Very interesting if true…
From
zerohedge:
Are Federal Reserve and U.S. Government Rigging Stock Market? We Have No Evidence They Are, but They Could Be. We Do Not Know Source of Money That Pushed Market Cap Up $6+ Trillion since Mid-March.
The most positive economic development in 2009 was the stock market rally. Since the middle of March, the market cap of all U.S. stocks has soared more than $6 trillion. The “wealth effect” of rising stock prices has soothed the nerves and boosted the net worth of the half of Americans who own stock.
We cannot identify the source of the new money that pushed stock prices up so far so fast. For the most part, the money did not from the traditional players that provided money in the past:
• Companies. Corporate America has been a huge net seller. The float of shares has ballooned $133 billion since the start of April.
• Retail investor funds. Retail investors have hardly bought any U.S. equities. Bond funds, yes. U.S equity funds, no. U.S. equity funds and ETFs have received just $17 billion since the start of April. Over that same time frame bond mutual funds and ETFs received $351 billion.
• Retail investor direct. We doubt retail investors were big direct purchases of equities. Market volatility in this decade has been the highest since the 1930s, and we no evidence retail investors were piling into individual stocks. Also, retail investor sentiment has been mostly neutral since the rally began.
• Foreign investors. Foreign investors have provided some buying power, purchasing $109 billion in U.S. stocks from April through October. But we suspect foreign purchases slowed in November and December because the U.S. dollar was weakening.
• Hedge funds. We have no way to track in real time what hedge funds do, and they may well have shifted some assets into U.S. equities. But we doubt their buying power was enormous because they posted an outflow of $12 billion from April through November.
• Pension funds. All the anecdotal evidence we have indicates that pension funds have not been making a huge asset allocation shift and have not moved more than about $100 billion from bonds and cash into U.S. equities since the rally began.
If the money to boost stock prices did not come from the traditional players, it had to have come from somewhere else.
We do not know where all the money has come from. What we do know is that the U.S. government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to support the auto industry, the housing market, and the banks and brokers. Why not support the stock market as well?
As far as we know, it is not illegal for the Federal Reserve or the U.S. Treasury to buy S&P 500 futures. Moreover, several officials have suggested the government should support stock prices. For example, former Fed board member Robert Heller opined in the Wall Street Journal in 1989, “Instead of flooding the entire economy with liquidity, and thereby increasing the danger of inflation, the Fed could support the stock market directly by buying market averages in the futures market, thereby stabilizing the market as a whole.” In a Financial Times article in 2002, an unidentified Fed official was quoted as acknowledging that policymakers had considered buying U.S. equities directly, not just futures. The official mentioned that the Fed could “theoretically buy anything to pump money into the system.” In an article in the Daily Telegraph in 2006, former Clinton administration official George Stephanopoulos mentioned the existence of “an informal agreement among the major banks to come in and start to buy stock if there appears to be a problem.”
and
informationclearinghouse adds:
The Working Group on Financial Markets, also known as the Plunge Protection Team, was created by Ronald Reagan to prevent a repeat of the Wall Street meltdown of October 1987. Its members include the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Chairman of the SEC and the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Recently, (2007) the team has been put on high alert because of increased market volatility and, what Hank Paulson calls, the systemic risk posed by hedge funds and derivatives....
This suggests that the PPT could, in fact, be the driving-force behind the ongoing stock market rally.
Posts
