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.

Be Like Carl

      Yesterday, legendary investor/infamous corporate raider Carl Icahn announced that he has a brand new $1.5 billion position in Apple common.  That’s 7.5% of his estimated net worth.  Were the legend to rebalance his portfolio holdings to something around that percentage as a diversification target, he’d end up with just 13 stocks, so this move is more than a tad on the aggressive side, which should come as no surprise to our valued subscribers.  And, who knows, Icahn may not be done with his buy program yet.  If the price tanks once again, one would think he'd step in somewhere and support it.

       To see if you want to be like Carl, first multiply your own net worth by .075, and consider how large this position would be for you, next double that number to accommodate the likelihood he's weighing the pros and cons of doubling up if the opportunity presents itself, and then decide whether you’d wheel and deal with that kind of action too.

       Or not.

Crime American Style

      While your friendly mobsters at JP Morgan Chase, the nation’s largest criminal organization, 1) have agreed to pay $410 million to make charges of power market manipulation go away, 2) are looking at arrests over that $6.2 billion London Whale trading loss scandal, and 3) remain under investigation over a) some kind of Libor fixing cover-up, and b) Presbyterian Mafia stockpiling of commodities targeted in industrywide price-rigging operations, we’re now told that 4) a criminal probe is finally underway into the part JP Morgan Chase goons played in the sale of those bundled subprime mortgage securities that caused the 2007-2008 Financial Apocalypse which took down the civilized world and Iceland.

      Comments from Washington lawmakers are strangely absent in the total lack of media hoopla surrounding these Kingpins and their archcriminal activities.

      Meanwhile, after staging civil demonstrations in support of street thugs pounding neighborhood watch heads against the pavement, the Justice Department announced that street drug dealers are spending too much time in prison and not enough time selling drugs on the streets, and so, will no longer be charged with smalltime drug crimes over street-level criminal drug dealing activities.  Efforts to take away our guns so street thugs can just go ahead and shoot us all dead while they shoot up our children remain on the back burner at Justice for now.

      Oh, and on Monday the NY Times reported that the settlement of a Facebook privacy case allotted nothing to the plaintiffs and about $2.3 million to their lawyers.

      What in God’s name has happened to the nation we were born in?  Lady Liberty weeps for the victimized children of her teeming masses.