Speculators

    We can’t figure out who threw Ireland under the bus: the media or Bloodbath Mary.  Bloodbath, primary person of interest over at the Securities and Exchange Commission, certainly took her best shot.  Dutiful readers will recall that, maybe a year ago, the regulatory hotshot called off hearings on short-selling, explaining that short-selling had nothing to do with the 2008/09 financial apocalypse caused by short-selling.

    Shorts, the worst kind of Crime Family Maggots, have been on the loose ever since.

    Well, difficult as it is to believe, hacks from rag and tube may have done her one better this catastrophe.  Those geniuses are blaming the Emerald Isle debacle on “speculators”.  Oh, it isn’t the first time.  Short-sellers don’t exist in the Land of the Blithering Idiot.  Maybe it’s the hyphen.  Tough to remember whether to put one in or not, easier to stop using the term.  Okay, probably not.

    Whatever, with an IQ about matching your typical market news babe’s bra size, the average financial journalist clearly blabbers/scribbles in mob code, an encryption omitting the purveyor of bogus securities lurking atop every market reversal price chart.

     I don’t think members of the modern financial press corps actually buy stocks. They snort their paychecks away.  It would explain a lot.

    To anyone who’s opened an account at my Crime Family, the difference between “speculator” and “short-seller” is crystal clear.  A speculator is one of hundreds of thousands of plundered clients who listened to their storefront grifter, and a “short-seller” is the a$$hole in the New York office who pulled the rug out from under them once the sting got set up.

    Recent media reports tell us “speculators” bashed Irish bond prices into the bog, and are now tongue-lashing anyone stalwart enough to hold the course in the freefalling Portuguese and Spanish markets.  Stalwart or daft, only time will tell.  All Europe appears to be tumbling downhill in sympathy, albeit at slower rates of decline than the Iberians, at least last week, as are U.S. multinationals with major stakes in the mob-fingered economic crisis of the month.

    Problem with that classic piece of media disinformation is found at the root of this wildly inappropriate label.  Speculate, implying you lose money, and lose money a lot, has no place here.  Gangland racketeers operate one obscenely profitable money machine, churning out Lordly fortunes by shorting their casualties’ life savings into smithereens.

    Speculators, balderdash.  Like it was last time, and the dance before that, like it always has been, and always will be, at least until Bloodbath and/or the hacks step up, what you have here, folks, are SHORT-SELLERS run amuck.

    Did you hear me, Bloodbath?

    SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS, SHORT-SELLERS.

    And Teflon short-sellers at that.

  Scourge of the planet in the Post Apocalyptic Era, these rampaging Gangland fiends set upon entire populations like some kind of malignancy, metastasizing pathological rot on a scale heretofore unseen, ravaging billions of innocent victims two years ago, then inexplicably left alone to inflict their lifestyle-draining contagion again at a rate of tens of millions upon tens of millions at a time.  If all Europe follows, make that hundreds of millions.  What does The MacDougal Post have to do to show sick people how to stay well?

    It’s a horrid disease borne by a psychotic Presbyterian Mafia, rendered untouchable through political bribery, but the cure is obvious - excoriation - and it can start with stripping the short-seller’s mystique away.

    Hyphen and all, we‘re afraid.

Networking

     While covering the initial FBI hedge fund raids, the New York Times added the following quote: “We have begun increasingly to rely, in white-collar cases, on undercover investigative techniques that have perhaps been more commonly associated with the investigation of organized and violent crime,” said Lanny A. Breuer, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s criminal division, in a speech this month.

    What on earth are the requirements for financial crime to be considered organized by Justice?  Or violent, for that matter.


    Maybe it’s the collars.

    Okay, Lanny and the boys are finally starting to sniff out those nefarious white collars, but what we’ve always had on Wall Street has been mostly striped collars, with some nice pastels and maybe a pink or two now and again.  Yellow as well, and I feel I should apologize for that one even after all these years.  So there’s really a pack of striped collars and like that on the loose, and it reads like we‘ll have to wait for Lanny Breuer’s crime busting Untouchables to catch up with them now.

    Meanwhile back in the real world, one notes yet another Goldberg, Styx connection to a Federal sting, and remembers that their former CEO, while Treasury Secretary, threw Letterman Brothers under the bus at the same time Goldberg’s exposure to the toxic Wall Street bond underwriting apocalypse got covered under the table when AIG was bailed out.  Could a Letterman informant be afoot in here somewhere seeking payback?


