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Politics : Welcome to Slider's Dugout -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: SliderOnTheBlack who wrote (11576)9/10/2008 9:16:41 AM
From: Broken_Clock1 Recommendation  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 50084
 
Does anyone find it odd that they don't name names?
===

From: Paul Kern 9/10/2008 6:40:26 AM
1 Recommendation of 109023

Oil Investors Pulled $39 Billion in Futures, Triggering Decline

By Daniel Whitten

Sept. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Commodity index investors, blamed for record oil prices, sold $39 billion worth of oil futures between their July record and Sept. 2, causing crude to plunge, according to a report to be released today.

The work by Michael Masters, president of the Masters Capital Management hedge fund, blames investors who buy and hold an index of commodities for driving prices to records, and for their subsequent drop. It comes a day before the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is set to discuss its own study of energy trading with a congressional committee.

Masters testified three times before Congress this year, arguing that limits on traders would cut oil prices to $65 to $70 a barrel. He has been cited by lawmakers who introduced at least 20 measures to curb speculation. Congressional pressure on the CFTC to step up enforcement and restrict anonymous trades has pushed index traders out of their positions, Masters said.

``I don't think it's just coincidence that the money came out after the pressure was put on these folks,'' Masters, who wants legislation that would set limits on index commodity holdings, said in an interview.

Crude oil futures surged to a record $147.27 on July 11, an increase of 53 percent for the year, on the New York Mercantile Exchange, then fell 26 percent to $109.71 on Sept. 2. Oil dropped $3.08 to $103.26 yesterday on the Nymex.

``The speculators that drove prices up basically deflated the bubble,'' said Fadel Gheit, director of oil and gas research at Oppenheimer Capital in New York. ``They said, `That's it, the game is over. We are going to bet on another horse.'''

CFTC Report

The commission is expected to release a report tomorrow that will lay out its findings on the impact of index investors and over-the-counter trading on commodities. Regulators may require Wall Street banks to regularly disclose their energy futures positions connected to the unregulated swaps market, according to people familiar with the discussions.

JPMorgan Chase and Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Barclays Plc and Morgan Stanley control 70 percent of the commodities swaps positions, and swaps dealers are the largest holders of Nymex crude oil futures contracts, Masters said.

Representatives for all four banks declined to comment. Banks enter into swaps with airlines and hedge funds to profit from moves in crude prices and then offset some of that risk in futures markets such as the Nymex.

``These large financial players have become the primary source of the recent dramatic and damaging price volatility,'' Masters said in the report.

The commission has put out special requests for information from traders and imposed limits on the number of U.S. oil futures contracts a trader can hold on Intercontinental Exchange Inc.'s London-based ICE Futures Europe market.

Masters's Critics

Critics of Masters's earlier work said he lacks access to the data needed to draw his conclusions. His hedge fund is based in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Walter Lukken, the acting chairman of the commission, is among those who question the validity of Masters's data.

``Just as weather forecasters have no effect on the weather, energy speculators have no effect on the price of oil,'' said Scott Talbott, a lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, which represents investors. ``His fallacy is that he ignores the laws of supply and demand, which determine the price of oil.''

Masters earlier this year reported that index speculators such as those that trade on Standard & Poor's GSCI accounted for $260 billion of assets, up from $13 billion in 2003. As of Sept. 2 that number was down to $223 billion, Masters said.

``For the supply and demand people, what I would like for them to explain is how from the supply-and-demand rationale you could have oil at $95 in January, at $150 in June and back to $100 in September,'' Masters said.

Hedge Fund Holdings

Masters's hedge fund held shares in the four major U.S. airlines, AMR Corp., Delta Air Lines Inc., US Airways Group Inc. and UAL Corp, according to a June 30 regulatory filing. Airlines hedge oil and have been hurt by commodity price fluctuations.

He said he extrapolates his numbers from agricultural data, which is publicly available, to arrive at overall numbers that include oil futures investments.

