Wall Street bankers, speak from many sides of their mouths. Perhaps there’s another explanation they haven’t mentioned, or even come up with yet.
In any case, it’s time to transfer the Securities and Excuses Commission to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has more sides to its mouth than anybody, and has been speaking to Native Americans out of all of them for years.
At least everybody knows who you’re dealing with when you come up against one of their regulatory hotshots.
October 16, 2010
Free Bernie
Friday, the Securities and Excuses Commission agreed to let three former Countrywide Financial executives avoid trial on Federal civil fraud and insider trading charges, sparing the alleged evil arch-villains a verdict that could be used against them in shareholder lawsuits or criminal prosecution by other enforcement hotshots. All fraud-based charges were dropped, according to one defendant’s lawyer, and the alleged plunderers admitted no wrongdoing.
For this, somebody, presumably the SEC itself, is collecting $25 million from a Countrywide escrow fund, $20 million from Bank of America, which acquired Countrywide, and an additional $22.5 million from some undisclosed payer, almost certainly Bank of America again under the kind of provisions buyouts generally flaunt. The SEC came up with $67.5 million in fines and civil penalties against the allegedly evil trio, but none of the three have to pay a dime.
Bank of America has already been hit for $8.4 billion in a 12-state settlement over Countrywide racketeering and $600 million to end a class-action suit by former Countrywide shareholders. From Bank of America’s viewpoint, its share is like adding a tad under 5 bucks to a $1,000 fine.
The Big Kahuna at California’s Countrywide had been charged with insider trading, reaping $139 million between October 2006 and October 2007 while writing emails since 2004 that described company paper as toxic, suckering uninformed borrowers into loans by asking for no proof of income and no down payment, and then hitting them with adjustable rates generating unaffordable monthly payments a few years down the road. Countrywide became the nation’s largest home mortgage lender through that swindle, and their alleged Don’s annual salary was 6% of company net income, obscene even by racketeering standards. The alleged Crime Lord has yet to face charges in a courtroom.
The SEC agreement stipulates that the Big Kahuna, about 72 years old now, can’t serve as an officer or director of a public company ever again, and says a second defendant can’t for 3 years. The third guy still can, we guess, and maybe even does.
The U.S attorney’s office in Los Angeles is believed to be conducting a criminal investigation of Countrywide’s former lending practices, as if that prospect somehow makes Friday’s settlement okay.
The SEC did this for bragging rights, we‘re told. The Big Kahuna’s fine is the biggest ever against a public company’s CEO. The Agency gets to “put his head on a pike and parade it around,” some lawyer offered. Remember, others are paying all the fines here.
Our regulatory hotshots at play.
What are these people, nuts?
Jails are for poor Blacks, Catholic priests, greedy Whites, and some others we get too depressed to even read about. Looking at what Bernie Madoff did, scamming a few thousand of his closest friends, the ponzi artist’s punishment is beyond cruel and unusual. Countrywide's alleged goons took down the civilized world and Iceland. In light of Friday’s landmark agreement, setting the new greedy White standard, it’s clear that Bernie’s only mistake was in not selling his con to JP Morgan Chase as the walls came tumbling down, hardly reason to be so hard on the poor guy.
Free Bernie, Free Bernie, Free Bernie, Free Bernie, Free Bernie.
And make JP Morgan Chase or somebody give him back his dough.
October 15, 2010
Saddled up
Chiropractic cowgirl, Rowdi Bonebender, DC, and life sidekick, Uzi, were jawboning over by the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, about ready to cross under the Hudson River and ride on into town. The Big Apple stood on the other side.
Some short-selling sidewinders had been messing with the wrong cowgirl is what it was. Short-selling hedge fund sidewinders.
“Bloodsucking thieves been issuing bogus shares to themselves and dumping ‘em on victims. You and me think we’re buying real stock, but racketeers slip pretend in on us just like that. Even pay phony dividends too. Make you believe your order was matched with bona fide company issue, but all you got is a dang bookkeeping transaction. Bookkeeping deception is what it is.”
Rowdi, an original subscriber to The MacDougal Post, had been reading her blogs good. Real good. Cowgirl knew how bad small investors were getting snakebit by short-sellers. Too good maybe because here she was in Jersey City, outside the major artery into midtown Manhattan, getting ready to do something about it.
Goodhearted soul knew nobody else would.
