Posted on 04/28/2013 4:56:27 AM PDT by Renfield
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that's trillion, with a "t") worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it "dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets."
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world's largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps....
(Excerpt) Read more at rollingstone.com ...
I won’t read the whole article because I despise Taibbi, but I will say that the markets are rigged in my opinion and basically the wolves run the hen house.
After the 2008 crash, it was apparent that the corruption is deeply entrenched throughout all the watchdog agencies, ratings agencies etc. As it stands, there is no rule of law and no market punishment for failure - EVER. The entire system is a sham hanging by a thread and propped up by corrupt governments including our Chicago thugocracy.
Great post well said.
Being a tool. Does this mean that the anti-Jewish administration is about to make its anti-bank move as Germany did and along the way include Christians? Where does Soros stand in this and the Saudis?
If so, I’m sure Mr. Tool will be right there writing articles supporting such efforts.
I don't really understand the point of your comment, but if you are implying that Soros is in any way a defender of Judaism or Israel, that's very wrong.
In November 2003, for the first time ever, the billionaire spoke to a Jewish audience at the conference of the Jewish Funders Network. Many people were dismayed by his call for “regime change” in the United States, his talk of funding projects in “Palestine" and the Geneva Accord, and his ideas about the cause of anti-Semitism.
Soros said European anti-Semitism is the result of the policies of Israel and the United States. “There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that,” Soros said. “If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish,” he said. “I can’t see how one could confront it directly.”
...Soros' comments were called “absolutely obscene" by Abraham Foxman*, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
*Foxman himself is an extreme liberal, but this was too much for even him to accept.
BTW, Soros got his 'regime change' but the prediction of a reduction in anti-Semitism has fallen flat.
Long ago I asked a buddy who was president of one of the nations largest banks at the time a question about interest rates and where they were going. He laughed and said “the real answer is no one knows what they should be. He added (at that time) we all go to conferences put on and we get a bunch of crap from a small group of economists who all have the same line. So, after a few months of group think at these “conferences” we all have the same message on the actual setting of rates. There is no demand or supply, just what a bunch of PHDs think the rates should be set at and the FED helps with that.”
I guess it is the same today except the rates are set by the central bankers alone but not out of the whim of what economists think but at the direction of the governments they represent acting in concert. Any notion the FED is independent of this process was completely blasted away when its charter was changed to accomodate the economy along with merely stabilizing the dollar. Today in fact it uses monetary policy to prop up the government with no regard to the dollar compared to before when at least there was an attempt to do so. The government is buying its own securities through the FED at virtually zero interest so something has to give...right now it is interest rates on fixed instruments and a deflating dollar. When it cannot hold the tide against the dollar any longer (early cracks appearing now with even the Auzzies using the yuan in its trade with China rather than the dollar) it will collapse and both interest rates and inflation will zoom to beyond historic highs before the entire system gets washed away and the USA is economically finished.
Yes, but is the outcome inevitable anyway? If so, why not deal with it now? But if we deal with it at all, it means global collapse. Where from there? Depression? War? combination of both?
“The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything. ..
Thank you for summing up the article. I hate reading crap from Rolling Stone so I appreciate your sum up.
I figured it wouldn’t be long before the liberals will have a major push to re-write the history of failing cities like Detroit. What’s sad is the fact they didn’t have to do that because people want to be clueless. You’d think after fifty years of liberal control of Detroit, the Michigan voters would stop voting for the democrats. They haven’t are they are just as blind as ever.
It is individuals that do rigging. Who are the people doing it? Names! Pictures! It is NOT BANKS that manipulate they are abstract entities managed by people by and through which they act.
This is 'Rolling Stone' which as no markets/business/economy section, that's why the article is posted under the 'politics' tab. Thinking of this nonsense as business/econ is like thinking of globalwarming as 'science'.
Hey, nobody's stopping you. If you want to make higher interest payments than the loan companies want to charge, they'll be happy to take your donation money. The reason you don't is because you obey laws that are far more powerful than any gov't reg.
btr
Matt Taibbi is so sloppy in his reporting you really can’t believe anything he writes. He’s consumed by a hatred of capitalism and wants to discredit it, which leads him to misrepresent the facts. Far better if someone objective would write about this — someone whose ability to be factual can be trusted. Failing that, all we have here is a diatribe.
Taibbi has done some good work (it seems to me) but what is it about the left and their hatred of people who simply disagree with them? For example it's finally knownNYTIMES CONFIRMS: MASSIVE FRAUD AT USDA IN PIGFORD; BREITBART VINDICATED
.. and here's Taibbi the morning following Breitbart's death
Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche
Matt Taibbi: So Andrew Breitbart is dead. Here’s what I have to say to that, and I’m sure Breitbart himself would have respected this reaction: Good! F*** him. I couldn’t be happier that he’s dead.
“Shakespeare got it wrong: ...first, kill all the bankers...”
How-a-bout the bankers and the lawyers? Might as well throw the politicians in there too.
>>This is Matt Taibbi of Rollingstone. The odds of his being correct about anything concerning markets is about 3 billion to 1.
Try to drag your IQ out of the trailer trash lane and think about doing something other than what has lost the conservatives the last election, the media, academia, social conventions, and soon, their means of self-defense. This is for all the marbles, son, and the only obvious conclusion is that something in the way we’ve been playing the game has landed us right here, off balance and unable to see the next punch coming.
Pogo?we have seen the enemy, and they are us.any old timers remember where that quote came from?
2 posted on 04/28/2013 5:01:18 AM PDT by teeman8r
”We have met the enemy, and he is us.” - Pogo Possum, drawn by Walt KellyI loved that strip.
i think the author is not calling so much for government control, but people control and stopping the government from being corrupted by it...
market rules best that which government can protect against shady deals, but when the government bases its economic recovery on shady practices, we will all be left in the dark...
teeman
Except that the credit default swaps were not declared to have defaulted, when they clearly had. "Residual value" is part of the contract.
It's like your insurance company saying that your car has not been totaled in an accident, when it clearly has, and saying they therefore owe you nothing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.