    Furthermore, as we learned from our mob connection, a man with close matrimonial ties to our mother, who was a saint, Mob traders rip us off through 1) short selling, 2) mining our orders, and 3) concerted action, throwing the entire weight of all the Families into targeted securities and sustaining the attack until the public’s savings are looted in full.


    Keep an eye peeled on how carefully Gangland stooges at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) avoid those three areas. Insider trading has long been used to draw attention away from the central rackets, turning up peripheral scapegoats with no direct connection to the Crime Lords themselves.


    Policing any one of the three would lead to the other two and put an end to Wall Street racketeering forever, so look for that to happen never.

    Lastly, using the yuppie term, “network”, to describe Gangland racketeering is a pathetic stab at sugar-coating organized financial crime, the kind of mob-serving touch our regulatory hotshots always add to show underworld observers whose side they’re really on.  Wall Street grifters are yuppies, you see, not mobsters at all.  Market crashes don’t mass-murder anybody, or psychologically cripple their immediate victims, or loot nations, or cause worldwide catastrophic economic devastation that lingers for decade after decade across generations of stricken families.


    One only hopes that someday FBI agents will be raiding SEC offices as well.

Ireland Goes Down

    Two years ago it was Iceland.  Now the same Financial Crime Maggots have destroyed Ireland‘s ability to borrow by short-selling that country's bond prices into the ground.

    Agencies responsible for evaluating credit risks rushed to drop their ratings on Ireland’s debt.  When asked why he was caught by surprise, a fellow at one of the rating houses replied that market conditions changed faster than anyone could’ve anticipated, and he thought that unwarranted.  Repeat, market conditions.

    In case you don’t understand code, he was telling us that wise guys from the Wall Street Crime Families, acting together as they always do, wrought fire and brimstone down upon the Emerald Isle on a felonious whim.

    Mob spokespersons fingered Portugal as next, then Spain, the kind of disinformation we've come to accept because the Securities and Exchange Commission allows these crooks to shoot their mouths off all over the tube.

    Two years ago the civilized world and Iceland were brutally attacked.  Now another sovereign nation has been mugged by racketeering hoodlums, and two more placed under the gun.  In every case, Gangland thugs have “surprised” the globe’s credit analysts with their bloody handiwork.

    The great mortgage scam buried Iceland, but we’ll side with the experts on the Emerald Isle debacle.  Debt there has not reached the point where this criminal outrage should have happened.  Listen carefully to what the Irish themselves have been saying.  And talk about Portugal is a case of bullies trying to muscle girly boys out of the way by warning the Nancies off.

    Why doesn’t anyone but the perps themselves see what’s going on?

    One can only note China’s burgeoning world influence, and look for the day when somebody with the reason, will, and wherewithal will line some of these punks up and start shooting them for egregious market manipulation, which, by any rational standard, has been a capital crime all along.

Smell Test

    We learned about the short-selling con from our mob connection, a man with close matrimonial ties to our mother, who was a saint, but what about everybody else?  How do you know it’s a big fat swindle?  Well, lets go back and look at what’s been covered so far, checking this stuff out like an auditor would.  Maybe it’s the best our readers should be expected to do.

    By definition, a deception is designed to fool.  In auditing, this often means you’re given a misleading view, told it’s something else, and never shown the true picture, which can’t be seen from the vantage point deliberately set up for you.

    If, somewhere along the way, something just doesn‘t smell right, you have to grab onto that.  There’s nothing else.  The perps have made sure of it.

    From there, you dig into things as best you can, tracking down the stench, or trying to.  If that awful odor never goes away, you keep at it.  Eventually, the auditor can get to a point where he has to inform someone they’ve got an odor on their hands.  The message can sound that silly.  So you pass along what amounts to suspicions to a comptroller, a board of directors, or even the police.

    Sometimes law enforcement is implicated, and then you’ve got a dilly of a deception on your hands.

    Anyway, all you can do is give the appropriate party what you’ve got.  May not be much, but the nature of deception means you go with it anyway.  But who on earth do you tell when the authorities are involved?

