Financial Market Rigging

The notion that markets move randomly and reflect investors' sentiment is rubbish. There's a "mechanism at work, like the Wizard of Oz behind a curtain, pulling on strings and pushing buttons." Indeed there is with names.

In 1989, Reagan's EO 12631 created the Working Group on Financial Markets (WGFM) in response to the 1987 market crash. It's more commonly known as the Plunge Protection Team (PPT), including the president, Treasury secretary, Fed chairman, SEC chairman, and Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chairman. Its purpose: to enhance "the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of our Nation's financial markets and (maintain) investor confidence."

The plain truth is that the PPT rigs market performance up or down at Wall Street's discretion because insiders profit both ways. Money used to manipulate markets is "Monopoly money, funds created from nothing and given for nothing" just to move markets as insiders wish.

In a June 2006 article titled "Plunge Protection or Enormous Hidden Tax Revenues," Chuck Austin wrote bluntly stating:

"The PPT not only cheats investors out of trillions of dollars, it also eliminates competition that refuses to be 'bought' through mergers. Very soon now, only global companies and corporations owned and controlled by the NWO (New World Order) elite will exist." Wall Street giants sit atop that pyramid.

Along with the PPT, the "Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) exists - "authorized by Congress to keep sharp swings in the dollar's exchange rate from 'upsetting' financial markets." In a word, like the PPT, it operates by rigging markets for insiders, the usual suspects being major Wall Street firms - getting inside information on how to invest or the equivalent of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal today.

Another organization exists for the same purpose - the so-called Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group (CRMPG), established in 1999 to handle the LTCM crisis and protect against future ones. According to one account, it was "set up to bail out its members from financial difficulty by combining forces to manipulate markets" with US government approval.

One of its devices is for the nation's giant banks to collude in large-scale program trading, amounting to over half of all daily New York Stock Exchange volume and on some days much more. Knowing which way to bet puts them at odds with smaller firms and ordinary investors, vulnerable to losing out by a scam designed to defraud them - supported, however, by the full faith, credit, and muscle of the government.

But is an eventual day of reckoning coming? Hans Schicht believes so and says:

Consider also the possibility that the "spider" moved to London where a "navy of pirate hedge funds....rule the world out of Cayman Islands" - an "epicenter for globalization and financial warfare" run by "Anglo-Dutch oligarchy" chosen officials allied with major global banks and shadow financial system players.

But even best laid plans at times fail, given how vulnerable even major banks are from their derivatives bets. As gold expert Adrian Douglas observed:

To fend it off, Wall Street and its European partners are using desperate measures, "including a giant derivatives bubble that is jeopardizing the whole shaky system." In a February 2004 article called "The Coming Storm," the London Economist warned that "top banks around the world are now massively exposed to high-risk derivatives (posing a systemic) risk of an industry-wide meltdown."

John Hoefle believes that "the Fed has been quietly rescuing banks ever since. (He) contends that the banking system went bankrupt in the late 1980s, with the collapse of the junk bond market and the real estate bubble." The S & L crisis was "just the tip of the iceberg."

The Fed secretly took over Citicorp in 1989," arranged shotgun mergers for other giant banks, back door bailouts, and "bank examiners were ordered to ignore bad loans. These measures, coupled with a headlong rush into derivatives and other forms of speculation gave banks a veneer of solvency while actually destroying what was left of the US banking system."

It got in trouble because big gambles failed, including Third World debt defaults as well as Enron and other corporate bankruptcies. Giant US banks "are masters at....counting trillions of dollars of worthless IOUs (like derivatives) on their books at face value (to make it look like they're) solvent."

Between 1984 - 2002, takeovers papered over failures by reducing bank numbers nearly in half and consolidating the top seven into three - Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America. According to Hoefle:

Does this "mark the inevitable end times of a Ponzi scheme that is inherently unstable?" Perhaps private banking as well, replaced by pension and mutual funds, and others able to operate efficiently at low cost.

Battling back, giants expanded into investment banking with repeal of Glass-Steagall, but profits continued to fall as the economic downturn accelerated, resulting in investment banks converting to commercial ones and retrenching temporarily from core businesses like M & A and corporate lending. "Meanwhile, banking as a public service has been lost to the all-consuming quest for profits," the very strategy getting giants in trouble and needing periodic government bailouts.

Very few of their services involve "taking deposits, providing checking services, and making consumer or small business loans." Instead, they concentrate on "dubious practices" responsible for a giant Ponzi scheme with "the entire economy in its death grip." They created a "perilous derivatives bubble that has generated billions of dollars in short-term profits but has destroyed the financial system in the process."

The "too big to fail" concept resulted from the S & L crisis when many of them collapsed and Citibank lost half its value. In 1989, Congress passed the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act, bailing S & Ls out with taxpayer money. It was a brushfire compared to today's global conflagration, making it far harder to contain and effectively teetering all banks on bankruptcy. Considering the damage they've done, it's time to cut them loose and let them survive or fail on their own. And if the latter, it will be a major step toward restoring economic health overall.

Banking services can more efficiently be provided than by parasites using us as their food source."The irony is that our economic system is built on an illusion. We have been tricked into believing we are inextricably mired in debt, when the 'debt' was for an advance of 'credit' that was ours all along." It's high time we reclaimed it.

The next article focuses on taking back our money power.

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