30 July 2009

The Shadow Banking Pyramid

The current spate of fraud on Wall St., and specifically the front-running and market manipulation scams being committed by Wall St. banks on the floor of the NYSE and other market making venues, is finally getting some coverage This would be good news if it weren't meaningless.

Some background: I first started reporting on the rigged markets scandal in the U.S. and the U.K. five years ago in the pages of The Ecologist magazine in the U.K. I predicted that the unraveling of FannieMae and FreddieMac was all but certain due to explicit accounting fraud. I was one of many pointing out the blindingly obvious, but this information was kept out of view from the main stream America for fear it would frighten the sheep into cutting back on their leveraged speculation and consumption; using their homes like ATM machines. In an economy dictated to by the unholy triangle of GE, CNBC, and Wall St. selling their wares of weapons, propaganda and lottery tickets, delusions (and fiat currencies) must never be questioned.

Talking about crooks on Wall St. has been a staple while co-hosting my radio show in London with Stacy Herbert on ResonanceFM 104.4, "The Truth About Markets." Week after week we forensically describe the workings of Wall St. frauds -- drawing on my experience as a former Wall St. trader and inventor of patented financial engineering technologies used on Wall St. today -- to explain how the scams are done in full view of the SEC and CFTC. ResonanceFM is a musicians cooperative listened to primarily by bong smoking squatters in Shordditch who, by virtue of the fact that mainstream American and British media chose not to cover these crimes left open a niche for us to cover, have become preternaturally knowledgeable about fraudulent Collaterized Debt Obligations, Special Purpose Entity Accounts and High Frequency Trading Arbitrage. Many of these pot heads thank me today because many of them put their meager savings into gold bullion as we have been suggesting since 2002 -- which shot up 40% against the British Pound last year.

In 2006 I started making documentaries for Al Jazeera English. Death of the Dollar, Rigged Markets and Money Geyser explained, respectively, the structural weakness of the dollar, the structural weakness of the New York Stock Exchange, and the structural weakness of the global currency grid and in particular the currency and economy of Iceland. A year later, the Icelandic krona and the economy evaporated in a cloud of currency 'carry trade' ice and dust exactly as we predicted it would.

In 2007 the sup-prime scandal and the controlled demolition of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers got under way thanks to the Washington-Wall St. revolving door that gave us the Goldman Sachs-Oval Office axis of insider trading; the S&L crash, the 1987 crash, the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) crash, the crash of Drexal Burnham, Enron, WorldCom and the dot-com crash. America has become the most corrupt empire in history and since the debts that caused each of these catastrophes was never paid off, but simply put off the balance sheet and traded in what Prime Minister Gordon Brown calls the 'Shadow Banking System' or to be more precise the Shadow Banking Pyramid, Americans can expect to live in the shadow of this debt pyramid in perpetuity.

America's debts are bigger than the entire GDP of the world, so unless the whole world decides to bail out America by gifting America 100 percent of their wages and profits for a year or more America can forget about ever digging out of its debt entombment.

In 2008 I produced and presented a series for BBC World News, The Oracle. For ten weeks I hammered away reporting on the rot that was threatening to take down America; the duplicitous spewings of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, as well as the parasitical machinations of the Fed, so I wasn't surprised when Congress appeased financial terrorists on Wall St. and coughed up 700 billion dollars in ransom at the end of last year to ensure payment of Goldman Sachs' bonus pool for 2008 and 2009.

This is why I do not believe that the main stream media's belated reporting on Wall St. scandals is meaningful. It's too late. Like the New York Times sitting on the Bush wire tap story until after the election of 2004, the story of banking buccaneers and vipers in the New York Times reads more like a requiem than a news story.

The Egyptians had the great pyramids in the Valley of the Kings we have the great pyramids of debt created in the canyons of Wall St. These are now permanent features of the American and British financial landscape that have effectively turned Americans and Brits into debt slaves.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-keiser/the-shadow-banking-pyrami_b_245988.html

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