    Which brings us to short-selling.  Financial Crime Maggots try to tell us that once in a while short sellers “borrow” the shares they sell.  As in sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.  Otherwise, we’re told, short-sellers “locate” shares, but not always.  Lastly, you read some short-sellers do neither, and that’s called “naked” short-selling.  On top of that, there’s a whole industry of securities “lenders” operating in the dark which would seem to exist only to give credibility to the “borrowing” alibi.  When its even used, that is.
   
    Last time we checked short-selling at wikipedia.com, the piece pretty much read like the above.

    Stinky.  Real stinky.  Face it, we’ve got a smell test to apply with this one.

    For starters, three explanations is two explanations too many.  Regrettably, all of them come from Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) spokespersons as well as various perps.  One too many would appear odiferous.  We’ve got two, and law enforcement bandying all three about.

    Basically, nothing smells right.  Disappointed in the human race, we look at the transactions themselves.

    1)  “Borrowing” shares:  Here, start with, say, 100 shares, all owned by the “lender“.  But after all is said and done, there are 200 shares left.  The “lender” gets his 100 shares “returned” to him, and the owner of the shares sold short in the marketplace now holds 100 shares too.  What kind of loan is this?  Where did the new 100 come from, and what in the world are they?  Why does anybody need a loan if he‘s creating brand new shares for nothing and getting paid to sell them?  Most important, how is this not a public offering, with the proceeds going to the short-seller instead of the company, making the so-called loan explanation a total lie?

    2)  “Locating” shares:  Short-sellers calling up to see if a broker holds as many shares as the short-seller wants to sell and selling short if there are enough sounds like “borrowing” where somebody neglected to actually borrow and got caught and came up with a “my dog ate my homework” excuse, particularly when preceded by a regulatory apology regretting that not everybody is “borrowing” after they said they would.  How is “locating” even relevant to a transaction?  You might as well add a memo entry showing what you ate for breakfast that morning.  Maybe it tasted really good and we haven’t tried any yet, so the breakfast entry would at least pertain to something.

    3)  Naked short-selling:  This is a paper swindle.  The short-seller simply issues himself bogus shares and sells them to a buyer who thinks they’re real, meaning, as any reasonable party would conclude, the short-seller makes his side of whole transaction up.  Here we start with zero shares, create, say, 100 phony, and sell them to a buyer deceived into believing they’re real.  All shares are put in the same bin at the brokerage house handling his account, mixing the 100 phony in with all their real.  Eventually the short-seller buys back his 100 phony from someone selling 100 real, conning a second sucker, so over time the real share count gets netted out between the two people he duped, meaning the phony shares only exist while the short-seller’s position is open.  You have no idea how difficult it is to explain that to normal people.  We just hope it’s intelligible now.

    Here at the MacDougal Post, we never use the term, naked short-selling.  It’s part of the deception.  All short-sales are paper swindles.  Buyers are sold phony transactions, not securities.  The purported securities never exist so you can‘t make a distinction between “borrowed“, “located“, and “naked“ shares.  They’re one and the same actual transaction.  A crook issuing shares to himself, dumping them on marks believing them to be real, then retiring his phony shares when he buys himself out.

    Next our smell test turns to valuations, and that means earnings per share (EPS).  If these are bogus shares, and we aren’t informed about them, then EPS is less than we’re told.  Investors base their market decisions on EPS, making this a clear case of securities fraud.

    If the SEC is misinforming us about short-selling, it’s involved.  The regulatory hotshots are charged with prosecuting securities fraud, not committing it.

    That’s what we’ve got, a real stinker of a smell test, at least 97.9% on the sniff-o-meter.  So who do we tell?  Congress?  The White House?  We already tried, and that’s a total joke.  Bribes from Financial Crime Maggots, a.k.a. campaign contributions, finance politics in Washington.  And the media is owned by corporate America, so forget them.  The New York Times editorial staff gave America this opinion of stock option crime some years ago:  people who complain only do so because they aren’t in on it, (like they are).

    So we tell you.

    And hope our valued readers pass the knowledge along to a million of their closest friends at cocktail parties, which actually gives us a shot in a couple of cases.

    Oh yeah, that securities lending to short-sellers thing.  Guy at a union pension fund says banks extort institutional investors into whatever that is by charging higher fees if they don’t lend.  Internet sources say the business is run by huge banks and appears to be fairly recent.  Sounds like somebody found a way to charge more fees.  The lending part is just a sham, as it always has been.  What intrigues us most is the cloak of darkness here.  We’d love to see what they’re hiding, and hope it all comes out some day.