Rowdi fingered the cylinder on her Colt .38. She rolled it slowly, counting the clicks, then ran her palm along the double-barreled pump-action set across her lap. Cowgirl glanced over to see how Uzi was doing with the M-79 40 mm grenade launcher. Life sidekick was fiddling with ordinance in one of the Gucci saddle bags her chiropractic cowgirl had given her for Musculoskeletal Awareness Day. Uzi was itching to head out. Cowhands too. All the girls looked ready to ride.
Ride into the lawless Hellhole folks in the badlands of New York call Wall Street.
Mongol bow slung over one shoulder, Roomfulla Grones riffled the fletching on a poison arrow. Clearly, battle couldn’t come soon enough for the office Amazon. She slipped the deadly missile back inside her quiver and fixed both eyes on the chiropractic healer, waiting for the move ‘em out.
Anybody could see this wasn’t going to be some fool roundup. Trail boss was out to settle a score.
Rowdi tugged gently on the reins and nudged the great Appaloosa into traffic. Oncoming New York commuters let the girls in with only a hoot and six or seven hollers.
That’s when the cell phone rang.
“STOP, Cowgirl, STOP.” It was MacDougal Irving. He had news. “I’ve got news,” is how MacDougal put it.
Traffic into Midtown from the Jersey side snarled. “Whassup, Hoss?”
“Bloomberg TV says the FDIC has authorized lawsuits against more than 50 officers and directors of failed banks as the Agency aims to recoup more than $1 billion in losses stemming from the credit crisis.”
“What’s that got to do with short-sellers?”
“Nothing, but don’t you see? Somebody’s doing something. You and the girls don’t have to get things started now.”
“Hoss, we’re already here.”
“FDIC’s negotiating. Story says they’ll file law suits if the sitdowns don’t work out.”
“Negotiating?”
“Give the agency a chance, Rowdi. Why not?”
“Negotiating with crooks?”
“Financial crooks. Hey, it’s America.”
“Negotiating with crooks for $1 BILLION?”
Took a while, but we talked the cowgirl into turning around. Her and her gunslingers trailered the saddle broncs and came on home. Didn’t like it much, but we’re talking about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation here.
Securities and Excuses Commission sticks a thing like that in the media, and the Bonebender Bunch is riding on into Hellhole town with fire in their eyes.
October 12, 2010
Quant Algorithms
Sunday night, 60 Minutes explained today’s fashionable whiz bang technology in terms even we can understand. It sounded like these new quant guys enjoy the status of floor traders, exchange members who’ve been around forever. Floor traders pay no commissions and stand right there among the booths, or at least used to, quintessential insiders trading for their own account with our brokers as well as each other.
Nowadays quant geeks at dozens of firms, some old and some new, program quantitative trading platforms into high-speed computers to skim pennies, or fractions thereof, from stock market orders. The software is simply designed to get to the transaction point faster. Programmers draw on no accounting or investment expertise, not even the technical stuff built around charting.
We already knew that these wise guys were hiding behind the vocabulary. Quant, cute for quantitative, means they use numbers. Algorithm refers to any series of calculations, simply some combination of adding, subtracting, dividing, or multiplying, including exotic forms like standard deviations and, if you ever took statistics, worse. Platform is a spiffy word business types came up with to charge more for the whole ball of wax, a total software package here. Specific algorithms are often referenced to bury us in arcane arithmetic irrelevance.
All their terms are just smoke and mirrors. High-speed says you have a brand new mainframe that gets your order in first, and that‘s all we need to know.
Literally first. The electrons, or whatever, actually engage everyone else’s electrons in a race. Results at the finish line also depend on where your cable is connected to the main circuit. The physical location. Like kids angling for a seat, first one to the Chevy’s door gets to ride shotgun for Dad.
These machines are wired into whatever computer system each stock exchange uses, and we now have over 80 exchanges to accommodate them. A guy at the Big Board even showed off the new space quant traders can rent for $10 thousand a month right inside the NYSE data transmission facility.
This nonsense has replaced the specialist. That’s right, replaced. The market maker who physically matched orders by hand to make sure nobody got swindled. Who bankrolled the liquidity in his assigned stock if necessary, often taking a beating when something went awry, recouping once the imbalance straightened itself out again. The company CEO and anyone else he needed were personally accessible to this guy during trading hours, assuring us that his decisions would be the right ones.
