Is the Fed rigging the Stock Market?

From MoneyCentral.

It is not illegal for the Federal Reserve or the U.S. Treasury to buy S&P 500 futures. This type of intervention could explain some of the unusual market action in recent months, with stock prices grinding higher on low volume even as companies sold huge amounts of new shares and retail investors stayed on the sidelines. Some market watchers have charted that virtually all of the market’s upside since mid-September has come from after-hours futures activity. [These claims are] based on an analysis of the possible sources of the $600 billion in net new cash that was needed to boost the U.S. stock market capitalization by $6 billion since March. The usual sources, such as retail investors and pension funds, could muster only about $100 billion. The rest had to come from somewhere. The Fed has been openly buying some $1.7 trillion worth of long-term bonds since last March, which is something it hasn’t done since the 1950s. Today, the Fed is making purchases to support housing by keeping mortgages cheap. As these purchases are phased out over the next few months, long-term interest rates will continue to move higher. This will cause long-term bond prices to fall, causing this new “bond bubble” to deflate. Stock investors will benefit, just as they did in the 1950s and 1960s as capital was moved from falling bonds into rising stocks.

Note: For a treasure trove of key reports from reliable sources on the secret manipulations keeping Wall Street afloat, click here. http://www.wanttoknow.info/bankbailoutnewsarticles

Move Your Money

Move Your Money is the campaign initiated by Arianna Huffington who publishes the No. 1 blog: The Huffington Post.

It simply suggests to leave the “too big to fail” banks and work with the small banks and credit unions instead.

Back to Building Societies in the UK? In Germany, “too big to fail” has been translated into “relevant to the system”. Another way of describing how the big banks are expected to gobble up the little ones in the name of globalisation and one world government with one world currency…

Here’s the original article.

Support Iceland against the Financial Blackmail of the British and Dutch Governments and the IMF

“The spin is failing because people around the world are finally starting to hear our side of the story, and other suppressed nations have perhaps seen this as a sign that they can also rise up against the corpocracy in our world where those with the money have as a rule always won. Let’s hope the nation will not been coaxed into fear of isolation and let’s hope the people of the world will join in this experiment of letting the interest of the peoples rise above the interests of banks, corporations, and international bullies such as the IMF. We need your support. I will soon issue a comprehensive report on the entire Icesave saga.”

http://www.rense.com/general89/dottr.htm

Call To The People Of The World
To Support Iceland
Against The Financial Blackmail Of The
British And Dutch Governments And The IMF

By Birgitta Jonsdottir [who can be reached on birgitta AT this.is
1-6-10

Note – Birgitta Jonsdottir is the leader of The Movement, a group within the Icelandic Parliament which has emerged from the mass struggle of Icelanders against the financial blackmail brought to bear against their country by the governments in London and The Hague, with the backing of the IMF, in the wake of the insolvency of three large Icelandic banks in the midst of the Lehman Brothers-AIG world financial panic of September-October2008. Birgitta Jonsdottir is a courageous leader in the fight for national sovereignty, independence, dignity, and the economic well-being and future of her country. January 5, 2010 is a historical day for Icelanders. The Icelandic President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson had a tough decision to make, and difficult choices to make. To listen to the 23% of the nation that signed a petition calling on him to put the state guarantee for 5.4 billion dollars to be paid to the British and Dutch governments to a national referendum. Or to ignore the nation and sign the bill for the government, after the bill had been passed through the parliament with a narrow vote on December 30, 2009 after months of acrimonious debate, tainted with secrecy and dishonesty on the part of the government. Every day throughout the debate, new information would emerge and documents would leak to local media or wikileaks. Yesterday, the people of Iceland finally had a chance to have something to say about their fate, because if the state guarantee is accepted it will mean that Iceland will become like a third world country, spending its GDP largely on paying interest on foreign debt. Last summer, a bill for a state guarantee was passed that had a significant meaning not only for Iceland, but also for other nations around the world facing the same problems of private debt being forced on taxpayers. The bill included a reasonable and fair way of handling the interest and the debt: Icelanders would pay, but only a certain percentage of their GDP, and if there were to be another financial black hole, they would not pay during that time. Thus it comes as no surprise that the Dutch and British governments reacted so swiftly with a condemnation of Iceland’s citizens for having the audacity to think they have the right to exercise their democratic rights in deciding for themselves what is in the best economic interests of their nation. Let’s also put this debt into perspective: 320.000 people live in Iceland, each and every person on the island, including children and the elderly, the disabled and the poor, would have to pay around $30,000 under the bill. The danger if Icelanders will accept this enormous burden is that the entire welfare system would simply collapse with no money to run it. On January 5th the Icelandic president had the courage, backed up by his nation, to place the interest of the people before that of the banks. Of course there has been an incredible spin by the government controlled media, attacking the nation and the president for this simple and fair demand. The UK and Dutch media were also full of misleading news, saying the nation had demanded not to pay, and that we would become isolated and there were even suggestions that the British navy should flex its muscles against this nation which has no military. As if the terrorist act they imposed on us was not enough during the darkest hour of our crises to bring us further down! The spin is failing because people around the world are finally starting to hear our side of the story, and other suppressed nations have perhaps seen this as a sign that they can also rise up against the corpocracy in our world where those with the money have as a rule always won. Let’s hope the nation will not been coaxed into fear of isolation and let’s hope the people of the world will join in this experiment of letting the interest of the peoples rise above the interests of banks, corporations, and international bullies such as the IMF. We need your support. I will soon issue a comprehensive report on the entire Icesave saga. Love and rage from Iceland Birgitta Jonsdottir Party group chairman for The Movement in the Icelandic Parliament Documentation: I append links to the files about Icesave that were leaked to wikileaks, and which show how the EU member states blackmailed Iceland into the same corner the government helped push into by accepting the Icesave bill. This file also contains letters between the main financial adviser to the Iceland Finance Minister and Mark Flanagan of the IMF: http://file.wikileaks.org/leak/icesave-eu7.pdf

