Market Manipulation
This is an excerpt from the latest on straightlinelogic.com:
The press, financial market participants, politicians, and regulators are all too happy to jump up and down over Mr. Lewis’s HFT “revelations.” Turning the spotlight on potential penny ante theft turns it away from the trillion dollar larceny of central bank asset purchases, aka quantitative easing. HFT may or may not cost the average stock investor a fraction of a cent on his or her trades. As it becomes increasingly obvious that monetary manipulation is not producing recovery and economic growth, even the manipulated financial markets might take note (it may have already begun). When artificially inflated markets deflate, the scale of losses is proportional to the scale of the previous inflation: trillions in, trillions out. Investors will discover that while a few cents might be missing from their coin purses, their life savings have vanished from their brokerage accounts, courtesy of their government and its central bank.
The press, financial market participants, politicians, and regulators are all too happy to jump up and down over Mr. Lewis’s HFT “revelations.” Turning the spotlight on potential penny ante theft turns it away from the trillion dollar larceny of central bank asset purchases, aka quantitative easing. HFT may or may not cost the average stock investor a fraction of a cent on his or her trades. As it becomes increasingly obvious that monetary manipulation is not producing recovery and economic growth, even the manipulated financial markets might take note (it may have already begun). When artificially inflated markets deflate, the scale of losses is proportional to the scale of the previous inflation: trillions in, trillions out. Investors will discover that while a few cents might be missing from their coin purses, their life savings have vanished from their brokerage accounts, courtesy of their government and its central bank.
I attended regional meetings held by the Resolution Trust Company then, and the testimony was all manipulated toward real estate which was a tiny fraction of the problem. The great majority of the losses was in securities that were only discussed behind closed doors in DC and NY. (I asked about this in the regional meetings, and that was the answer given... "thats being handled by financial experts in Washington and NY".) Wall St chose its scapegoat who voluntarily went to a federal 'country club' for a couple years, paid the feds a fine, and retained half a billion in legal profits. He wasn't the reason for the collapse, just a convenient patsy to cover for the perps. It was no coincidence that the only competitors of the bankster system, the savings and loans, were wiped out (and allowed to fail by the feds) to be replaced by the banksters who created the crisis.