The Hypocrites and the Horrors

    Once upon a time in a kingdom beset by Horrors, the royal village had rather dark and spooky markets.  So dark and spooky, the markets were always having problems with the Horrors.  After one particularly horrifying problem, the King ordered bureaucratic functionaries to shine light upon the markets, and poke lanterns everywhere Horrors might be lurking, so that none of the villagers would ever run into the awful creatures again, but that never happened.

    It doesn’t take long for Horrors to bribe their way into bureaucratic functions and staff them full of Horrors, Hypocrites who look and sound and even scribble like bureaucratic functionaries, but aren’t because they’re Horrors like I said.

    Hypocrites are very good at disguises and fool everyone, you know.

    And so, light never really came to shine upon the markets.  Oh, the Hypocrites brought lanterns all right, but hardly ever lit them and then only poked in silly places no self-respecting Horror would deign to beset.  Some villagers tried complaining to the King, but his bureaucratic functionaries wouldn’t let the emails through, and other villagers tried blabbing to the media, but all the talking heads in the village were owned by Horrors, and more’s the pity, nothing ever got done.

    How could it?  The kingdom was beset by Horrors.

    On a day when Horrors were lurking up in the rafters of the markets, tossing phony beans and carrots and rutabagas in with the real beans and carrots and rutabagas, vegetable prices were plummeting.  If people actually bought all the beans and carrots and rutabagas you kind of saw in those rather dark and spooky bins, they’d never be able to eat them all, and would have to throw tons out, so villagers saw no reason to pay a lot of hard-earned royal flibbertigibbets for trash, thus vegetable prices went down and down and down.

    Villagers are funny that way.

    Alas, Horrors were trashing the markets, or so one might be excused for saying, because there was no light there, and also because they’d made bets against vegetable prices at the derivatives casino next door, and the casino was even darker and spookier than the markets and nobody in the royal village knew what was up with that place at all.  The Hypocrites had meetings all day, so zero bureaucratic functionaries were poking about with lanterns, is what was going on with them during this particular trading session, alas again.

    Eventually, farmers rose a clamor over the plummeting vegetable prices, and so it eventually transpired that the talking heads got called in after all.  Somebody found a lantern and a Hypocrite with matches, and a spokesperson for the Horrors called this press conference, and said, “vegetable prices plummeted today on fears over inflation in Asia and debt in Europe.”

    And the Horrors watched the talking heads saying this goofy thing on TV and had a good laugh, and went back to tossing phony beans and carrots and rutabagas into the bins again because that's what was really going on with the vegetable prices.

    Market manipulation.  Bean and carrot and rurabaga market manipulation. 

    Right under everybody's nose.  Or noses.  I never get that one right.

    Thereupon, as fate would have it, when vegetable prices finally got low enough to suit the awful creatures, Horrors bought up everything in the bins at big fat bargains, making oodles next door too, then took out all their phony beans and carrots and rutabagas and marked up the real beans and carrots and rutabagas over the next few trading sessions and sold them for yet more oodles.

    And the spokesperson for the Horrors called another press conference and explained, “fears over inflation in Asia and debt in Europe were overblown,” and the talking heads certainly saw the logic there, and the Horrors had a good laugh over that one too when it came on the TV, but they were all partying down on South Beach now, so no one had to go back and toss beans and carrots and rutabagas into bins this time.

    And so it came to pass that in this kingdom, light stopped shining altogether on the rather dark and spooky markets, and government functionaries stayed in their government function building and had meetings and enjoyed glazed breakfast pastries with their lattes, and the farmers sold their beans and carrots and rutabagas at horribly low prices, and were poor, and the people bought their beans and carrots and maybe 3 rutabagas because 3 of those God awful things are enough for any people, at horribly high prices and were poor too, and the Horrors reported trading profits every day but maybe 8 and partied in cabanas on weekends and market holidays and drank umbrella drinks and stuffed itchy powders up their noses and hired boy bands and got out on that dance floor and did the hoochie coochie all night long.

    And the Hypocrites quit their jobs and went to work for the Horrors, and lived happily ever after with stock options and obscene year-end bonuses.

    Rather horribly obscene year-end bonuses, if you want to know what I think.

