Errant Trade/Mini Flash Crash

         It was described by someone at Procter and Gamble (PG) as an errant trade.  The media labeled it a mini Flash Crash. Whatever, at 12:11 yesterday prices of PG common stock dipped from what looks like something a tad over 77.50 down to 73.61, and then bounced right back to the 77.50+ level within that same minute.  The New York Stock Exchange later announced that all trades would stand, including, according to one blogger, one for 65,000 shares at 75.11, indicating that multiple transactions got triggered, not just the one.

         Subscribers, as we stated immediately after the catastrophic 2010 Flash Crash, do not place market orders anytime anywhere ever again.  The humans formerly in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening to you no longer exist.

         The system we've been left with is whacked. 

Debt Ceiling Again

         The Umama White House has informed the Honorable John A. Boehner, Speaker, U.S. House of Representatives, that Treasury’s ability to pay for Government spending ends in mid-October.  Department ledgers had already reached the nation’s statutory debt limit back in May, the Secretary announcing then that his functionaries would be taking “extraordinary measures” to come up with the dough needed to keep Washington afloat temporarily, and now those financial shenanigans will be exhausted in a month and a half, at which time Federal bureaucrats will either stop writing checks or start bouncing them.

         Apparently they plan to pay expenses out of cash on hand, usually meaning first come, first served.  If your check gets to the teller's window before the money runs out, you get paid.  After that, well, think bank run, we suppose.  Photos from the 1930's show padlocked front doors and a whole lot of people standing around in the cold.

         The deadline sets up another Umama v Boehner standoff, and media coverage immediately jumped all over a rumored GOP attempt to defund Umamacare with the confrontation process.  Others were quick to point out that this strategy would seem to suggest that the timeliness of your October Social Security electronic bank deposit is now in play as well, possibly signaling the end of the Republican Party as we know it.  Okay, as Seniors know it anyway.

         Be forewarned, valued subscribers.  Whatever happens, the children are playing with the D-word again.  DEFAULT.  We may be in for yet another debt ceiling punch in the gut.

Another Death on the Job

         We read that a 21 year-old summer intern in the London office of this high-profile investment bank is thought to have died from overwork, having pulled three consecutive all-nighters, which would seem to mean he went without sleep for 72 hours straight.  Trying to cover their pathetic a$$, some unidentified hand job claimed that the Crime Family’s Human Resources Department had recently sent out a memo “saying something along the lines of don’t work your interns too hard in the final weeks”.

         Time was, our blogger landed a coveted entry-level gig in white-collar racketeering too, this junior security analyst slot over at Fallutin National, and faced the same kind of calamari himself.  Nobody in management actually told you to put in ridiculous hours, but a body couldn’t help noticing that none of the other bodies left when the little hand got to 5 and the big hand finally hit 12, and this guy, Alan in the next booth, had horror stories about what happened to previous coveted gigholders who did.

         “Don’t go until he goes,” was Alan in the next booth’s advice, referring to the group capo way in the back of the room.  Capo split at precisely 8 PM most nights, otherwise up to as late as 11.  Nobody went out the door with him – that would look like you were just hanging around because he was still %$#&ing there, which you were, but pretended you weren’t as pretending is the most important part of any investment banking job description and you need to show the boss that you're good at it – and the assistant group capo made a point of inviting everybody to join him in the elevator then so we could all be tied for last person to go home tonight.

         Alan in the next booth quit at the end of the week, and, in time, so did the rest of the underlings.  Our blogger, who turned out to be Alan in the next booth’s replacement, though nobody had told him that, got transferred to another capo fairly soon, otherwise he would’ve fled too.  New hires who had the unmitigated gall to head for the elevator when you were supposed to, got pink slipped the very next payday, and nobody other than the capo and the capo wannabe lasted more than a matter of months in that beleaguered corner of the office.

         Capo was an inhuman monster.  A sociopathic beast.  Wasn’t the only sociopath in the place either.  Monsters beget monsters, and drive actual human beings away.

         Fallutin hired thousands of overachieving young men and women every year, at least twenty-fold more than they’d be promoting any time soon, and expensing all those slots with entry-level wages meant the CEO and them could pull in that much more dough themselves.  Placing new hires in the hands of monsters raised the employee turnover rate high enough to keep that system running smoothly.