In arguing for legislation, lawmakers, primarily Democrats will point to the Masters report and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology report released in June alleging that speculation caused the rise in energy prices.

``Why did so much money come into these markets and why is it leaving,'' asked Senator Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, in an interview. If Congress reduces scrutiny, ``do we see the run-ups happening again?''

CFTC data show that speculative net long positions in crude oil for non-commercial traders dropped from 115,145 for the week ended March 11, to a net short position, or a bet that prices would drop, for the week ended July 22, when prices started to plunge. For the week ended Sept. 2, net long speculative positions were 14,331.

To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Whitten in Washington at dwhitten2@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: September 10, 2008 00:01 EDT



To: SliderOnTheBlack who wrote (11576)9/10/2008 6:09:23 PM
From: RonMerks2 Recommendations  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 50084
 
The 90/10 rule and Jim Sinclair & Don Coxe?

Now I was just joking about being despondant, and having a drink at noon- but, get a load of Jim Sinclair and Don Coxe- they've CRACKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

First- from Jim Sinclair

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
jsmineset.com

Posted On: Tuesday, September 09, 2008, 8:36:00 PM EST

A Level Of Market Intervention Never Before Seen

Author: Jim Sinclair



My Dear Friends,

I have fielded as many calls as any human being can. My first responsibility is to my corporate calls and they alone are beyond what any single person can handle.

You are all being run by the largest intervention in the shortest time frame any market on the planet has ever seen.

I am not your whipping boy so those who are wishing to use me as such cut it out. I am not opening any email from an address I do not recognize.

Today takes the gold ring for downright evil.

I have heard that crap about deflation and negative gold. Will you please click here to read the Formula and stop busting my balls? The synthetic dollar short is plain ignorance at a WORLD CLASS level.

I am not reciting to you what you refuse to read. I am finished with mean people.

THOSE OF YOU ON MARGIN DO NOT CALL OR EMAIL ME. You have injured yourself and everything you have touched. I have warned you AT LEAST 1000 times.

Please don’t call me if you refuse to read what is written here.

Nothing has changed at all. In fact, it has become fundamentally and significantly WORSE. If the stabilizers have panicked you then panic SELL everything gold you hold and get it over with.

If you think you are in the frying pan then buy dollars, maybe some Lehman, WaMu, Freddie and Fannie shares and jump directly into the fire.

If your investments are paid off in full with cash then what the dickens are you panicking over? Are you being run by the Bloomberg talking heads? Think for yourself, do not let the media do it for you. The truth is painfully obvious.

$1024 could be read. Three tries at $1000 before success could be read. A reaction could be anticipated, but not the intervention that entered the market at $960, $940 and $912. Technical analysis never saw this coming and never could have. Those that claim theirs did simply got lucky. Investigate their past predictions and reasoning behind it if you call BS on this claim.

Intervention has nothing to do with the markets. Only the precious few know it is about to happen. For the rest it comes out of nowhere.

Maybe your TA should be thrown out from here on in because those of you calling me today in total panic are being driven there by big money painting your damn little charts.

I cannot and will not encourage people who simply want to vent on me. Today is the end of the line for that.

Corporate Responsibility is first and foremost as it always has been, and even they must first read as well.

I HAVE A JOB TO DO AND I INTEND TO DO IT, SO EVERYONE ATTEMPTING TO STOP ME KINDLY GET OUT OF MY WAY.

For those of you who have taken the time to listen and protected yourselves, I applaud you.

Now onward to the next problem that needs to be addressed:

Many of you have mortgages, which you pay monthly with an escrow for taxes and insurance.

How do you know that whomever you now owe is in fact really being paid? How do you know that anyone really knows who claims via their SIV that you owe them?

Without reference to what is below, what if your servicer was part of a mortgage lending arm operating under a name entirely different from whom their parent really was?

