Prop Trading, 2013

          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.)

Shut Hollywood Down

           As a clamor over gun shows waxed in stately, to-the-manor-born Connecticut this weekend, the byproduct of awkwardly contrived stabs at what passes for reasoning in Liberal Middle-earth, a single thought popped into responsible minds of real Americans all across the amber plains of our cherished American Heartland.

         Where’s the move to shutter theaters showing violent films out of respect for the victims in Newtown?

         Hollywood had killer thrillers screening in Nutmeg State multiplexes as that tragedy was being played out, Tinseltown is still brandishing Roscoe-packing Palookas at your neighborhood bijou right now tonight, and more Loogans, they’re bragging, lousy with filmdom’s kind of trouble, will be out queering the nation’s fettle soon.  Like this week or something.  Those dirty rats haven’t even stopped filming this bunk or releasing this bunk or developing this bunk or anything.

         The insensitivity in that is mind-numbing.

         Though motion picture moguls put a lid on the kind of relevant industry data that would otherwise finger the scope of the problem, your MacDougal Post staff is comfortable estimating that theatergoers in the U.S. and Canada witnessed at least 6.5 billion murders on the big screen in 2012 alone*, and there’s no way we can begin to come up with numbers for that damn TV in your living room.

         Now we like to see bad guys get it as much as anyone, and understand that bodies have to pile up in order to make them out as so evil they just gotta be plugged, but, folks, there has to be a limit.  Clearly, that point lies somewhere before 6.5 billion lives being seen snuffed by the moviegoing family members of North America.

         Something like maybe one plugging a decade would seem to suffice here.  On a per theatergoer basis, that would still amount to something like 1.3 billion murder viewings, averaging out to 130 million a year.

         So business dries up out there by Hollywood and Vine, and some hams go jobless.  Hey, join the club.  If what have to be awful, awful people, judging from the product they’ve been giving us anyway, need to find another line of work, so what?  To stop desensitizing killers to killing is worth any price.  And losing Hollywood would probably end up becoming a huge plus.

         Whatever stepped in to take its place couldn’t possibly be any sicker.

* Estimated 2012 movie theater attendance of 1.3 billion times an average of 5 whacks per cinematic presentation.

To Have and Have Not

         As armies of prattle-wielding suburban Democrats storm the Second Amendment once again, hell bent on stopping rural Republicans with legal guns from defending themselves against ghetto Democrats with illegal guns, one of our favorite movies seemed to step into the fray last night.  We’ll spare you clips of the gunfights, exemplifying the real reason for all the gun violence in this country - ghetto Democrats with real guns acting out what Hollywood Democrats with fake guns teach them onscreen – but those scenes aren’t as good as the two linked below anyway.

         And, by way of welcoming our new Kappa Sig subscribers to The MacDougal Post, both clips feature brother Hoagy Carmichael at the gin mill piano.

         For those of you who have no idea what we’re going on about with that, know this.  In his novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Ian Fleming described James Bond as “…certainly good-looking … Rather like Hoagy Carmichael in a way.  That black hair falling down over the right eyebrow.  Much the same bones.  But there was something a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold.” 

         That’s how cool the songwriter/actor/KZ who also gave us Stardust was.  Oh, okay, we may as well toss Hoagy's signature song in too.

         Am I Blue:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9C1vJ2Z8aI0

         How Little We Know (We do know we've blogged you this one before):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX3ccbPbohg

         Stardust:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=fvwp&v=GzRWwQK5OQ0

Best Disingenuous Arrogance in a Supporting Political Role; and the Oscar Goes to …………..

          Ain’t Hollywood grand?  We’ve all noted the unconscionable hypocrisy of a pretentious and overindulged, vaingloriously egomaniacal show-off, who is the real reason why gun-wielding ghetto Democrats act out armed crimes the way they do, unabashedly grappling to confiscate the guns of besieged Americans trying to protect themselves against armed crimes by gun-wielding ghetto Democrats acting out this brain-dead hambone’s movie roles.  Well, somebody has edited film clips of what some of these troglodytes do for a living in between their sanctimonious political inanities, and delivered it unto YouTube.  Take a gander at this X-rated frig-you-mentary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxRlpRcorEU&list=UUmJcQe7-uS6gvcOUDFyFBng&index=9