         Vicious pack of sociopathic beasts marauding in the stench of all the rotting careers they had lain to waste – and, from time to time, a forsaken young soul or two as well.

Yesterday's NASDAQ Glitch

           Yesterday, NASDAQ shut down for either two or three hours, depending on which paragraph of the story we read you want to cite.  It happened during what was supposed to be the afternoon trading session, and since we didn’t place any OTC orders then ourselves, we’re wondering what the dysfunction must’ve felt like to those who did.

         Online with a discount Crime Family, as is our lot these days, we would’ve checked “Buy” or “Sell” on the “Trade” window, added the "Number of Shares", "Symbol", "Order Type" (always “Limit” for us ever since the Flash Crash, and appropriate “Price”), and “Time-in-Force” (“Day” for us).  The “Special Instructions” and “Routing” defaults are “None” and “Smart”, respectively, and we never mess with them.

         This is where the typical investor deals with sundry typical investor issues, things like thoughts of suicide, where you're going to live when the bank takes your home, how many times you've lost money using this $#%&ing form, how much money you've lost using this $#%&ing form, and just who your testamentary heirs are this year and how much of the estate each is going to get his/her grabby little hands on.

         Then we would’ve clicked on the big “Review Order” button at the bottom of the window, compared our limit price with the current market quote and bid and ask offers on the display that popped up next, and, deciding we were okay there, hit “Place Order”.

         For some inexplicable reason, thoughts of who your testamentary heirs are probably going to be next year often runs through the typical investor's mind at this point in the order-placing process, as well as how much of the estate each is probably going to get his/her grabby little hands on this time, and we would've been no exception to this inexplicability, we're sure.

         The final step, hitting “Order Status” on the top bar of the current window, would've come next, and we always pause for something more than a millisecond before doing so as it generally takes at least a millisecond to fill an order these days, only, Holy Calamari, yesterday one could’ve sat for up to maybe three whole hours, or whatever it was, waiting for a fill to come in.

         Would we have been savvy enough to check the “Streaming Quotes” screen and see WTF?  You betcha.  That display is always up and dazzling us before we ever get started with the wheeling and dealing.  And there would’ve been no changes to any of the NASDAQ numbers there.  The NYSE quotes would’ve been flipping green and red and the occasional black to indicate up, down, or even from the last trade or yesterday’s close, depending on which column you were gawking at, but the NASDAQ, they would’ve been, like, totally lifeless.  Since we only have two NASDAQ issues on our “Streaming Quotes” thingie, tech giants INTL and AAPL, it would’ve looked tech-specific to us.  Like China stopped using computers.  Or somebody had invented something, and it wasn't INTL or APPL.  Maybe time travel, and nobody was going to stay home in front of a laptop anymore.  Or need cell phones when people can now warp over and say what they want in person.

         ALL NASDAQ STOCKS HAD JUST GONE TO ZERO, AND THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE DIDN"T KNOW HOW TO TELL US.

         Subscribers, we’re too old for this kind of calamari.  Somebody needs to fix these dysfunctions and soon.

         NOW would be a good time for us.

The Muslim War and Mexican Ethnic Cleansing

Facing outrage over holding their “Million Muslim March” on Washington on the September 11th anniversary of their dramatic victory against this country back in 2001, protest organizers pulled out a timeworn religious tenet - lying to despised infidels - and changed the event’s name to “Million American March Against Fear”.   Reminiscent of raghead plans to place a mosque beside the World Trade Center site a while back, our nation’s refusal to acknowledge the bloody war these people have been waging against nonbelievers across two millennia continues to demonstrate how dumb, hence vulnerable, we appear to the enemy.

Meanwhile across the country in Los Angeles, Jorge Vergara, billionaire owner of Major League Soccer’s USA Chivas, has been charged with what one former employee calls “ethnic cleansing”, removing everyone from his organization who isn’t Mexicano and doesn’t hablo Espanol, including players, staff, and all connected with their youth soccer programs, kids too.

“If you don’t speak Spanish,” Vergara is quoted as allegedly saying, “you can go work for the Galaxy”.

