Cramer is interested in the September blow-out, the half dozen trading days wherein short volumes spiked to ten times normal in apparently coordinated waves from the dark pools, driving down the big banks’ stocks as much as 70% in those several days. Cramer thinks people inside the banks were shorting their own institutions (while conducting the normal client trade of course) while running whisper campaigns (which natch flared into open rumors) against their own outfits. That’s why he wants a special prosecuter, and perp walks on tv, in order to rebuild the public trust in Wall Street. There’s a youtube out there of the spiel –try [ cramer special prosecuter ] –

a LOT of clinton retreads are in the O financial team. If you want to understand even the outlines, you have to start with the fin de Clinton seicle; an efficient place is the year 2000 reg reforms. Take a quick glance at this resource:

http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraudrotten.htm

Prepare your hair to stand on end as shapes shift in the dark whilst running down who, of O’s new PERAB, cabinet, and staff, was where doing what with whom in that late 90s financial engineering which burned like a slow fuse for a near decade before blowing subprime dynamite and making this here new pair o dime.

Wall Street and Washington, London and Zurich host some sort of permanent and gigantic financial gray area, call it the crime-ish zone, legal-ish enough that connected paladins systematically ride in, load up, and ride out on elections cycles, that is, always as if by design, before marshals can marshall anything martial against them. Elections bring in reformers, who are as mosquitoes alighting momentarily on the surface of the waters, to be slurped from below or to skitter away never to be noticed again.

Not a bad idea, your gambit. Probably looks even better after a couple of glasses of Chateau Thames Embankment.

BTW: John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole, died in January. Great stuff he created.

Cheers.

L3

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4490541725797746038

There are good reasons why Thomas Wood’s Bailout is on the best-seller list at the NY Times, and Atlas Shrugged is at its greatest level of popularity.

If GM went bankrupt the $70 per hour that UAW workers get, would be rationalized by a new owner.

Sirius Satellite radio is facing post-bankruptcy prep with 2 companies buying up their debt, for the sole purpose of setting the company up for a trustee sale. Sirius is viable without there $55 million per year contracts to Oprah, and more to the NFL and NBA (which have low listener ratings). Anything that props the status quo, only postpones the inevitable.

Market solutions will work.

The initial wave of productivity gains from computerization is probably coming to an end. There may be another round of gains in the future, but for now I think real productivity has hit at least a temporary plateau. Unfortunately, the topsy-like growth of the parasite economy has continued and without supporting gains among the few remaining producers it threatens to topple everything. Plus the looming retirement of the Baby Boomers threatens to accelerate the growth of the unproductive sector. And producers have noticed that most of the gains they made have ended up somewhere else besides their own pockets and are reacting to that. Our real productivity may be shrinking as people give up. I think that’s the underlying event that the financial markets are signaling. All the other systemic problems, such as what Shivermetimbers and Blert mentioned, were to a degree masked and their impact minimized by the ability of the productive sector to absorb the shocks and keep on chugging. But enough body blows and even Atlas will finally crumple. Not shrug, but collapse and fall to the mat.

The parasites have reached critical mass and some HIV-like viruses(Political Correctness, cronyism between Wall Street and K Street, Bureaucratic Socialism in the EU, a corrupted and coopted media, and frankly high levels of taxation) are inhibiting society’s immune system from fighting back. We need antidotes, fast.

They were downright counterproductive. At best they led to creative dodges to get around them. At worst, some needed work simply did not get done.

In fact, had Governor Coke Stevenson of Texas
not sabotaged them in the Lone Star State,
there would have been critical shortages in both the ETO and PTO.

For an example of how to do it right, take a look at Salmon P. Chase, Abe Lincoln’s Secretary of Treasury. As a result of his
creative non-intervention, the North actually had civilian economic growth from 1861-65.

In fact, towards the end, Jeff Davis got himself a new SecTreas who copied Chase
reversed things in the South and even stabilized the Confederate Dollar——until the unfortunate events at Appamattox Courthouse ruined everything.

The faith in WWII wage and price controls and rationing seems to be the result of an orchestrated postwar disinformation campaign. Please re-examine your premises.

In short, unwinding FDR’s anti-competition policies, which deliberately jacked up prices and wages. Law of Unintended Consequences, the Great Depression would have been just another recession, if it hadn’t been for governments trying to cure it.