Reports surfaced this morning that a stealth
unit at Goldberg Styx is engaged in proprietary (prop) trading.
Now, subscribers will recall that
something labeled the Volcker Rule, a ban on prop trading by commercial banks proposed
a couple of years ago by a former Fed guy, became law last summer, but Ben
Bananas, the current Fed guy, said he wouldn’t enforce it, at least for now or
something, pending another whatever, and hearings are scheduled early this year. More hearings. We already had some before. What the thing even means is impossible to pass
along as banking industry lobbyists are currently at work chipping away at the underlying
regulations that will ultimately define the Volcker Rule, which clearly isn’t a
ban on prop trading anymore if one of the largest too-big-to-fail commercial
banks in the country is doing it.
Proprietary trading, traditionally the
practice of talking customers into taking the losing side of Crime Family
transactions, is considered the principal reason why entire generations of
burned public investors never return to the stock market after getting fleeced
big time during one of Wall Street’s cyclical financial lootings. Lately, it has been almost universally cited
as the cause of the 2007-2013 Global Financial Takedown. Proprietary trading has always been thought
of as “The Big Con” by knowledgeable industry observers.
Now, this Goldberg Styx news comes
after the Crime Family’s Don publicly assured more than 400 people at an economic
luncheon that “we shut off that activity (prop trading)”, insisting, according to the account our
staff is staring at right now, the criminal enterprise no longer had
proprietary traders who… didn’t interact with clients.
Turns out, reading further along (and
what is remarkable about this coverage is how these journalists can show us
what happens when there's no longer any rule of law in your country without
noticing that there's no longer any rule of law in our country), today’s Volcker
rule allows financial crooks to use long-term trading positions to screw marks,
the details of which defy description as all the lobbying is going on
underground and we’re not allowed down there.
For example, apparently all these weasels do is intend to take long-term
positions at the time of initiating a trade but close the trade out out whenever
they want to. At least, that’s how we
read the story.
WTF?
(That’s the best we can do with this one, subscribers. If anything about this mess were any clearer,
believe us, someone on The MacDougal Post staff would have caught it. As always, the Crime Lords don't want us to know what's going on.)
