@VB Bart: Re George Soros, he is said to be anti-Putin, yet his media outlets preach an attitude that Putin would design to weaken USA. He does appear to be megalomaniacal, and he does play just off the center stage occupied by the leaders of world governments (ask Brits whose Pound savings emerged from Soro’s embrace at a fraction of previous purchasing power). I searched [ soros british pound ] and turned up something trustworthy, from Forbes’ Investopedia.com series “the Great Investors”.
I happened to note two different crawlers on FoxBizNews on Friday, that Lehman Bros (NYSE: LEH) says it “may get out of the commercial real estate market” and “George Soros is taking a large position in Lehman Bros”.
Bear in mind Soros’ 1992 Pound attack has a slogan “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” (which pulled the Pound out of the european exchange system), and his 1997 Thai Baht attack precipitated directly the “Asian Financial Crisis” –which you should search & get a feel for –Soros wins big, citizens & ‘long’ investors lose big, characterize both these crises.
The current USA financial mess is battering currencies (dollar & euro) in sequence as it adds to the oil-price shock to pull first USA and now EU into slowdown/recession.
The whole thing has happened in domino fashion, with ‘confidence’ in the role of the gravity which pulls down the dominos, and is rather incredibly based on a very small relative number of mortgage defaults.
The leverage which is doing this is the reverse of the leverage which, when it was pushed out and pushed out until it had to fail (first failures to hit American awareness was (cough)Lehman Bros “auction rate securities”) and start the de-leveraging which is now loose as a vicious cycle in the housing market, where falling prices sink mortgages under water, which causes credit to dry up, which kills profits, which kills markets themselves.
Center problem, which bank-stock raiders have often exploited, is that banks are set up to be safe but to also create economic growth, meaning the percent of hard reserves which must be kept against deposits is set by law very low. Hence we’re seeing bank failures now, tho the number is small (FDIC has a ”watch” list) and creating inflation as the gov’t pours liquidity into the system.
Soros locates a weakness, and then places huge bets, timed to leverage off mood and temperament, in order to start “runs” on the system order in which he has located or created a chaotic subsystem.
The first failures, in Lehman & Bear Stearns hedge funds, turn out to’ve been mortgage-backed securities in which the original mortgages had been leveraged 30 to 1. Why alarm bells in the US banking system didn’t start flashing at half that, i do not know. Where was FDIC? Where was congress –specifically Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and the push behind the recent emergency bail-out, the $300 bbl housing bill (which is alluded to elsewhere on this site as including payments to indicted vote-fraud organization ACORN)?
…now, take a look at this email being sent around among investors & gold bugs (i’ve rec/ it several times now, from people i know):
“According to a July 29 Pravda article, an anonymous Russian diplomat revealed that the “Russian administration believes the United States may soon suffer from a serious political crisis.” The sequence begins with a financial crash, advances to political unrest and finally to the dissolution of American military power. As the Russian diplomat warned, “America is standing on the verge of a large-scale crisis of its own existence.”
…and here are the ”publications” listed in the very short & far from comprehensive, but politically untainted Investopedia article:
“The Alchemy Of Finance” by George Soros (1988)
“Soros On Soros: Staying Ahead Of The Curve” by George Soros(1995)
“Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism” by George Soros(2001)
“The Bubble Of American Supremacy: Correcting The Misuse Of American Power”by George Soros(2003)
“Soros: The Life And Times Of A Messianic Billionaire” by Michael Kaufman(2002)
I have no conclusions to offer –but we may be under a larger attack than we realize. Forewarned is forearmed.
Market volatility has been huge –professionals are shaking their heads in wonder at it. The volatility is chasing many accounts to the sidelines, assuring the low volumes which magnify large trades and enable even sharper volatility swings, which further erode ma & pa citizen’s confidence in the national integrity.
How to fight this attack –even if KGB is not involved, at the minimum large hedge funds on the short side are relentlessy hammering our stocks, which is enriching the bears and clobbering the bulls. “Bears” –heh heh. I’m not selling into the mess, tho i’m way down, maybe 15% from my recent high –in fact I’m buying –latest purch is a domestic drilling rig builder, the biggest, which i won’t name in respect of Wretchard’s site.
One last note, many investors have been heartened to see oil & gold really nose-dive seemingly due to the Dollar gain. This could represent a USA victory over the financial attack which has been ongoing (since about the time of the 2006 election but i won’t go there), or (and this is circulating among the Depends-Wearers) it could a combination of central bank intervention to prop the Dollar, contemporaneous with these same dark funds dumping the two ”fear indicators” oil & gold –in order to ”shrink the footprint” of the Rus invasion during its initial stage when world people might’ve otherwise taken the process out of rus control, say in the even of a superspike which would have really caused anger at the rus. Either way we’ll soon know –if they are that smart, and if the dollar is rising on central bank intervention, or that and a Euro confidence collapse, then we will see gold and oil turn up sharply and the dollar down, in the coming week or weeks perhaps, depending a lot now on the news flow next week, esp the NATO meeting on Tuesday.
I personally think this shit is happening, and i think we’ve already broken the frontal attack. The markets have been fighting a war, blindly in a way, where the sheer amount of wealth and the sheer depth of knowledge and the rule of law and power of communications and confidence in our peers, here in the west, brings buyers in whenever prices get low enough that the reward looks like a good risk.
Information helps. Watch the cable financial stations, Fox and even CNBC, for a lift –lots of financial people talking stocks –business as usual, if business as usual during a rough time.
