Posts Tagged ‘SEC’

Stop The Pillaging Of America

Monday, March 5th, 2012

The International Forecaster

One of the things we learned in almost 30 years in the brokerage business is that self-regulation does not work. The players are simply too abusive, greedy and prove to take the regulations to the very edge. We saw that at MF global. All markets are rigged today. Twenty-five years ago perhaps 80% were rigged. The SEC and CFTC are well aware of this and in many cases aid and abet in the crimes. The crimes are too many to mention, but among the leading problems are complicity in front running and naked shorting. There is no such thing as an efficient market hypothesis. Just another phase to led you off into the forest.

A small group of big hitters control Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, our government and our economy. Just ask members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderberg Group. They know what is going on because they help make policy, and arrange to get it executed. Wall Street is one long litany of fraud, where the guilty seldom go to jail and the tables are squared via fines, usually paid by the firms and not the individuals. While the SEC and CFTC investigations go nowhere, or don’t happen at all, they relish charging small and medium sized brokerage houses to justify their existence. That is when they are not pursuing some newsletter writer, all of whom cannot afford top legal help, or any legal help at all. The whole game is crooked and has been for many years. It is government and its agencies and Wall Street and baking that controls your entire lives. Their power is immense and that is how they get away with what they get away with.

The same is true with Congress 90% of which are bought and paid for via campaign contributions and other artifices such as insider trading. That is why we have free trade and globalization, offshoring and outsourcing. Congress and those running for the office and president don’t even talk about it, yet, in 12 years it has cost 12 million jobs and 450,000 businesses. Obviously that is not a serious matter for Congress. Or should we say those who pay Congress, transnational conglomerates, want free trade just as it is. Our nation could not compete with slave labor countries in 1795 and they cannot compete now. There has to be a leveling force, a balance that stops the pillaging of America, which destroys economic independence and eventually sovereignty. We are a step away from post industrial dependency and bankrupt as well. Congressional complicity stands out like a beacon, when these asset strippers do not have to pay taxes on foreign earnings. Who has ever heard of something so unreasonable? Instead of lowering corporate taxes as other nations had done we eliminated taxation, so transnational corporations could compete. This is what we call modern colonialism.

After the debacles of the 1790s and British colonialism, the US switched to a tariff system, which worked quite well until about 25 years ago. Then came WTO, NAFTA and CAFTA, the result of which you are witnessing today. The system of tariffs allowed government to fund itself via exercise taxes funded by foreign corporations, which kept Americans from having to pay income taxes for about 100 years. Tariffs are part of what made America great and we cannot be great again without tariffs, it is as simple as that. You cannot have prosperity giving away 12 million jobs in 12 years. As we have seen you cannot have persistent and growing trade deficits year after year and not go broke. Here we are 217 years later doing the same stupid thing over again. The main reason for this is that the public is not paying attention and Congress does whatever their paymasters tell them to do.

The debt position of the US deteriorates each day and with it not only the dollar, the world’s reserve currency, deteriorates versus other currencies and gold and silver. Having the dollar as the world’s reserve currency gives many benefits to Americans and if that advantage is lost so is what is left of American prosperity. Are we to follow in the footsteps of Greece? It is wrong to say that tariffs cause depressions. They were increased six times over the past 200 years and no depression followed. If we do not get tariffs America cannot survive as a world leader.

If a written document exists outlining the deliberate default of Greece and has been in the possession of two Wall Street banks for a month then the fall of Greece has been in the works for some time. The date of March 23rd was supposedly the date for default. The rating agencies are supposed to be the trigger for the default. The 23rd is a Friday and on Saturday Greek bank accounts are to be frozen. If that is true all Greeks should have their euros and any other currencies and valuables out of all Greek banks.

Several months ago we stated that we did not know what was really going on behind the scenes in Germany. Our question was did they really want to save Greece and perhaps the euro, or were they interested as the majority of Germans are, in dumping the euro and the EU? Over the past week commentaries were all over the place, many of them off the wall. We have seen delays for 2-1/2 years, but nothing like we have seen over the past month. It is like most non-Greeks had monkey wrenches to throw into the gears of progress. The US says they do not want to get any deeper into Europe’s problems, as the IMF offers a pittance. The Germans and Schäuble these past 2 weeks had nothing but negative comments and commands trying to keep moving the goal posts, so to cast confusion among Greek negotiators. We are told on Saturday that on Thursday a deal was cut. Mrs. Merkel wants to replace the Greek government with a EU commissioner. In German it is called Gauleiter. We guess they want to have Greece as a subsidiary of Germany.