Perspective

     Keep buying stocks and pay us our commissions, or we’ll bury you in a rockslide of short-sales.  That’s how that racket works.

    Some fun, investing.

    But there’s a bright side to this too.  Short-sellers afford their foils deep insight into the darker forces of Evil.

    By shorting, mob armies from Hell lay a demonic overhang of bogus securities atop authentic issues owned by righteous Gangland customers, and then rain this faux paper down upon them.  As long as honest, salt of the Earth types keep accumulating enough real stock, market prices kind of zigzag upwards through gaps in the archenemy’s infernal barrage.  Once righteous souls start for cover, however, the pummeling intensifies, battering quotes downward, crushing markets if Satan’s ruthless minions scare the Lord’s flock away, as so often happens, otherwise pinning God’s lambs down while Crime Family hit men flank out in the darkness of SEC oversight to slaughter them with blades.  It’s a prolonged battle then.  Session after session after session.  Torture by endless string of down days.

    A bleeding, a.k.a. the death of a thousand cuts, and we‘re taking those kinds of hits right now, crimestopper fans.  It was brutal out there last week.

    The Holy Bible views the primal struggle between Good and Evil as mortal hand-to-hand combat, and clearly you and I enter the fray ourselves forking the hard-earned family savings over to Crime Lords.  Good Book also says we lose.

    But win upon finally reaching Heaven, making everything just hunky-dory, at least then anyway, though kind of rendering you a stone cold loser at the end, it would otherwise seem.

    What gives our tormentors the right?

    Bribing Washington, plain and simple.  Now and again corporate types get busted for slipping payola to foreign officials, but making “campaign contributions” here is somehow okay.  Our justice system, already rendered unabashedly unjust by assuming that all its citizens know all its laws, totally breaks down when enabling systemic political corruption.  The Financial Crime Maggot is domestic officialdom’s most generous benefactor.

    What kind of people are we?  Doesn’t anybody care?

    Maybe, but the media’s owned by the corporations too, and voices of dissent are drowned out by “journalists” who can’t possibly fail to see what’s going on, but are willing, if not eager, to puff their feathers for blue chip perps paying them to jabber on about something else.  Anything else it would seem, to listen to them.

    The type who find that part amusing, we’ve observed.

    That Gangland’s Hell-bent aristocracy can flourish taking God’s law-abiding victims down with what amounts to highway robbery at the intersection of buyer v. seller is hilarious to those who make words say whatever The Man wants, and not think twice about it.

    Which brings us to perspective.  The working Joe cannot support his family here.  His job is overseas, his wages fractionalized to yuans and rupees on the dollar.  American Dreamholders are technically bankrupt.  Collapsed home prices cratered their personal net worth, exacerbated by corrosive home equity loan racketeering.

    Investors and the outfits they invest in are pouring money offshore hand over fist.  Things are peachy there.

    Meanwhile, an imminent financial apocalypse threatens to stomp what’s left of our humbled existence and squish it underfoot.  Without material tax hikes or dismantled boondoggles, probably both, Government soon won’t be able to find anyone to buy its debt at anything remotely close to par.  When that happens, the Ship of State sinks, her fuel lines fatally severed by an explosion in the engine room.  Mismanaging extravagant military escapades with tax cuts, W and Bam have placed a fiscal IED inside our nautical metaphor, primed to go off some years out but perilously close given the timeframe our bomb squad will need to do something about it whenever they can schedule that in.

    Particularly in the midst of economic depression.  Forget what you read elsewhere.  Those pens get paid to say it isn’t, just like they ignore our un-and-under-employment rate of maybe 40% these days.  Come to Tennessee and try telling these long faces this is just recession.  Or that now-vanished jobs inside empty factories will come back ever.

    Or Ohio, or pretty much anywhere outside your metropolitan coastal shoreline communities.

    If you haven’t studied economics, and for some who tried, we’re getting at hyperinflation here, now a chilling tad closer than just over the horizon, thanks to the new fiscal adolescents enrolling in Congress on January 3rd.  Picture your life sidekick headed for the grocery store behind a wheelbarrow full of dollar bills, where she/he finds prices 50% higher than they were last week, a bargain at half what they‘ll be 7 days from now.  That’s the most likely scenario as dangers loom today.