We at the MacDougal Post did not know this before Sunday night. The Securities and Excuses Commission saw no need to inform the small investor that the only man standing between him and potential minute-to-minute aberration ruination, the underpinning of the whole floor trading concept, has been gunned down. It was left to an investigative TV correspondent to let us in on the news. As an aside at that.
A correspondent who had no idea that this loss trumped anything else that could have been said all night. And we wonder why nobody goes to jail.
The media has no idea what’s going on. None whatsoever. That’s why perps never get locked up.
This 60 Minutes segment covered high-speed computing. What the loss of the specialist has done, starting with the Flash Crash, and will continue to do to our markets, is yet to be addressed.
Anyway, here’s your algorithm. Place an order to sell at 30. It fills at 29.995 because a buy was put on at 30 as well, letting some high-speed computer trap both trades and subtract or add all over them, costing you half a cent a share. Math guy got in at 29.995 and out at 30.005, and all this happened in a nanonanosecond, which is our quant for simultaneously.
Now program your computer to do the thing with the sell after anticipating it will be able to complete the buy too. That’s what they’d like us to believe is happening.
It isn’t. If you know these rackets, you’ll realize they‘re lying. Reward yourself by checking out The MacDougal Post Archive, and look up Lewie the Dip (July 2010).
Lewie didn’t use a fancy algorithm to stick it to you real good. They don’t either.
No way. Gangsters use light speed for one reason, and one reason only, the time warp. See the paragraph with 29.995 in it above. The part about present and future becoming one.
And after you’ve dipped into a mark on a specific order, nobody else can.
Neener, neener, I got there fiiiiiirst.
No other explanation makes any sense. And that is the one I learned at my mob connection’s knee, this, as some of you may already know, a man with close matrimonial ties to my mother, who was a saint.
60 Minutes said the SEC is looking into high-speed trading. Maybe somebody there knows what a specialist used to do too and can check into the ramifications over his sudden demise. One can only hope with them.
Keep placing limit orders. That’s all this calamari means to us. That and knowing where those third and fourth decimal places on our confirmations come from. Quant trading is expected to account for 70% of volume pretty soon. Those extra thousandths and ten thousandths in the recorded prices are definitely going to be driving some people nuts.
Now that we know what’s going on.
Oh, all right, I’ll give 60 Minutes credit for that. Getting some really valuable information out. Only one of all those quant trading outfits would speak with the correspondent, though even their representative never said what they did for a living exactly.
Just that they did it a lot.
There are only two sources of money on Wall Street, yours and theirs, and now they’re pocketing yours one fallutin’ penny at a time. Or less.
One cent. Half a cent was mentioned. Less can be found on some of our own recent confirmations. Mob offed the investing public’s floor specialist for that. To paraphrase a familiar slogan, these hoods are the plundering herd.
Plundering herd of pocket picking punks.
Nowadays quant geeks at dozens of firms, some old and some new, program quantitative trading platforms into high-speed computers to skim pennies, or fractions thereof, from stock market orders. The software is simply designed to get to the transaction point faster. Programmers draw on no accounting or investment expertise, not even the technical stuff built around charting.
We already knew that these wise guys were hiding behind the vocabulary. Quant, cute for quantitative, means they use numbers. Algorithm refers to any series of calculations, simply some combination of adding, subtracting, dividing, or multiplying, including exotic forms like standard deviations and, if you ever took statistics, worse. Platform is a spiffy word business types came up with to charge more for the whole ball of wax, a total software package here. Specific algorithms are often referenced to bury us in arcane arithmetic irrelevance.
All their terms are just smoke and mirrors. High-speed says you have a brand new mainframe that gets your order in first, and that‘s all we need to know.
Literally first. The electrons, or whatever, actually engage everyone else’s electrons in a race. Results at the finish line also depend on where your cable is connected to the main circuit. The physical location. Like kids angling for a seat, first one to the Chevy’s door gets to ride shotgun for Dad.
These machines are wired into whatever computer system each stock exchange uses, and we now have over 80 exchanges to accommodate them. A guy at the Big Board even showed off the new space quant traders can rent for $10 thousand a month right inside the NYSE data transmission facility.