Did you know that this entity was closed down at a significant cost but the severer (collector of your monthly payments) still is operating to collect their money? Did you know that all their mortgage assets were offered for sale at $0.15 and did not sell? Did you know that the stock of the parent is plunging in a manner that does not happen to solvent entities, or at least presages disaster?

What makes you think these people really pay anyone or anything in today’s amoral sociopath world of finance?

How do you know that most of the paperwork on these SIVs is somewhere where people could find them?

Maybe you should check on:

Who owns your servicer?
Who do you owe?
Are they being paid?
How many sales of your mortgage have taken place since your closing and where is it now, if anywhere?
How long did your original lender, the only papers there are on your loan, hold that mortgage?
You think OTC derivatives are a mess? This is worse. The following is given only for its current financial events reference.

Lehman Takes Charge
Fri Jan 18, 2008 6:01am GMT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc (LEH.N) on Thursday said it would stop U.S. wholesale mortgage lending because of a continued slump in credit and housing markets, a move that will cut 1,300 jobs and result in a $40 million charge.

With these cuts, Lehman will have eliminated 3,750 mortgage jobs globally since June 2007. That represents a big scaling down of a business model the investment bank was one of the first to adopt, namely making home loans itself with the sole purpose of packaging the mortgages into bonds for investors.

Lehman said it will suspend wholesale and correspondent lending at its Aurora Loan Services unit.

Aurora will continue to make home loans directly to borrowers and service mortgages. But the company makes relatively few direct loans and does not have retail mortgage locations.

More…

Lehman sinks as much as 40 percent on capital worry
Tuesday September 9, 1:15 pm ET

NEW YORK: Lehman Brothers Holdings shares sank 45 percent on Tuesday on growing concern the fourth-largest Wall Street investment bank won't raise sufficient capital to survive the global credit crisis.

"This has been going on for a while now, and people are worried about liquidity, survival," said Rose Grant, a portfolio manager at Eastern Investment Advisors in Boston, which invests $1.8 billion (1 billion pounds) and has never owned Lehman shares.

In a sign of the deepening concern over Lehman's stability, several major Wall Street rivals issued statements that they were still trading with Lehman.

The stock closed down $6.36 at $7.79 on the New York Stock Exchange, and touched its lowest level since October 1998. The slide wiped out $4.4 billion in market value, and was a factor in broad declines in major U.S. stock indexes. Prices of safe-haven U.S. Treasuries rose.

More…

Jim Sinclair’s Commentary

I'll bet Korea was scared off by the Fannie/Freddie rescue. They are probably holding enough US debt all ready.

Wall Street Trading Gets Zero Value From Lehman, Merrill Owners
By Yalman Onaran

Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. is trying to sell its fund-management unit to cover further mortgage- related writedowns. If it does, what's left won't be worth much, based on how investors value the firm.

Lehman's market capitalization of $11.2 billion is almost equal to the value of its asset-management arm, which includes Neuberger Berman Inc. That leaves its main business of trading stocks and bonds as having little worth. The numbers are similar for Merrill Lynch & Co.: Take out its retail-brokerage and asset- management businesses, and the investors' valuation of the rest of the third-biggest U.S. securities firm is zero.

After being the most profitable business on Wall Street, generating more than $65 billion in pretax profits for the four largest U.S. securities firms between 2002 and 2006, trading has become a black hole. It still accounts for about half of the revenue at the Wall Street firms. Yet Lehman Chief Executive Officer Richard Fuld and Merrill CEO John Thain have been unable to convince shareholders to attach a value to the businesses.

``We're standing at one edge of the Grand Canyon, looking at the other side,'' said Brad Hintz, an analyst at New York-based Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. and a former Lehman finance chief. ``I can see a rejuvenated fixed-income market and Lehman as one of the major players in that market at the other side, but we don't know how deep the canyon is. And we have to get through the canyon to get to the other side.''