    Understand, the country’s beyond the point where traditional spending cuts will work.  Unless tax revenues get unplugged and/or whole Government programs are rent asunder, the budget’s toast.  It truly is all about 1) tax hikes, and you know where mindless posturing puts Republicans on that limb, and/or 2) downsizing bureaucracy and the Democratic propensity to stuff its big fat voting underbelly with social pork.

    So why worry about short-sellers or financial racketeering?

    We’re not sure The Post has an answer for that one.  But the country’s got a Satan-spawned pack of Wall Street thugs out there, basically un-policed, the same black-hearted sort who buried various peoples in the civilized world and Iceland in 1720 (twice), 1769, 1796/97, 1819, 1837, 1847, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1882, 1884, 1893, 1896, 1901, 1907, 1929, 1937/38, 1973/74, 1980, 1982, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1997 (twice), 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007 (twice), 2008/09, 2009, April 27, 2010, and May 6, 2010, not to mention all the clever little issue-specific plummets, freefalls, plops, splats, downdrafts, and tailspins victimizing population segments at every mob bloodletting in between, and if you have to go around fixing things anyway, you might as well start with demons.

    Who knows, somebody might finally go to jail.



Investor Aside:  Long ago, a German survivor of their notorious Weimar Republic's struggle with hyperinflation in 1922/23 told us he would go into it holding industrial assets like non-financial common stocks and businesses themselves if anything like that ever threatened him again.  Half a century had passed, and he was still wary of fixed income securities.  In what we'd allocated as the bond portion of his portfolio, he made us take a modest position in gold bars instead.

Taped Cell Phone Calls

    Bloomberg TV reports that England will start taping trader’s cell phone calls soon.  The new regulatory policy is aimed at stopping insider trading, and easily evaded, but, hey, a win is a win, and we‘ll take it.  Coming on the heels of Germany’s outright ban of short sales, we find ourselves approaching joyous delerium here at The MacDougal Post.

    So much so our blogger’s decided to cut you a break.  That’s it for today.

    He’ll get back to ragging on next time.

    Experience shows that an Oracle needs two martinis a week to see everything.  This week it’s going to be three, and The Guru’s already started on that extra.

    Party on, valued readers.  It’s a gala time to be one of the good guys.  Throw a Taped Trader Hoedown yourselves this weekend.

  Investor Aside:  Lately, an energetic white plume has been rising above Jupiter's cloud tops, possibly heralding the return of the giant planet's missing stripe.  We are proud to observe that The MacDougal Post is the first financial blog to chronicle this fortuitous omen.  All may be well again soon.

Soldier Hedge Funds

    Back in the day, Filch & Finagle was an over-the-counter (OTC) house, meaning F & F didn’t make markets in issues traded on the various stock exchanges, only in unlisted securities of large or mid-sized publicly held corporations.  Banks and insurance companies were all unlisted in those days, and two of the Crime Family’s five traders manipulated stock quotes in those industries.  A third handled arbitrage, mostly in listed names, so there were only two traders gaming the rest of the OTC marketplace and one of them spent much of his time helping the arbitrageur mess with preferred stocks.

    OTC houses charged no commissions on stock trades, getting paid through a spread between the price they’d bid to buy 100 shares of something and what they’d ask to sell 100.  On internal reports, income within those spreads got booked under “fees and commissions”, and pencil pushers classified large amounts garnered outside the bid-and-asked as “trading profits”.

    Trading profits swelled when wise guys convinced big institutions to discount large sell programs because distribution would “flood” the market.  Filch & Finagle could get one of those block trades at a 15% discount, or whatever, then spend a few weeks touting the premium wise guys now claimed these shares deserved to smaller institutions because such quantities weren't always available, and ultimately unload slimmed-down blocks at quotes maybe 15% over where the price had been before the hoedown started.

    The trading desk's target profit happened to be 30% per caper, and you can see why the crooks hit it time after time.  A little off here, a little on there adds up fast when you‘re swindling everybody.  There were plenty of other stings too, often pulled down in concert with complicitous Families.

    We rob your customers and you rob ours was a particular favorite of our mom's.  It always got her leaving the room whenever one of those deals came up.  Sometimes she'd even take a drive.

    Mom had a '55 Chevy for a while, so we'd go too if she let us, and the Irving family's mob connection dropped the subject after a couple of those conversations.  Apartment got real empty, we guess.

