The End Of The American Experiment - Of Fear, Greed, Stupidity, and Unprecedented Larceny...
Bob O'Brien's Sanity Check
Posted by: bobo
11/25/2008 1:35 PM
For years, the lie from Wall Street has been that delivery failures never really happened in the stock market. Then it became that they did occasionally, however those were usually due to the dog having eaten the stock or some-such. Then it morphed into that it happens, but that it isn't a large enough problem to really get worked up about. Then we got to, well, sure, hundreds of billions of dollars of stock doesn't get delivered to the buyers who paid for the stock, but that it wasn't US doing it, it was those other guys (prime brokers quickly pointed at hedge funds, hedge funds fingered prime brokers).
Now that the U.S. financial markets have suffered the greatest decline in 70 years, and the currency is headed to being worth less than mud, some of the biggest names on Wall Street are crying out that delivery failures, aka naked short selling, have destroyed some of the largest firms in the business. Even Cramer point blank admits that it's a huge problem, which is destroying the capital markets. The cat's out of the bag.
During this destruction of wealth and sacking of the nation's fortunes via fraud and larceny in the markets, of course, no lawmakers or regulators are willing to put an end to it - by simply requiring a pre-borrow for all short sales and establishing meaningful penalties. No, instead they grandstand, hold hearings, rant, pound tables, feign outrage, etc. But they don't fix the problem.
Well guess what? Turns out that stealing is a popular way of getting rich, and not just in the stock market! While most everyone in the country goes to work every day, trying to earn enough to cover whatever nut they have and make it a while longer, apparently the bright lads on Wall Street have done away with the old fashioned conventions against fraud, stealing, and counterfeiting. And they don't just limit the wholesale theft of the nation's wealth to counterfeiting stock - they also do exactly the same thing in the treasury market.
Actually having what you accept payment for is so old fashioned and boring. It's so much more lucrative to just take the money and not deliver - to refuse to deliver that for which you were paid.
Not only can you make off with trillions in the stock market, you can also do the same in the treasury market, with the exact same sort of non-enforcement that's caused the collapse of the stock market, and the exodus of any sane money from that cesspool. Well, I should say, you can't make off with trillions. But Wall Street special interests can. Just as you probably can't get some of that $8.5 trillion and growing US government commitment to bail out the thieves on Wall Street - you know, the bailout that needs to happen due to unchecked manipulation and counterfeiting in the swaps, derivatives, stock, and commodity markets. No, if you're reading this, you also probably aren't on the Xmas list for benefiting from the last major looting of this and future generations' earnings. You are the food. Stand still in the pen while they get the sledgehammer out, and don't make any annoying protesting noises.
But not everybody is blind, deaf and dumb to the mindboggling level of theft and crookery going on. To see how completely well understood this blatant larceny in the treasury market is, read this piece from Euromoney. Of course, it isn't a NY financial pub, as those just pretend that everything's hunky dory. No, Euromoney is the British periodical that also broke the very first real expose of the naked short selling scandal in the equities market. That of course was followed by 3 or 4 years of the NY financial media claiming that it was all nonsense, and a figment of a few disgruntled investors' imaginations.
What a proud testament to where our nation's integrity has sunk that one has to go beyond its borders to hear anything even approaching the truth. Our brave journalists, with the notable exception of Bloomberg and a couple of folk at places like Forbes, are busy singing whatever party line Wall Street instructs them to sing, no matter how absurd or patently false. They are just fine selling out the country for a few table scraps from the masters for whom they dance. There's no shame in being a lying cheating scumbag if you're a member of SABEW - it's practically a red badge of courage there.
This will continue to get much, much worse from here. Believe me when I tell you this is the tame version. The wholesale theft of the remaining wealth of the nation is under way, and those participating in that theft show no shame, nor interest in secrecy anymore. It's OK to be blatant. Hell, if you're going to steal trillions in broad daylight, why bother with secrecy? Who's going to stop you? When you have co-opted the government that's chartered with protecting its citizenry, and you wholly control the media that's supposed to be the final gatekeeper of truth, you have nothing to fear. You can just rely on your cronies and unelected minions to keep you safe. and very, very rich.
A few years ago my readers were complaining that I was too negative and fatalistic, that I needed to offer hope and solutions. I argued that reality didn't look particularly good to me moving forward, and that I preferred to tell the truth, which was as ugly as it was unbelievable back then.
It's not so unbelievable now. It's actually front page news.
But not in the US. You have to go elsewhere for the truth these days.
The American experiment is officially over. We now live in a sort of quasi-capitalistic version of the Soviet Union, where the press parrots whatever the financial Politburo wants declared as the truth, where most of the businesses that matter have been effectively nationalized, and where the wealth of the nation is made off with by those running the place. Kind of like an African or Central American nation, where the treasury is looted by whoever is leaving power, only to be replaced by a different corrupt regime also intent on looting whatever prosperity was missed by their predecessor.
Turns out this time wasn't so different after all. Human nature hasn't changed much over a couple hundred years, which is the average life of a democracy.
Last one out, turn off the lights.
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