This nonsense has replaced the specialist. That’s right, replaced. The market maker who physically matched orders by hand to make sure nobody got swindled. Who bankrolled the liquidity in his assigned stock if necessary, often taking a beating when something went awry, recouping once the imbalance straightened itself out again. The company CEO and anyone else he needed were personally accessible to this guy during trading hours, assuring us that his decisions would be the right ones.
We at the MacDougal Post did not know this before Sunday night. The Securities and Excuses Commission saw no need to inform the small investor that the only man standing between him and potential minute-to-minute aberration ruination, the underpinning of the whole floor trading concept, has been gunned down. It was left to an investigative TV correspondent to let us in on the news. As an aside at that.
A correspondent who had no idea that this loss trumped anything else that could have been said all night. And we wonder why nobody goes to jail.
The media has no idea what’s going on. None whatsoever. That’s why perps never get locked up.
This 60 Minutes segment covered high-speed computing. What the loss of the specialist has done, starting with the Flash Crash, and will continue to do to our markets, is yet to be addressed.
Anyway, here’s your algorithm. Place an order to sell at 30. It fills at 29.995 because a buy was put on at 30 as well, letting some high-speed computer trap both trades and subtract or add all over them, costing you half a cent a share. Math guy got in at 29.995 and out at 30.005, and all this happened in a nanonanosecond, which is our quant for simultaneously.
Now program your computer to do the thing with the sell after anticipating it will be able to complete the buy too. That’s what they’d like us to believe is happening.
It isn’t. If you know these rackets, you’ll realize they‘re lying. Reward yourself by checking out The MacDougal Post Archive, and look up Lewie the Dip (July 2010).
Lewie didn’t use a fancy algorithm to stick it to you real good. They don’t either.
No way. Gangsters use light speed for one reason, and one reason only, the time warp. See the paragraph with 29.995 in it above. The part about present and future becoming one.
And after you’ve dipped into a mark on a specific order, nobody else can.
Neener, neener, I got there fiiiiiirst.
No other explanation makes any sense. And that is the one I learned at my mob connection’s knee, this, as some of you may already know, a man with close matrimonial ties to my mother, who was a saint.
60 Minutes said the SEC is looking into high-speed trading. Maybe somebody there knows what a specialist used to do too and can check into the ramifications over his sudden demise. One can only hope with them.
Keep placing limit orders. That’s all this calamari means to us. That and knowing where those third and fourth decimal places on our confirmations come from. Quant trading is expected to account for 70% of volume pretty soon. Those extra thousandths and ten thousandths in the recorded prices are definitely going to be driving some people nuts.
Now that we know what’s going on.
Oh, all right, I’ll give 60 Minutes credit for that. Getting some really valuable information out. Only one of all those quant trading outfits would speak with the correspondent, though even their representative never said what they did for a living exactly.
Just that they did it a lot.
There are only two sources of money on Wall Street, yours and theirs, and now they’re pocketing yours one fallutin’ penny at a time. Or less.
One cent. Half a cent was mentioned. Less can be found on some of our own recent confirmations. Mob offed the investing public’s floor specialist for that. To paraphrase a familiar slogan, these hoods are the plundering herd.
Plundering herd of pocket picking punks.
October 9, 2010
Rowdi Bonebender
Chiropractic cowgirl, Rowdi Bonebender, DC, had a point. Given the position Rowdi had your blogger in, this was fortunate as he was going to be listening anyway.
“Look, Hoss.” Cowgirl calls all her mounts Hoss when she’s writhing them on the table.
“Uhhhh,” your blogger replied.
“We got guns.”
“Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhh.”
“Them short-sellers, what they got is criminal intent.” The cowgirl is an avid fan of this blog, an original subscriber. She’s always trying to help The MacDougal Post out.
“Uuuuuuuuh, Uh.”
“Wall Street ain’t that far away. Not with today’s livestock trailer. Maybe me and the girls ought to trailer the saddle broncs up yonder and ride on into town.”
“Uh, Uh.”
Rowdi Bonebender is what folks down here call a chiropractic healer. Patients get wheeled in all bent over and what have you, and walk out right. Well, the ones who survive her proprietary THRASHING (pat. pend.) anyway. Put a Bible in one of those powerful hands, and the cowgirl could be doing this in church, raking in some real dough, maybe even go televangelical, but Rowdi wouldn’t think that way. Cowgirl’s doing fine just helping folks out.
Still, the chiropractic healer does have guns, and from reading these posts, figures if anyone needs helping out, it’s MacDougal Irving and his small investors.