     Our mob connection, a man with close matrimonial ties to our mother, who was a Saint, claimed the trading desk made money every month he ran the Filch & Finagle back office, even in the depths of The Great Depression back in the 1930’s.  We asked him to prove it and he showed us the statements, and it was true.  Every single month in the worst of the worst of times, trading profit or loss at F & F always printed black.

    That kind of success has everything to do with the mob definition of trading.

    Bloodsucking thieves dancing around our orders is what it is.  There are two sides to every transaction.  Somebody’s buying and somebody’s selling.  Generally, we give Family soldiers one side and the racketeers go out and find a mark to beat on the other, stuffing the mob’s own pockets with the difference.  Like the gangs were rigging a curling match, you go first so they always get to wield the hammer.  Sometimes offsetting orders come in simultaneously and racketeers take multiple suckers down in one caboodle.  At their most devious, wise guys from all the Families get together and pull the fleecing rug out from under the rest of us through massive short-selling.

    That’s how this ridiculous “trading” racket works.  It's all “proprietary”.  A fancy two-step inside the spread or out.  Nobody at the desk knows where the market’s going.  Nobody even cares.  Thugs simply rip off clients one transaction at a time, every transaction, every time.  When the Dons are ready to move markets, a Kingpin passes the word down.  That’s their business, not the trader’s.

  Those notorious “rogue” traders you read about are silly civilians who don’t understand that price swings happen when Dons make price swings happen.  By getting all the Families together and bullying markets in some direction.

    Rogues are never made men.

    Lately, according to Corporate TV, there’s been an exodus of trading desk soldiers leaving the Families for brand new billion dollar hedge fund start-ups, presumably to comply with new financial regulations.

    It’s our guess that Dons are simply shifting their own billions out of mob brokerage trading desks in order to back mob hedge fund trading desks, and in a way that we’ll never get close to uncovering, making sure their soldiers take the Family’s order book along with them.

    We’ll venture a guess that this way is electronic.  If you’re an SEC hotshot following our blog with regulatory diligence, I’d avoid looking there for sure.

   Chances are good you might find something.*





* Hedge fund trading items matched with brokerage firm fees and commissions. (We’d let the Don thing slide through. They’re way smarter than you.  Too smart to keep a hotshot on the Agency payroll if it looks like he’s close to nabbing them.  Or worse.)

News v Propaganda

    Last night, talking heads on GE TV told us that all those jobs we lost in recent decades went overseas because students in something like 40 countries graduate smarter than ours.

    Maybe a month ago, Chinese officials explained that they couldn’t seriously weaken the Renminbi, or the Yuan, or whatever that currency is called, because all their rural poor emigrating into the exploding urban job markets in recent decades would be put out of work.  Officials even showed how big the Chinese manufacturing centers had gotten, and discussed some of the problems caused by the massive relocation of their semi-illiterate, who apparently had to semi-skip their studies to frolic in the family rice paddy before Capitalism showed up.

    Big manufacturing centers.  Really, really big.  Big and cram packed with semi-illiterate rural poor.

    Why do we find ourselves 1) believing what looks, sounds, and feels like actual news coming from a Communist regime dealing with reality in an honest and forthright manner, and 2) rejecting what then becomes corporate propaganda from mob Crime Lords stuffing 75% of the nation’s wealth into their own pockets, up from 35% when those above decades started, while continuing to transfer as much as they can of the rest, in part by leaning on what used to be our media?

    And why isn’t anybody else ranting about this?  Talking heads claimed the education gap is a long term problem and we’d be even more decades catching up.  AND WE’D NOT BE GETTING ANY OF THOSE JOBS BACK until then.

    Guess they are broadcasting to some of the dumbest people in the world.  At least, the gangsters themselves must think so.

    I worked in a plant once.  Sometimes I stood on one side of the furnace plucking powdered-metal gun parts out of a bunch of small boxes and setting them onto the conveyer belt.  Other times I stood on the other side plucking really hot solidified metal gun parts off the conveyer belt and packing them into these great big boxes.

    Face it, that’s what we’re talking about here.  They even had somebody else taking care of the boxes so I couldn’t screw that part up.

    Education gap.  When the gun parts came out of the furnace, I had to remember to wear mittens.  Wasn’t anything else to it.

    How smart does a semi-literate rural poor Chinaman have to be?