NWO pyramid

Congressmen Give Themselves a Loophole Filled Insider Trading Bill

Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Economic Policy Journal

Since it has become widely known that members of Congress are exempt from insider trading laws, an uproar has forced Congress to bring themselves under the scrutiny of the SEC for insider trading laws.
It should probably come as no surprise, but Congress has put together a bill to regulate against insider trading by members of Congress that is so full of loopholes that it will actually make it easier.
Yale law professor Jonathan Lacey
writes in WSJ:

Members of Congress already get better health insurance and retirement benefits than other Americans. They are about to get better insider trading laws as well…
Strangely, while insider trading by corporate insiders has long been the white collar crime equivalent of a major felony, the Securities and Exchange Commission has determined that insider trading laws do not apply to members of Congress or their staff. That is because, according to the SEC at least, these public officials do not owe the same legal duty of confidentiality that makes insider trading illegal by nonpoliticians.
The embarrassing inconsistency was ignored for years. All of this changed on Nov. 13, 2011, after insider trading on Capitol Hill was the focus of CBS’s "60 Minutes." The previously moribund "Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act" (H.R. 1148), first introduced in 2006, was pulled off the shelf and reintroduced. The bill suddenly had more than 140 sponsors, up from a mere nine before the show.
The "Stock" Act, as it is called, would make it illegal for members of Congress and staff to buy or sell securities based on certain nonpublic information. It would toughen disclosure obligations by requiring congressmen and their staffers to report securities trades of more than $1,000 to the clerk of the House (or the secretary of the Senate) within 90 days…
Publicly, House members echo bill sponsor Rep. Louise Slaughter (D., N.Y) in saying things like: "We want to remove any current ambiguity" about whether insider trading rules apply to Congress. Or as co-sponsor Rep. Timothy Walz (D., Minn.) put it: "We are trying to set the bar higher for members of Congress."
On closer examination, it appears that what Congress really wants is to keep making the big bucks that come from trading on inside information but to trick those outside of the Beltway into believing they are doing something about this corruption. For one thing, the rules proposed for Capitol Hill are not like those that apply to the rest of us. Ours are so broad and vague that prosecutors enjoy almost unfettered discretion in deciding when and whom to prosecute.
Congress’s rules would be clear and precise. And not too broad; in fact they are too narrow. For example, the proposed rules in the Stock bill are directed only at information related to pending legislation. It would appear that inside information obtained by a congressman during a regulatory briefing, or in another context unrelated to pending legislation, would not be covered…
If the law passes in its current form, insider trading by Congress will not become illegal. I predict such trading will increase because the rules of the game will be clearer. Most significantly, the rule proposed for Congress would not involve the same murky inquiry into whether a trader owed or breached a "fiduciary duty" to the source of the information that required that he refrain from trading.
If enacted, the law of insider trading will remain one of many where one reality applies to Congress and an uncomfortable and insecure reality applies to everybody else. Just as Congress is protected from the vicissitudes of ObamaCare, Congress will remain safe from the vagaries of insider trading law. The rest of us will still be vulnerable
.

party

While the Financial Crisis Commission Report Looks Impressive At First Glance, It Doesn’t Hit Hard Enough … and Won’t Lead to Any Real Change

Friday, January 28th, 2011

Washington’s Blog

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

While the Financial Crisis Commission Report Looks Impressive At First Glance, It Doesn’t Hit Hard Enough … and Won’t Lead to Any Real Change 

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission largely blames Greenspan, Bernanke, Geithner, Summers, the rating agencies, SEC and big banks for the economic crisis. (Here’s the final report).

Bernanke is still Fed chief, and the government has substantially increased the Fed’s power in the last year. See this, this, this, this and this.

Geithner is still Secretary of the Treasury.

Summers just resigned, being replaced by someone with a virtually identical philosophy, background and mindset as Summers.

The rating agencies are unrepentant, and have not been reined in. They are still government-sponsored monopolies which are accept bribes to give high ratings. And see this.

The SEC is still not acting as a real watchdog, and the banks are still speculating wildly with excessive leverage and acting as predators – instead of supporters – of the real (non-financial sector) economy.

Indeed, the banks are growing even larger, instead of being downsized, even though independent financial experts say that the very size of the banks is hurting the economy. The FCIC report doesn’t really tackle that issue (the phrase “too big to fail” does not appear in the report itself, only in a very peripheral way in the footnotes).

Nor does the report detail the fact that inequality in the U.S. is higher than it has been since 1917, and that inequality was one of the prime causes of the economic crisis. The FCIC does not even mention the words “inequality” or “oligarchy”, and mentions the word “oligopoly” only once (in a footnote) .

And while the FCIC report discusses mortgage fraud, it does not dig deeply enough into fraud by the largest financial players, detail other types of financial fraud, or push hard enough for prosecution, even though fraud was one of the core causes of the financial crisis, and one of the main reasons that the economy has not stabilized.

For example, the report uses the word “fraud” 46 times, compared to 167 mentions of “leverage”. The phrases “control fraud”, “accounting fraud”, “regulatory capture”, “systemic fraud”, “criminal fraud” and “criminally negligent” do not appear anywhere in the report, nor do the words “looting” or “Ponzi”. The word “prosecute” appears only once (and only in a historical context), and the word “prosecution” appears only 6 times (and half of them are buried in footnotes). The word “corrupt” appears only twice (one of them in a footnote).

So – while the FCIC report looks impressive at first glance – it doesn’t hit hard enough, and is not going to lead to any real change.

And see this, this and this, and this visual representation by Tyler Durden of the most frequently-used words in the report.