Elaine Meinel Supkis
David, one of our readers, gave us a funny and totally appropriate You Tube video of a top right wing 'market expert', Mr. Cramer, going totally insane because he wants 1% interest rates like they have in Japan. He is typical of right wing money men: he wants to have the presses print money, forever, as fast as it can so he can stuff it into his ugly mouth. Infinity isn't enough. And these same creatures demand the poor get budget cuts while they must be pampered or else! Or else they won't pay the politicians more money. And today's news is full of this sort if infantile, greedy petulance.
The dollar fell versus the yen, pound and euro on speculation a worsening outlook for U.S. growth may prompt the Federal Reserve to cut borrowing costs by year-end.The U.S. currency declined to near a record low against the euro yesterday as reports showed slowdowns in payroll growth and service industries. The European Central Bank on Aug. 2 signaled it may raise its interest rate in September. The Fed is forecast to hold the U.S. lending rate at 5.25 percent on Aug. 7.
This collapse of the dollar isn't like the Plaza Accords cuts or the Bretton Woods II insider deal, this is pure trade. The US is the world's #1 economy and #1 empire and we are spending money like mad, bribing despots in the Middle East and arming them for Armeggeddon while driving around and off bridges in our SUVs while demanding the Chinese buy our crappy Alt-A loans. So time to see our top economic pundits on TV who get paid lots of money to tell us how to get rich quick, well!
This guy, Cramer, reminds me of Rumplestiltskin. He is so mad, he will stomp himself right through the floor now that he can't spin straw into gold anymore.
These horrible clowns are a blight on our great nation. They snarl and snap at anyone who needs a hand-out or help. They sneer at the weak and shove grannies under trains. They kick dogs and steal candy from babies. But god spare us if they make stupid business deals or their gambling games end up crashing into this wall called 'reality'! They lecture us that they take on this thing, this 'RISK' and thus, should be greatly rewarded because they could lose everything.
If there is any group of people who should go to Hell in a very large handbasket, it is these loudmouth jerks on TV and at the heads of all our financial houses! They have, collectively, made every possible bad choice one could make, they have acted for their own greed while endangering our entire nation, our entire economy. They lied about debts and pretended we could have tax cuts and when they saw the debt grow from $3 trillion to $9 trillion under Bush, they lied about the importance of this.
They lied about the trade deficit and they lied about China being the cause of this, they lied about fiat currencies, they lied about health care and they lied about 9/11. And indeed, if we seek truth, we will find only a writhing darkness and the howls of three headed dogs at the Gates of Hell. Just look at Mr. Cramer! He wants 1% interest rates again. Then he can be rich, rich, rich! He doesn't care if the dollar plunges further into the abyss! He will use these 1% loans to bet AGAINST the dollar and this will make him and his sticky, disgusting, criminal gang richer and richer and we will all DIE. Thank you.
As an adult, it disgusts me to see this guy wailing just because he was too stupid to play the markets. When the Chinese were living with me and learning about capitalism, they told me, my own cautious actions were stupid, They would get rich quick by going to Atlantic City and gambling. They went off and lost their shirts. I had to save them. And I let them know, their distress was my power and they were beholden to me! And they had better learn, the easy way is not the way to go!
Life is cruel. I did Search and Rescue when I was young. Many times, as people did stupid things and I had to rescue them, I was the only person there and the wait for the professionals could take a lonnnnng time in the mountains of Tucson back 40 years ago! And I would sit there and lecture them on sanity in the desert. 'You would have died if I wasn't here,' I would say. For Reality is a very harsh mistress.
The rich think the US Treasury is their own personal bank account. They refused to pay their share of taxes and let the government go deep in debt. The richest man in Minnesota demanded and then bribed the politicians into using tax money to build a stupid baseball stadium while the Gov. of that benighted state vetoed a gas tax to pay for the bridges. Bush went there to tell everyone, he and Congress will spend $250 million to fix one bridge!
All the bridges are collapsing! Our nation is collapsing! And the bribers of our political representatives are directly responsible. They are deliberately causing our currency to collapse! And this is making our trade deficit worse, not better, since a good hunk of it is energy imports! And now they want Bernanke to drop interest rates for them. Gah. The Bank of England as well as the European Bank are both talking about raising interest rates and we are going to drop our own? Our currency is UNDER ATTACK! This is pure madness.
