Peacenik just got back from a wilderness survival course. Some interesting stuff on mushrooms and the biomass of salamaders. Peacenik was out of the information loop, but did notice a newspaper box headline declaring the recession in Canada over. And Peacenik got some text news flashes from a Punditman correspondent, that in fact the recession was over. Peacenik goes away for one week and all the problems of society are cured. Is it time for Peacenik to admit that Doom and Gloom is dead? By the way Peacenik has CNBC on tv in the background right now. The pundits sound hysterical. Maria Bartolomo is hyperventilating. Apparently there is no limit to the upside. Was Peacenik wrong? Should Peacenik put his meagre savings into mutual funds?
Then Peacenik scanned the blogosphere. The bubble economy is back. Or is it? Was Peacenik wrong? Peacenik thinks the economy is close to absolute collapse. Read Kunstler's take on the stock market. Is Kunstler right? Peacenik thinks so. And ask yourself this. Why would you believe anything that any central banker, or corporate spokesmen or politician says about the economy?
by Jim Kunstler
By now, everyone in that fraction of the world that pays attention to something other than American Idol and their platter of TGI Friday's loaded potato skins knows that Goldman Sachs has been caught at another racket in the stock market: front-running trades. What a clever gambit, done with the help of the markets themselves - the Nasdaq in particular - in which information on trades is held back a fraction of a second from public view, while the data is shoveled to the computers of privileged subscribers who can execute zillions of programmed micro-trades before the rest of the herd makes a move. This allows them to vacuum up hundreds of millions of dollars by doing absolutely nothing of value. The old-fashioned method used by brokers was called "churning," in which stocks were bought and sold incessantly (by phone) from the portfolios of inattentive clients merely to generate commissions. In any sensible society - i.e. a society with an instinct for self-preservation - it would be against the law and the people doing it would be sent to prison.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've got to think that the actions at the Nasdaq end - shoveling the data to the privileged subscribers a fraction of a second early - is patently illegal in the first place, since the whole purpose of an exchange is to create a fair trading space. Where both parties are concerned, it should amount to a plain vanilla criminal conspiracy to commit stock trading fraud. Maybe the larger question is: since when did we become a society lacking the instinct for self-preservation - that is, a society bent on suicide? Or maybe the question is better put to Goldman Sachs's CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
Read on...
Then Peacenik scanned the blogosphere. The bubble economy is back. Or is it? Was Peacenik wrong? Peacenik thinks the economy is close to absolute collapse. Read Kunstler's take on the stock market. Is Kunstler right? Peacenik thinks so. And ask yourself this. Why would you believe anything that any central banker, or corporate spokesmen or politician says about the economy?
by Jim Kunstler
By now, everyone in that fraction of the world that pays attention to something other than American Idol and their platter of TGI Friday's loaded potato skins knows that Goldman Sachs has been caught at another racket in the stock market: front-running trades. What a clever gambit, done with the help of the markets themselves - the Nasdaq in particular - in which information on trades is held back a fraction of a second from public view, while the data is shoveled to the computers of privileged subscribers who can execute zillions of programmed micro-trades before the rest of the herd makes a move. This allows them to vacuum up hundreds of millions of dollars by doing absolutely nothing of value. The old-fashioned method used by brokers was called "churning," in which stocks were bought and sold incessantly (by phone) from the portfolios of inattentive clients merely to generate commissions. In any sensible society - i.e. a society with an instinct for self-preservation - it would be against the law and the people doing it would be sent to prison.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've got to think that the actions at the Nasdaq end - shoveling the data to the privileged subscribers a fraction of a second early - is patently illegal in the first place, since the whole purpose of an exchange is to create a fair trading space. Where both parties are concerned, it should amount to a plain vanilla criminal conspiracy to commit stock trading fraud. Maybe the larger question is: since when did we become a society lacking the instinct for self-preservation - that is, a society bent on suicide? Or maybe the question is better put to Goldman Sachs's CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
Read on...
