As usual you strike right at the heart of these issues, and I hope everyone at least reads your post. I'll chime in piece by piece:
<their game is "gearing" and "leverage">
Good terms for it, mine being the more colorful, "pump and dump".
<Take one policy response pole (say the inflationary), and gear it to the max.>
I don't really see this being pumped or geared to the max yet, although there may some pockets of it. I actually see sudden sell offs such as in copper as reverse precursor Crack Up Boom manipulations. They just appear to me too obvious, too blatant, and really too stupid, and are designed to get weak hands out, and to allow plutocrats, crooks, and financial apparatcheks to reload.
<which in our situation I expect to be a more deflationary emphasis, with a pronounced return to positive real interest rates (i.e. a normalization of the interest rate structure).>
I most certainly have this prospect on my radar screen, and I think people would be nuts not to, which is why you see me always hearing footsteps (but mostly of the MoP, not real variety), trying to short EDs and bonds as hedges, scanning COTs data, sentiment, etc, etc. And this would definitely "surprise" many if not most market participants who are engaged in reflation, or in my case Big Inflation Crack Up Boom trades. I constantly check for action Tea Leaves that might signal this. I'm not going to react to mere MoP words though: my motto being if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, probably is a duck.
<Masonic-inspired financial elites have practiced so well in both finance and war for centuries. Once you see the underlying pattern, it's both extremely beautiful in its criminal elegance, and of course extraordinarily pathetic in its disregard for the welfare of the broader human community.>
I know you subscribe to the Big Centralized Conspiracy (BCC) theory, and I for one will not laugh at it, like others might. My view is different though. I subscribe more to the Little Decentralized Conspiracy (LDC) theory. I feel there are lots of criminals at work in these markets, mostly unrelated though. True some may be big enough (the Gould-Fisk corner in 1869 is sort of a model for it) to really influence markets, or get important snippets from the Wizards, but mostly I think it's just sort of a lazy, tawdry rogue trader bunch, who try and gain some advantage over the "sheep". The latest financial scandal out of the insurance industry illustrates it well, and is just the tip of the iceberg on this kind of behavior. Of course in aggregate it really adds up, and is hugely market distorting, and in the end has the same effect as your BCC theory. |