Selling hot air

This article about “The Fed’s sneaky new way of raising money” makes it clear how the Fed does its own thing – independent of the government, Congress or the general public.

In fact, the author James Turk, an active member of GATA, the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, writes that “central banks are a barbarous relic”…

Priceless: How the Federal Reserve Bought the Economics Profession

This article in the Huffington Post describes how the Fed has been buying economists and their thinking for the last 3o years.

I wish I could also refer to the stories that described how the thinking of the London School of Economics was hijacked by the ruling financial elite.

GATA sues Fed to disclose gold market intervention records

GATA today brought suit against the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, seeking a court order for disclosure of the central bank’s records of its surreptitious market intervention to suppress the monetary metal’s price.

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and targets Fed records involving gold swaps, exchanges of gold with foreign financial institutions. In a letter dated September 17 this year to GATA’s law firm, William J. Olson P.C. of Vienna, Virginia, (http://www.lawandfreedom.com) Fed Board of Governors member Kevin M. Warsh acknowledged that the Fed has gold swap agreements with foreign banks but insisted that such documents remain secret:

Former City Boy makes fun of The City

I’ve just seen a German video about Geraint Anderson, a former hippy turned successful banker. His conscience got him to write a column in The London Paper as the City Boy.

He criticizes the people who make money out of money, but doesn’t understand (yet) the really underlying causes.

Still, he dared and dares to criticise and has become persona non grata in The City.

Bank of Japan seems committed to more interest-free yen

This is the title of one of the daily dispatches of GATA, the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee.

Interesting how it gets to the point of the original news item from Bloomberg.

GATA members tend to belong to the investor community who have a different kind of overview of the financial markets and their conditions than us ordinary folk.

Money supply is in the air of the FT

This letter in the FT recommends quantitative easing (the printing of Credit money by the Bank of England) and led me to Tim Congdon and his consultancy International Monetary Research Ltd.

It is most interesting how he watches and interprets the money supply and certainly knows how to distinguish between the Treasury and the Bank of England.

This is what I wrote to him:

Dear Prof. Congdon

Your letter in the FT sparked so much interest in me that I comment on it on one of my blogs here.

I have also studied your website and would love to add to your insights from my perspective as a mathematician and systems analyst, formerly at CERN in Geneva.

The fact that you watch the money supply and its growth is most intriguing to me. That you manage to turn it into advice to clients is downright impressive!

If you were to read Green Credit for Green Purposes which we submitted to the Treasury Select Committee in response to the Stern Review, you would see that we recommend the Cash : Credit ratio as a measure that needs to be taken and redressed. By Cash I mean M0 and Credit refers to M4.

The real problem is that nobody creates the interest necessary to pay for M4. Hence people need to borrow and borrow to pay interest upon interest.

If you were to take an interest in our perspective, I would be glad to hear from you!

House approves sweeping financial reforms

This is a very good sign for a possible beginning of a melt-down of the unchecked power that the Fed holds. For the 1,279-page bill includes plans for an agency that will “expose Federal Reserve monetary policy to unprecedented congressional scrutiny”.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The House of Representatives approved the biggest changes in financial regulation since the Great Depression on Friday, marking a win for the Obama administration and top Democrats in Congress.