Since we can’t believe this one ourselves, here’s the Fox News link: 


http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/08/16/la-soccer-team-accused-purging-non-spanish-speakers/ 


         Why aren't we throwing all these a$$holes in the clink or out of the country or something?  This calamari is beyond ridiculous.

What’s Just around the Bend

         If you don’t think you’re at war, or sometimes question why, take a look at our relentless enemy and his vile objective in every corner of the globe:

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/08/18/egyptian-islamists-attack-christian-churches/

A Word about Banana Clips

         Your MacDougal Post staff first noticed that the Feds were cooking the books while slogging through the bedeviled, inflation-ravaged wasteland otherwise known as the Jimmy Carter years.  Suddenly some of their rosier economic stats had lost any possible connection to reality, and the more glaring errata getting pooped out of Washington at that time could no longer be reconciled with audited financials coming from the private sector and empirical evidence.  To us, the national accounts have never looked right since, and we simply don’t use them in decision-making.

         Thursday, consternation over federal debt totals made another media splash, at least with the fair and balanced crowd over at Fox News, so MacDougal revisited malfeasance there once again, and we’ve decided to let you in on his thinking.

         MacDougal thinks that all the poopheads in Washington should be thrown in the slammer, number crunchers too.  Clearly any digit published inside the beltway passes across a political desk prior to release.  Those misbegotten dirtbags have to be penciling in whatever they want.

         Within each stinking Federal Agency is a high level socioeconomic sociopath who answers to nobody and is ethically challenged enough to crank out the kind of malevolent drivel that will let the 1% continue to fleece every single man woman and trust fund baby in the 99% until the last woebegotten penny is squeezed out of their destitute, wage-enslaved, sorry-a$$ wealth management accounts.

         Washington says the Federal Government has rung up a $16.9 trillion National Debt.  Everybody else sees it as a staggering $70 trillion or worse.  Do you have any idea what the difference is between 16.9 trillion anythings and 70 trillion of them?  Of course you don’t.  Neither do we.  Nobody does.  Basically, nobody has a clue.  We don’t even understand what the number 1 trillion could possibly be.

         Driving 40.2 million times around the equatorial circumference simply does not trigger a comprehensible electronic impulse inside the human brain to explain what 1 trillion means.

MILEWISE, 70 TRILLION MOTHERF#$%ING DOLLARS IS LIKE DRIVING YOUR LEXUS AROUND THE EARTH’S EQUATOR 2.814 BILLION MOTHERF#$%ING TIMES

         To punish high crimes against the crown in Merrie Olde England, our buddies the Brits used to drag their hopelessly condemned to the gallows bound and roped behind a horse, and thereupon hanged the miscreant until almost dead, thence disemboweling alive whatever was left, entrails burned in the process, whereupon anything that still remained got beheaded and the charred corpse quartered (four limbs, four horses, one giddyup, and you don’t want to know what happens next).  That’s the closest we can come to describing how our elected officials have been doing the American people since about the time a prior Mr. President was getting done too, only different, inside the Clinton Oral Office.  Screwing with National Debt totals probably fits in with those entrail burnings during the disembowelment part, and maybe smoldering for a bit just after that part too.

         Off-balance sheet financing is how they’re going about it, subscribers.  Remember Enron?  Same kind of thing.  The Feds do not fund promises, leaving out the future cost of political bacchanalia like Social Security, guarantees of student and mortgage loans and pension benefits, and now Obamacare.  That means we’ll be printing money to pay for the actual benefits when the promised dreams come true, and the day the real extent of that debt is acknowledged, and the monetization needed to cover it starts to get unsprung, interest rates will skyrocket, and financial markets will collapse. 

         We’ve written about hyperinflation before.  That’s the biggest fear.  Whatever, financial fraud is the cause, and that’s what we’re covering here.  Washington’s financial fraud.  That American voters continue to leave any of these perps in power should be a lesson to us all.  And that lesson is this:

         Don’t leave the house without side-arms, subscribers, and at least one semiautomatic rifle, and stock plenty of ammo in the pickup.  And don’t forget the banana clips.  Boxes and boxes of fully-loaded banana clips snugged up just inside the tailgate so you can get to them real quick.

         Time’s coming when you’re gonna be needing every dang one.  Every dang fully-loaded 30-round clip.

         Could be coming sooner than you think too.