Since I was at You Tube today, I decided to include one of many, many online symposiums on how to make money using charts and doing fast trades. It is interesting to me because I caution everyone and I do mean EVERYONE that playing for pennies like this is dangerous. The longer it goes, the more dangerous it gets. If one switches from yearly buys and sells to monthly and then to weekly and then to daily and so on, at this point, for example, FOREX traders play by the MINUTE, this is a bad thing for it leads to a total global trainwreck as everyone uses the same charts and the same methodology and the same TRADE TIME FRAME, we get a harmonic magic number moment which is when all things coalence together and become one and the same.
Indeed, this is what a lightning bolt is. I wasn't hit by one last night because I took great precautions but it did hit the house as I sat in the livingroom, wearing rubber and cringing. These systems that have been set up and set into motion are like going out in the thunderstorm with an iron rod!
As everyone uses the same type of scheme in the same way we get a lot of people on the same side of a sinking ship and they will stampede in a mass riot from one liferaft after another. Many are pouring into the FOREX trade as well as more and more are going in for gold certificates despite the ugly and obvious history of governments, including our own, unilaterally seizing all gold certificates or freezing them at $35 an ounce, for example.
Bear Stearns Cos., the manager of two hedge funds that collapsed last month, plans to oust Warren Spector, chief of bond and stock trading, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing an unidentified person familiar with the matter.
*snip*
Shares of Bear Stearns fell 6 percent yesterday, bringing this year's decline to more than 33 percent. The perceived risk of owning the New York-based company's bonds rose to the highest in at least six years yesterday.
Yesterday's genius is today's failure. As if any individual can be blamed in this case! For the failure wasn't any particular individual. They all did the same things. They moved in a pack because they are hell hounds. They moved in a flock because they are vultures. Removing one while keeping all the others is meaningless. Bear Stearns is doomed. It can't attract money because it ate up the money it was suppose to grow. End of story. Like Cramer, they can't accept their fates and be content. They want to go on and on and on, forever, getting richer and richer.
More Bears Stearn steroids:
In 2004, Bear Stearns Chief Executive Officer James E. Cayne, a Republican, chided Spector for endorsing Democratic candidate John Kerry in a way that could be ``viewed as being attributed to Bear Stearns as a whole,'' according to a memo he sent the employees at the time.Spector had announced his support on a conference call with other executives arranged by Kerry's election campaign, breaking ranks with many Wall Street executives, including Cayne, who had raised at least $100,000 for his Republican rival, President George W. Bush.
Ho-ho! Now we know why one of these guys was booted out! The traitors who raised money for Bush wanted him to keep the party going. They wanted to pay no taxes. They wanted him to help them use off-shore tax shelters and off-shore manufacturing and all the other things that are now coming home to roost. And they want him to do more of these stupid things that set us up for this disaster in the first place. They never learn nor do they admit their mistakes and faults!
Ritsuko, 34, is, as she puts it, “waist deep” in a fiendishly complex currency swap involving the Japanese yen, the US dollar and the Omani riyal. The trade has lost her more than 100,000 yen (£417) this morning alone. She is beginning to think she might get more joy from borrowing another 200,000 yen from her online broker and selling her yen for Turkish lira, but is irritated because the prices she’s after have not yet flickered on to her little screen.
*snip*
In the space of just a couple of years, Japanese online currency speculators – many of them housewives, elderly matriarchs or young working women – have taken the markets by storm. Economists, major corporations and investors, awed by the sheer market influence of the Japanese speculators, have been forced to rethink their analysis of global currency markets. James Gow, the British chief executive and co-founder of one of Japan’s big three internet currency brokerages, FXOnline Japan, says: “We are looking at Japanese women taking a very different attitude to risk and markets than they used to, and a lot of people have been taken by surprise by that.”Borrowing their native yen more cheaply than any other major currency, multiplying their initial stake by as much as 200 times through margin trading and then dipping into dozens of higher-yield foreign exchange markets, the online traders of Japan now account for around $15 billion (£7 billion) of deals each day. Some have made the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of pounds in just six months’ trading, others trade with a fraction of that. They are, say currency analysts, “obsessive” sellers of the yen – relentlessly ditching the Japanese currency and its wafer-thin interest rates for the more lucrative currencies of New Zealand, Brazil, South Africa and Iceland. About a fifth of all trades that hit the screens at the Nomura brokerage are generated by “housewives” – the catch-all term the professionals use to describe Ritsuko and her powerful cohorts.
This is the latest fad. I predicted this would happen in Japan. For who is stupid enough to park their money in bank accounts earning 0% interest! Even the Japanese aren't that stupid! The government could fix this mess by raising interest rates and the wages of Japanese workers. Like we should do here! But instead, they pretend they are helpless! They pretend these ladies are responsible for the dying yen! And so it goes: always, the financiers and ruling elites blame the people way down the cause and effect ladder for things that THEY created and THEY caused! This is why, every time we have a complete collapse like the Great Asian Currency Crisis or the various stock market belly-flops or the Great Depression, these same liars, thieves and con artists will join a chorus of deluded professional professors to yell, ' NOBODY knows WHY this HAPPENED!'
