If a mechanic were to decline to attempt to repair the car shown below, would you say you were "not very impressed with his admission that he couldn't do his job"?
Posted on 11/17/2011 12:06:57 PM PST by Attention Surplus Disorder
BCM Has Ceased Operations (Part 1)
Posted by Ann Barnhardt - November 17, AD 2011 10:27 AM MST
Dear Clients, Industry Colleagues and Friends of Barnhardt Capital Management,
It is with regret and unflinching moral certainty that I announce that Barnhardt Capital Management has ceased operations. After six years of operating as an independent introducing brokerage, and eight years of employment as a broker before that, I found myself, this morning, for the first time since I was 20 years old, watching the futures and options markets open not as a participant, but as a mere spectator.
The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not. And this goes not just for my clients, but for every futures and options account in the United States. The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse. Given this sad reality, I could not in good conscience take one more step as a commodity broker, soliciting trades that I knew were unsafe or holding funds that I knew to be in jeopardy.
The futures markets are very highly-leveraged and thus require an exceptionally firm base upon which to function. That base was the sacrosanct segregation of customer funds from clearing firm capital, with additional emergency financial backing provided by the exchanges themselves. Up until a few weeks ago, that base existed, and had worked flawlessly. Firms came and went, with some imploding in spectacular fashion. Whenever a firm failure happened, the customer funds were intact and the exchanges would step in to backstop everything and keep customers 100% liquid – even as their clearing firm collapsed and was quickly replaced by another firm within the system.
Everything changed just a few short weeks ago. A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let’s not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem “complex” and “abstract” by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. Knowing Jon Corzine, and knowing the abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime and its cronies, this is not really a surprise. What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate. This is unfathomable. The risk exposure precedent that has been set is completely intolerable and has destroyed the entire industry paradigm. No informed person can continue to engage these markets, and no moral person can continue to broker or facilitate customer engagement in what is now a massive game of Russian Roulette.
I have learned over the last week that MF Global is almost certainly the mere tip of the iceberg. There is massive industry-wide exposure to European sovereign junk debt. While other firms may not be as heavily leveraged as Corzine had MFG leveraged, and it is now thought that MFG’s leverage may have been in excess of 100:1, they are still suicidally leveraged and will likely stand massive, unmeetable collateral calls in the coming days and weeks as Europe inevitably collapses. I now suspect that the reason the Chicago Mercantile Exchange did not immediately step in to backstop the MFG implosion was because they knew and know that if they backstopped MFG, they would then be expected to backstop all of the other firms in the system when the failures began to cascade – and there simply isn’t that much money in the entire system. In short, the problem is a SYSTEMIC problem, not merely isolated to one firm.
Right. This could easily perpetrate a run on the stock market, followed by a run on the banks. Unless FedGov gives some sign that investors aren't risking all customer funds in accounts.
You are one rude boy. Little else.
Maybe he’s not “acting”.
She closed the firm BECAUSE she lost faith in the MARKET MECHANISM she had placed her client’s accounts with, not because she couldn’t do the job. Read the blog entry carefully. Her accounts were cleared through the same exchange mechanism that MF Global used. She no longer trusts that her client’s accounts are safe from regulatory decisions that the CME made.
You are not reading the decision the way she made it. She genuinely fears that her clients would be put at a risk (in a market that requires instant trading access to be available) of NOT BEING ABLE TO ACCESS THEIR MONEY. It isn’t the investment risk she fears, but the risk of the Exchange not functioning.
This is a little over-reaching in my opinion but it DID HAPPEN with MF Global’s clients, whose accounts were frozen while markets continued to trade around them.
If a mechanic were to decline to attempt to repair the car shown below, would you say you were "not very impressed with his admission that he couldn't do his job"?
Ann has gone Galt.
A liberal, as demonstrated by their collective actions over the last few years would have taken the money and run.
You don't get much money by closing all your accounts and refusing to open new ones.
Ann is staunchly Christian, pro-America, anti-Obama, anti-abortion, anti-Islam, anti-Romeny. Do you have a problem with any of those positions?
ML/NJ
Lol. Onerudeboy can’t stop acting like a troll, he is a troll, he is a disrupter, he attacks others on any topic in hopes people will get tired of him and others of his ilk and leave.
Yeah, maybe not. I was just trying to be charitable, LOL.
Where are the Viking Kitties when you really need them?
1rudeboy is a disrupter, notice how he changed the topic in his attempts to discredit her, this has the affect that later readers will not read much past the first page of posts due to a lack of discussion on the first page. Best course when you come across someone like him, and it’s usually on the first page of posts, ignore them and discuss the topic.
Nuts...I meant to link to her YouTube channel, and picked up another poster’s channel. Oh, well...same video.
It is the same Ann Barnhardt who made those vids and more. Check her out on youtube.
I shook her hand and thanked her for the koran vid she made.
??? I can’t believe you (or anyone else) would ask such a question, but from part 2 of the “opus” I posted at the start of this thread...
“Finally, I will not, under any circumstance, consider reforming and re-opening Barnhardt Capital Management, or any other iteration of a brokerage business, until Barack Obama has been removed from office AND the government of the United States has been sufficiently reformed and repopulated so as to engender my total and complete confidence in the government, its adherence to and enforcement of the rule of law, and in its competent and just regulatory oversight of any commodities markets that may reform. So long as the government remains criminal, it would serve no purpose whatsoever to attempt to rebuild the futures industry or my firm, because in a lawless environment, the same thievery and fraud would simply happen again, and the criminals would go unpunished, sheltered by the criminal oligarchy.
To my clients, who literally TO THE MAN agreed with my assessment of the situation, and were relieved to be exiting the markets, and many whom I now suspect stayed in the markets as long as they did only out of personal loyalty to me, I can only say thank you for the honor and pleasure of serving you over these last years, with some of my clients having been with me for over twelve years. I will continue to blog at Barnhardt.biz, which will be subtly re-skinned soon, and will continue my cattle marketing consultation business. I will still be here in the office, answering my phones, with the same phone numbers. Alas, my retirement came a few years earlier than I had anticipated, but there was no possible way to continue given the inevitability of the collapse of the global financial markets, the overthrow of our government, and the resulting collapse in the rule of law. “
Rush...this woman is more of a man than most of us...
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