Is the FED and U.S. Gov Rigging the Stock Market?

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.

How Goldman Sachs Made Tens Of Billions Of Dollars From The Economic Collapse Of America In Four Easy Steps

Step 1: Sell mortgage-related securities that are absolute junk to trusting clients at vastly overinflated prices.

Step 2: Bet against those same mortgage-related securities and make massive bets against the U.S. housing market so that your firm will make massive profits when the U.S. economy collapses.

Step 3: Have ex-Goldman executives in key positions of power in the U.S. government so that bailout money can be funneled to entities such as AIG that Goldman has made these bets with so that they can get paid after they win their bets.

Step 4: Collect the profits - Goldman Sachs is having their "most successful year" and will end up reporting approximately $50 billion in revenue for 2009.

Thanks to Mike Rivero.

Fake Al Qaeda Actors Exposed ???

On the wierd list:

Profits for us, losses for you

Bill Moyers interviews Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) and Simon Johnson (MIT Sloan School of Mgmt, former Chief Economist at the IMF) on Bank capture of the economy:

See also NY Times: Banks Bundled Bad Debt, Bet Against It and Won.
BTW: Top 135+ Personal Finance Posts for 2009.

BBC: al Qaeda Does Not Exist

It is claimed that this clip is from the three-part BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares".

Number of corporations that control media

see this link.

SEC OIG Investigating SEC Complicity in Naked Short Selling

From Deep Capture: exposing the crime of naked short selling: "SEC OIG Investigating SEC Complicity in Naked Short Selling", 12/1/09.

The Office of the Inspector General of the Securities and Exchange Commission not long ago submitted a semi-annual report to Congress. There are two items in the report of interest to those of us who have argued that the SEC has turned a blind eye towards, or even assisted, unscrupulous hedge funds that make their fortunes destroying public companies for profit.

The first item reads as follow:

“The OIG has opened an investigation into complaints from an investor alleging that the SEC failed to investigate instances of market manipulation and other misconduct in connection with the review, and eventual non-approval, of a developmental drug. The investor also has alleged that the SEC failed to investigate a recent bear raid on the stock of the company that developed the drug, causing a severe plunge in the stock price. The OIG has reviewed several hundred pages of documents, including numerous emails and attachments provided by the complainant. The OIG expects to complete its investigation and issue a report of investigation in the next reporting period.”

I have confirmed that this is a reference to the bear raid on Dendreon, described in considerable detail by Deep Capture. There is plenty of evidence — including, perhaps, those documents and emails referred to by the OIG — pointing to miscreancy in this case. Indeed, it is one of the more despicable cases of market manipulation on record – and many cancer patients were deprived of potentially life-extending treatment as a result. We look forward to reading the OIG’s report – it should be a doozy.

The second item of interest in the OIG report is this:

“The OIG continued its investigation of an allegation that SEC staff engaged in retaliation against a company after it publicly complained about naked short selling in the company’s stock. During this reporting period, the OIG took the sworn testimony of the staff attorney who worked on the matter and reviewed numerous relevant documents. The OIG has completed its investigative work and plans to issue its report of investigation prior to the end of the next semiannual reporting period.”

It has long been a contention of Deep Capture that the SEC has not just ignored allegations of naked short selling, but has gone after companies that complain about it, often at the behest of the short sellers themselves. This report, too, should be interesting, to say the least.

It wasn’t so long ago that people who did battle against abusive short selling and captured government officials were labeled as conspiracy theorists. Now, thanks to SEC Inspector General David Kotz and a few other honest people in government – people like Senator Ted Kaufman – we might finally see some light shed on some of the shenanigans that have made America look an awful lot like a third world basket case.

Yes, there are hedge funds that do bad things.

Yes, there are government officials who help them.

It’s an ugly reality, and the OIG is to be commended for treating serious allegations as they should be treated – i.e. seriously.

Organized Crime in Charge of EU Carbon Trade, Europol Says

Global Currency in the Works

John Perkins: Was Iceland Victimized by Economic Hit Men?