Right. And the last thing they want to know is pointing fingers in their direction. After 9/11, we were told not to do this. After the recent bridge collapse, we were told to not do this. Indeed, disaster after disaster, we are ordered to NOT POINT FINGERS at authorities or people responsible for disasters.
More about how Japanese housewives rule Buffett and Goldman Sachs (HAHAHA):
And as well as wrestling with the subversive, utterly unexpected cultural phenomenon of “greed is good” women, Japan itself has started to panic that this new breed of profit-hungry housewives threatens its economic revival and global standing. Because the housewives are endless sellers of the yen, any upward pressure on the Japanese currency is almost entirely absorbed by the online traders. For months now, the yen has fallen against most global currencies at every turn.James Gow of FXOnline says: “Where the Government of Japan used to spend billions of dollars intervening in currency markets and fighting the prevailing tide to deflate the yen and help exporters, it now has thousands of Mrs Tanakas doing the same thing out of choice.” Although government intervention remains an option, things may be beyond immediate central bank control: individual Japanese have opened 600,000 margin trading accounts in the past year, with the deposits on those accounts amounting to around $5 billion.
And this is a disaster. The government of Japan should never had let this happen. I warned them that if they got everyone in the habit of sending their wealth overseas, this is hard to stop. And when it does stop, since it is a herd of investors, they switch direction enmass and without much warning. And this is why the old-fashioned systems that create and contain wealth are so important: over and over again, in history, we see clearly that following the stodgey, CONSERVATIVE old rules work! They are the key to success! And one element is 'moderation.' And 'savings' and 'prudence.' Greed is a bad thing in the long run. Prudence, care and moderation are good things.
Setting up systems that seethe with people in greater and greater numbers, trying to guess which way things are moving so they can bet on the system is DESTABLIZING. This means, our boat sinks, the apple cart falls on its side. Earthquakes, floods, high winds and heavy rains are bad! Tsunamis are terrible! Meteorite strikes are hideous!
The joys of serenity and peace means there are far fewer opportunites to exploit differentials and rises and falls. But in the long run, stability is good for us! This concept has been nearly totally destroyed. The present currency system isn't good, it is a catastrophe! It ONLY WORKS if there is an imperial currency that is STABLE and STRONG!
The second it falls into weakness, the whole system begins to swing in ever-wilder gyrations. And the end is always the same: a crash and a war. The bigger the empire,the bigger the war!
Listed Firms' Pretax Profit Jumps 19.5% In April-JuneTOKYO (Nikkei)--Combined pretax profit at listed firms increased 19.5% year on year in the April-June period, fueled by booming demand in emerging economies and the weak yen, according to data compiled by The Nikkei Inc.
Japan is filled with fools. If they think their weak yen and the games they are playing will make them richer forever, they are insane. When our economy and our currency collapses, they will fall off the cliff and into the clutches of one very, very angry dragon! The government of Japan has an obligation to not kill the Golden Goose no matter how stupid that goose is.
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Cramer actually has precedent. Alan Greenspan dropped interest rates, after the collapse of Long Term Capital Management(LTCM),to restore confience in the market.
Your post made me dig out my copy of Roger Lowenstein's "When Genius Failed". (The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management) Fourth Estate 2002.(Keep the publishers happy, buy a copy).
See Page 229-230, Lowenstein has this quote by Alan Greenspan, "To be sure, some moral hazard, however slight, may have been created by the Federal Reserve's involvement." Lowenstein records that Greenspan had done so because the negatives were outweighed by the risk of "serious distortions to market prices had Long Term been pushed suddenly into bankruptcy."
For those who like to keep score, $1 invested in LTCM in Mar 1994 was worth 23c in Oct 1998 (after management fees had been deducted).
We are certainly seeing serious distortions to market prices.
Posted by: Bokonon | August 07, 2007 at 08:03 AM
Greenspan wanted to save his drinking buddies (the guys running that fund all hang out with him socially!). Greenspan NEVER wants to save you or me.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | August 07, 2007 at 03:57 PM
Elaine, please stop. I don't want to think about Alan Greenspan after a few drinks (unless I had a few myself). Couldn't handle the pontification, index finger in the air and babbling on about the economy.
Even worse, could you imagine being one of his tennis buddies and forced by Andrea to let him win match after match?
Posted by: Cato | August 07, 2007 at 05:20 PM