“Hoss, them badlands could use a little shooting up.”
“Mglrkkkkkkkkkgggnnnsstttbbllllrrrmmpppppph.”
“Bloodsucking thieves and all.”
"Rdlgpfffssst."
That’s when the office Amazon, Roomfulla Grones, took over.
"NOT ROOMFUuuuuh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh."
Cowgirl keeps the Amazon around to finish up with the chiropractic healing once Rowdi’s about turned a person into ground round hamburger meat. When Roomfulla's pummeling was done too, your blogger hotfooted it out of there, feeling two-thirds of an inch taller and maybe half as wide. We didn’t get to finish our conversation, Rowdi Bonebender and the new man.
Probably was for the best.
We’re keeping our eye peeled on the financial news though. Cowgirl and them do trailer the saddle broncs up yonder, then it’s game over for at least one of those Crime Families there in the badlands of New York.
Might be the onliest thing we can do too, any of us. About that lawless Hell hole folks call Wall Street.
We're thinking Rowdi and her gunslingers would do it up right too, a ridin' on into town.
“Look, Hoss.” Cowgirl calls all her mounts Hoss when she’s writhing them on the table.
“Uhhhh,” your blogger replied.
“We got guns.”
“Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhh.”
“Them short-sellers, what they got is criminal intent.” The cowgirl is an avid fan of this blog, an original subscriber. She’s always trying to help The MacDougal Post out.
“Uuuuuuuuh, Uh.”
“Wall Street ain’t that far away. Not with today’s livestock trailer. Maybe me and the girls ought to trailer the saddle broncs up yonder and ride on into town.”
“Uh, Uh.”
Rowdi Bonebender is what folks down here call a chiropractic healer. Patients get wheeled in all bent over and what have you, and walk out right. Well, the ones who survive her proprietary THRASHING (pat. pend.) anyway. Put a Bible in one of those powerful hands, and the cowgirl could be doing this in church, raking in some real dough, maybe even go televangelical, but Rowdi wouldn’t think that way. Cowgirl’s doing fine just helping folks out.
Still, the chiropractic healer does have guns, and from reading these posts, figures if anyone needs helping out, it’s MacDougal Irving and his small investors.
“Hoss, them badlands could use a little shooting up.”
“Mglrkkkkkkkkkgggnnnsstttbbllllrrrmmpppppph.”
“Bloodsucking thieves and all.”
"Rdlgpfffssst."
That’s when the office Amazon, Roomfulla Grones, took over.
"NOT ROOMFUuuuuh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh."
Cowgirl keeps the Amazon around to finish up with the chiropractic healing once Rowdi’s about turned a person into ground round hamburger meat. When Roomfulla's pummeling was done too, your blogger hotfooted it out of there, feeling two-thirds of an inch taller and maybe half as wide. We didn’t get to finish our conversation, Rowdi Bonebender and the new man.
Probably was for the best.
We’re keeping our eye peeled on the financial news though. Cowgirl and them do trailer the saddle broncs up yonder, then it’s game over for at least one of those Crime Families there in the badlands of New York.
Might be the onliest thing we can do too, any of us. About that lawless Hell hole folks call Wall Street.
We're thinking Rowdi and her gunslingers would do it up right too, a ridin' on into town.
October 7, 2010
Goldman Sachs: Power and Peril
CNBC showed this documentary last night, and will run it again late tonight and in prime time Sunday and probably some more down the road. Catch it, watching the faces of current and former Goldman employees closely, and keep asking yourself the following question:
1) Can you see there, written vividly all over every single facial expression, that each one of these people lucked into this company and has absolutely no chance to make millions a year anywhere else ever again, knows full well that the entire Goldman enterprise centers around robbing customers blind, and is going to say or do anything to protect that business and their personal millions no matter what it takes, knowing full well that he or she has become a total crook, which is okay now because it makes him or her obscenely rich, and also knows that everybody in the world knows that too, so with the ones being interviewed by David Faber, each has to get through the interview being shown to viewers who will all think they’re scum however they try to wriggle away from what everyone in that company did and still does,
2) or not?
I think the pack of them find the situation hilarious, and can't wait to get back to their culture and share how funny the above question and their part in it is.