Lehman's asset-management unit is worth about $8 billion, based on the amount of cash it manages for clients, compared with publicly traded rivals such as New York-based BlackRock Inc. or Federated Investors Inc. of Pittsburgh. That leaves less than $3.5 billion for the rest of the fourth-largest U.S. securities firm.

More…

Callers take note:

I am convinced unconditionally that all that has now driven you over the cliff is spin and stabilization to a degree never executed before.

If you have no margin, you have no problem That is the bottom line answer to every question honestly asked me today.

I simply refuse to let you beat me up anymore. 95% of the calls and emails I received were nothing more than a desire to denigrate me.

It ends here. It ends now.

Thank you to those of you who are sitting tight because you have listened and took the time to understand.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From Don Coxe

reportonbusiness.com

JOHN HEINZL

Globe and Mail Update

September 10, 2008 at 6:00 AM EDT

To hear Donald Coxe tell it, the commodity selloff ripping through Canada's stock market is no accident. It is the result of a deliberate, brilliantly executed plan hatched at the highest levels of the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury.

Mr. Coxe is no paranoid conspiracy theorist. As the chairman and chief strategist of Harris Investment Management in Chicago, he is one of the most respected investment authorities in North America. He also happens to have lost about 10 per cent of his personal wealth in the commodity rout, which came at the worst possible time for his Coxe Commodity Strategy Fund that started trading in June.

“This has done more damage to my personal wealth than anything in the last 20 years,” he said in an interview yesterday. But he has too much respect for how the U.S. authorities engineered the collapse in commodities – a move he said was necessary to shore up the global financial system – to be bitter.

“My attitude is, goddamn it, they're good … it was brilliant.”

To understand why commodities are plunging now – the S&P/TSX plummeted another 488 points yesterday – you have to go back to mid-July, when the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury first announced steps to support mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The move, which ultimately led to the Treasury taking control of Fannie and Freddie this week, touched off a chain-reaction of market events that culminated with the wrenching decline in commodities.

According to Mr. Coxe, the Fed's ultimate goal was to trigger a rally in financial stocks, which would, in theory, help banks hammered by the credit crisis raise fresh capital and repair their balance sheets. To accomplish this, the decision to support Fannie and Freddie was deliberately announced on a Sunday, which had the effect of maximizing the reaction from thinly traded financial stocks on overseas markets.

Because many hedge funds were using massive leverage to short financials and go long on commodities, when North American markets opened and banks initially rallied, the funds were forced to cover their short positions.

At the same time, the U.S. dollar was rallying because the risk of holding Fannie and Freddie paper had diminished. The rising dollar, in turn, made commodities less attractive, giving funds that were already scrambling to cover their financial shorts another reason to dump oil, grains and other commodities.

The losses were swift and dramatic. On the Friday before the July 11 announcement, crude oil closed at $145.18 a barrel. Over the following five days, it plunged 11 per cent. “Leverage was being unwound dramatically,” Mr. Coxe said on a conference call last week. “We had a true panic.”

As oil and other commodities were tumbling, fears about the slowing global economy were mounting, giving resources another push downhill. This was also in keeping with the Fed's wishes, because lower commodity prices would help quell fears about inflation.

Mr. Coxe has no proof that the Fed and Treasury acted in concert to boost financials and sink commodities. He is basing his assertions on conversations with hedge fund managers and on years of watching financial markets. “There's no doubt whatever in my mind” about what happened, he says.

The future is less certain, however. Now that Freddie and Fannie have been nationalized, the credit crisis is still very much alive and financial stocks are looking as shaky as ever. As for commodities, once the current storm passes, Mr. Coxe is confident they will recover.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Slider- fess up. How many emails did you send Sinclair, and how many times did you call him (vbg)? Listen to the guy- he's completely lost it! (not to mention that one million dollar bet).

And you guys thought you had a tough week. Sinclair can't even get any repsect from the home crowd any more.

And Don Coxe blindsided by the pupeteers?

Hat tip Slido- ya did well on this one.

Ron