For a long time now, I have been watching the stock market behave in ways that defy explanation. As a result, some high powered hedge fund managers have jumped ship, claiming that as the stock market is no longer based in reality, it was impossible to advise their clients on how to proceed. Even the MSM has been forced to cover this when an executive with Goldman Sachs revealed just that before he quit, which had zero impact on any sort of investigation from our worthless government.
But until last week I had not realized what exactly was going to down until JP Morgan all but spilled the beans with a blatant manipulation of the silver market when they dumped 500,000 ounces of silver driving the price down an entire dollar, a lot for the commodity. At the same time, JP Morgan was betting heavily on short selling of the same commodity, meaning they drove the price down on purpose, and while they lost some money on the silver sale, they more than made up for it on the derivative side. Years ago, I said that if people can bet on losing money, then someone with enough money and influence could manipulate the market to make sure the commodity does just that, making them a lot of money in the process. This is a sure fire way to destroy the economy. How exactly are they doing it?
That's easy. High speed computers, which now make 70-80% of all stock trades, are engaged in something known as fractional trading. The computers are making millions of transactions every second, buying them for a few moments at best, and making pennies off of each trade. This doesn't sound like much until you realize they are doing this hundreds of millions of times each day which is why some investment firms haven't lost money in years as the payoff can be very high. Add to this the fact that the computers can be programmed to buy twice as much as they sell for a set period of time and drive the price up as a result. When it gets to a preprogrammed point, the process reverses and people still buying when the sell off starts gets burned. This is what happened with Facebook stock.
This is dangerous because at this point greed is everywhere and sooner or later, someone is going to do something that could crash the whole system, like JP Morgan's 7 billion plus derivative fiasco. We have offset this crap with low interest rates and treasury bond sales, both of which are reaching the limit of their potential. Treasury bonds are all the rage as the Euro implodes and stocks react wildly to nothing, as the derivative market now controls their actions more than economics. But Treasury bonds are ultimately a losing bet. Everyone who purchases a Treasury bond is purchasing a depreciating asset not to mention the fact that the capital risk of investing in Treasuries is very high. The low interest rate means that the price paid for the bond is very high. When interest rates rise, which is inevitable, this will lower the worth of bonds and cause capital losses on bond holders, both domestic and foreign.
As high-frequency trades now account for 70-80% of all equity trades, the result is death for traditional investors, who are leaving the stock market. They end up in Treasuries, as banks have interest rates as closer to zero as possible, and 10-year Treasuries will pay about 2%, which means, that they are losing 1-8% of their capital each year, depending on which rate of inflation you which to look at, real versus imagined. Treasuries are at least guaranteed a rate of return but, the investor is still ultimately losing money that could have been used to build capital, a fact that is why there are no jobs being created anymore as capital is all but gone from everyone except the 1% and their capital is being used on the derivative market to make billions, perhaps trillions.
With the precious metal market, companies like JP Morgan do not even have to prove they have the silver or gold they are betting against. It is taken on faith and explains why companies like this have far more precious metals on the books than they actually have. Must be nice to bet with money you don't have. Try going to any casino on Earth and see how that works out for you.
How long this continue depends on how long the powers that be can keep those spinning plates spinning. From all indications, those plates are starting to look awfully wobbly. The derivative market is a bubble waiting to burst, a bubble as high as $1.3 quadrillion dollars. Here's a link to the Comptroller of Currency
http://www.occ.treas.gov/topics/capital-markets/financial-markets/trading/derivatives/dq411.pdf
In this file we see that the five largest banks hold 95.7% of all derivatives which is at least $226 trillion dollars. J.P Morgan has total assets of $1.8 trillion but holds $70 trillion in derivative bets. A few bad bets and JP Morgan is toast with that possible loss ratio. Worse, JP Morgan only has $136 billion in risk based assets or 516 times the capital it actually has. Goldman Sachs is even worse. That bank has $44 trillion in derivative bets covered only by $19 billion in risk based assets or 2,295 times what it has in capital. Incidentally, all of these loses are now covered by FDIC rules meaning if they go bust, so does your bank account, IRA, stock portfolio and any other form of money in the system. Even your safety deposit box would be confiscated according to DHS rules as well as certain gold and silver confiscation.
Is there a solution? Yes. First, kill the derivative market and tell anyone that bet on it too bad. As the money only exists in cyberspace anyway, it would have little to no impact on world markets. Yes the 1% would scream bloody murder but fuck them. Then to get our debt under control tell the Fed the same thing about not paying the interests on our debt and viola, another 7 trillion off the books. These are common sense steps to fix our economy in a world where we don't have any.
A recent poll said almost half the country believes in creationism and that mankind is only 10,000 years old or less. As Scott Walker convinced these same retards that we don't need unions or good pay and get re-elected, I am less than optimistic about our future.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
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Great post. Very astute. I will be sharing this with friends.
ReplyDeleteVery good! Yes, creationism retards will always be around waving the Yahweh stick I'm afraid :(
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