1) Can you see there, written vividly all over every single facial expression, that each one of these people lucked into this company and has absolutely no chance to make millions a year anywhere else ever again, knows full well that the entire Goldman enterprise centers around robbing customers blind, and is going to say or do anything to protect that business and their personal millions no matter what it takes, knowing full well that he or she has become a total crook, which is okay now because it makes him or her obscenely rich, and also knows that everybody in the world knows that too, so with the ones being interviewed by David Faber, each has to get through the interview being shown to viewers who will all think they’re scum however they try to wriggle away from what everyone in that company did and still does,
2) or not?
I think the pack of them find the situation hilarious, and can't wait to get back to their culture and share how funny the above question and their part in it is.
October 6, 2010
Free Marketeering
Capitalism views the marketplace as an intersection where buyer and seller meet. It fails to consider the robber, who’s already there, lurking in the bushes.
That’s why economists keep getting everything wrong.
The criminal mind is totally unaccounted for. From Adam Smith through George WTF Bush, the great free market deciders of History missed the whole fleecing point. Money begets crooks. The bigger the profit, the bigger the profiteer. And by passing the wealth of nations through a small number of identifiable hands at announced times in specified locations, capitalism optimizes the last remaining larcenous ingredient, opportunity, turning the Greed Lust From Hell that markets spawn into Serial Financial Crime Spree of the Century after Serial Financial Crime Spree of the Century.
Nobody gets it in the Dismal Science. Nobody gets it at all.
But we have Arthur Conan Doyle to blame as well. Had the creator of Sherlock Holmes recognized where all the real offenders were, the New York Stock Exchange would be trading inside Police Headquarters today, where it belongs, supervised by burly Irish-Americans with Billy clubs instead of an SEC and its hapless staff of unprofessionals.
Besides, with Conan Doyle afoot, John Maynard Keynes keeps his fool mouth shut, and we’re hanging onto our savings that much longer.
In his 1934 doctoral thesis, Laissez Faivre, Chief Economist at Filch & Finagle, came up with a landmark hypothesis all but proving that pi had nothing to do with circles. Or geometry even. Pi related to the short-term public trader. The little guy doing business with one of the Wall Street Crime Families.
If such a mark makes 22 trades, profiting on only 7 of them, for every $12.50 of capital loss or gain he records, on average, the bloodsucking thief dancing with him rakes in $100 of the sucker‘s starting capital. Should our little guy bring a $1,000 wad to the table, our wise guy pockets it all after 220 total trades. Marks netting more than $12.50 per dance per $1,000 lose their bundles faster.
Pi is 22 divided by 7, or 3.14 and change, and doesn’t mean math shinola compared to what Laissez Faivre came up with. If readers don’t believe him, order some candlestick charts, bone up on your stop loss protections, and phone in 220 orders. See how your life savings does compared with the hypothetical numbers.
Accomplished small investors, on the other hand, keep the same top quality, modest yielding core holdings across generations. It’s ugly paring portfolio income to get in, uglier still hanging on through the occasional train wreck, but bloodsucking thieves make nothing off them. To this day that drives Laissez Faivre crazy bananas.
Economists never let a thing like this get out though. The lot of them have always been paid off by the gangsters.
Little guys help fire the engines of finance. How, never concerned the likes of Laissez Faivre or any of his historical econo-cronies.
We have gamed markets, folks. The only thing free about them is the opportunity racketeers seize to go out and rig the action.
That’s why economists keep getting everything wrong.
The criminal mind is totally unaccounted for. From Adam Smith through George WTF Bush, the great free market deciders of History missed the whole fleecing point. Money begets crooks. The bigger the profit, the bigger the profiteer. And by passing the wealth of nations through a small number of identifiable hands at announced times in specified locations, capitalism optimizes the last remaining larcenous ingredient, opportunity, turning the Greed Lust From Hell that markets spawn into Serial Financial Crime Spree of the Century after Serial Financial Crime Spree of the Century.
Nobody gets it in the Dismal Science. Nobody gets it at all.
But we have Arthur Conan Doyle to blame as well. Had the creator of Sherlock Holmes recognized where all the real offenders were, the New York Stock Exchange would be trading inside Police Headquarters today, where it belongs, supervised by burly Irish-Americans with Billy clubs instead of an SEC and its hapless staff of unprofessionals.
Besides, with Conan Doyle afoot, John Maynard Keynes keeps his fool mouth shut, and we’re hanging onto our savings that much longer.
In his 1934 doctoral thesis, Laissez Faivre, Chief Economist at Filch & Finagle, came up with a landmark hypothesis all but proving that pi had nothing to do with circles. Or geometry even. Pi related to the short-term public trader. The little guy doing business with one of the Wall Street Crime Families.
If such a mark makes 22 trades, profiting on only 7 of them, for every $12.50 of capital loss or gain he records, on average, the bloodsucking thief dancing with him rakes in $100 of the sucker‘s starting capital. Should our little guy bring a $1,000 wad to the table, our wise guy pockets it all after 220 total trades. Marks netting more than $12.50 per dance per $1,000 lose their bundles faster.
Pi is 22 divided by 7, or 3.14 and change, and doesn’t mean math shinola compared to what Laissez Faivre came up with. If readers don’t believe him, order some candlestick charts, bone up on your stop loss protections, and phone in 220 orders. See how your life savings does compared with the hypothetical numbers.
Accomplished small investors, on the other hand, keep the same top quality, modest yielding core holdings across generations. It’s ugly paring portfolio income to get in, uglier still hanging on through the occasional train wreck, but bloodsucking thieves make nothing off them. To this day that drives Laissez Faivre crazy bananas.
Economists never let a thing like this get out though. The lot of them have always been paid off by the gangsters.
Little guys help fire the engines of finance. How, never concerned the likes of Laissez Faivre or any of his historical econo-cronies.
We have gamed markets, folks. The only thing free about them is the opportunity racketeers seize to go out and rig the action.
October 2, 2010
Flash Crash, Part II
(The Dow lost 1,000 points in a matter of minutes in the Flash Crash, and anyone placing market sell orders then risked getting plucked. Plucked real good, some of them, in what clearly became cyber fraud as prices shot back up. We stopped using any kind of market order ourselves as a result, and have already blogged about why, and suggest that our readers consider sticking with limit orders instead.)
Yesterday, officialdom came out with a report concluding that last Spring’s high-speed computer trading hiccup was caused by high-speed computer trading. The SEC congratulated itself on something too, but I lost interest in anything these people were trying to tell me long before getting to that part of the story.
There are four words to the term, high-speed computer trading, and nobody thought to remove the first three, and start with the only one that really matters.
Officialdom put some geek in charge of the reporting team. In a separate article the geek boasted that he found out exactly what happened, and the report lays blame on a single unidentified large player.
A single unidentified large player who was trading at the time.
We, you and I and most normal adults in this country, invest, putting our life savings into a small number of risky enough business ventures, and our Government allows the worst kind of bloodsucking thieves to kick us in the financial acorns from 9:30 to 4 Eastern every $#&%ing weekday, including most religious holidays, all of them if you‘re Jewish.
And officialdom’s geek wants to talk to me about high-speed computers.
$#&% officialdom, $#&% their geek, $#&% high-speed computers, and point me at all the readily identifiable racketeers who are doing us every minute of every trading day. I mean, what is it about our life savings that makes this their game?
That’s the hiccup Officialdom needs to be reporting on. That, and when is somebody going to start putting these a$$holes in jail?
Yesterday, officialdom came out with a report concluding that last Spring’s high-speed computer trading hiccup was caused by high-speed computer trading. The SEC congratulated itself on something too, but I lost interest in anything these people were trying to tell me long before getting to that part of the story.
There are four words to the term, high-speed computer trading, and nobody thought to remove the first three, and start with the only one that really matters.
Officialdom put some geek in charge of the reporting team. In a separate article the geek boasted that he found out exactly what happened, and the report lays blame on a single unidentified large player.
A single unidentified large player who was trading at the time.
We, you and I and most normal adults in this country, invest, putting our life savings into a small number of risky enough business ventures, and our Government allows the worst kind of bloodsucking thieves to kick us in the financial acorns from 9:30 to 4 Eastern every $#&%ing weekday, including most religious holidays, all of them if you‘re Jewish.
And officialdom’s geek wants to talk to me about high-speed computers.
$#&% officialdom, $#&% their geek, $#&% high-speed computers, and point me at all the readily identifiable racketeers who are doing us every minute of every trading day. I mean, what is it about our life savings that makes this their game?
That’s the hiccup Officialdom needs to be reporting on. That, and when is somebody going to start putting these a$$holes in jail?
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