Ry Cooder – “No Banker Left Behind” – [2011]

Ry Cooder – “No Banker Left Behind” – [2011]

Black Thursday?

It’s not quite noon in New York today August 4, 2011 and the Dow is down 350 points already.  Will this be Black Thursday?  Will the market close early today, suspending trading, circuit breakers?  Or will the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) step in with taxpayer money to prop up the bankster ponziconomy?  Stay tuned…..

update 2 pm new york time Dow still down 340 points, there was the usual ppt bounce after noon but it didn’t last…..still 2 hours to go but the trend at the moment is down.

update 4 pm market closes with Dow down 512 points, and clearly signs of panic in the last hour.

Morgan Stanley Fund Defaults on $3 Billion Tokyo Real Estate Deal

via Reuters:

TOKYO (Reuters) – A Morgan Stanley property fund failed to make $3.3 billion in debt payments by a deadline on Friday, handing over the keys to a central Tokyo office building to Blackstone (BX.N) and other investors, the largest repayment failure of its kind in Japan.

Taking advantage of a run-up in property prices, MSREF V refinanced its debt on the Shinagawa property in 2007 with new debt worth 278 billion yen, twice the value of its purchase and likely yielding a tidy profit for the fund.

The refinanced debt was sold in six different tranches by Morgan Stanley to investors.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110415/bs_nm/us_morgan_stanley_real_estate

James Gorman, the CEO of Morgan Stanley, saw his 2010 compensation rise to $15.2 million from $6.5 million in 2009, according to an Associated Press analysis of data filed with regulators.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9MJM2QO0.htm

Anger in Rogue River Valley as Bankrupt Harry & David Crushed Under Buyout Debt

The failure of the 77-year-old company is raising anger locally at Wall Street, which is seen as recklessly borrowing to do the buyout without regard for the local economy, workers or the business.

“Buying a successful company like Harry & David, and crushing it under millions in bonding debt required to pay for the purchase may be known as brilliant financial maneuvering on Wall Street,” said state representative Dennis Richardson, whose district includes the Rogue Valley. Mr. Richardson added: “Oregon citizens have a different name for it.”

via the Wall St. Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703739204576229113684414704.html

The Greatest Financial Con of All Time

“If the goal were to encourage “investing” while reining in the sort of speculations which “earn” hedge fund managers $600 million each (no typo, that was the average of the top 10 hedgies’ personal take of their funds gains), then all unearned income (interest, dividends, capital gains, rents from property, oil wells, etc.) up to $6,000 a year would be free–no tax. Unearned income between $6,000 and $60,000 would be taxed at 20%, roughly half the top rate for earned income. This would leave 95% of U.S. households properly encouraged to invest via low tax rates.

Above $60,000, then unearned income would be taxed the same as earned income, and above $1 million (the top 1/10 of 1% of households) then it would be taxed at 50%. Above $10 million, it would be taxed at 60%. Such a system would offer disincentives to the speculative hauls made by the top 1/10 of 1% while encouraging investing in the lower 99%.”

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/con-of-decade-pt2-07-10.html

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/con-of-decade07-10.html

http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html

Slot Machine Malfunction In the Big Casino – Winnings Cancelled….for some

For others, a big payday(or a big flotation device)  when a stock goes from $40 to 1 cent in less than an hour.  This is like when you hit a big jackpot these days in the casino and they tell you that the machine malfunctioned.  The stock market game is fixed.  Is there any doubt any more?  All of the workers pension retirement money invested there, just to be scammed away.  Tsk, tsk.

The big question is what happens to all the derivative bets made on the values of the underlying trades that have been cancelled?  They are worth much more (in fantasy money)  than the underlying stocks.   Oops.

from CNN Money:

“Accenture (ACN) fell from $40.13 at 2:45 p.m. all the way to just 1 cent before quickly rising back to $39.57.

Sam Adams maker Boston Beer Co. (SAM) also fell to a penny before recovering to $55.82.

Oxford Industries (OXM) tanked to $1.34 before soaring back to $19.51 a minute later.

But some other wild trades were not canceled by Nasdaq. For instance, Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) traded down 22% to $199.25 before recovering, but those trades were upheld.

Most notably, Nasdaq did not cancel trades of Procter & Gamble (PG, Fortune 500) or 3M (MMM, Fortune 500), which momentarily fell 37% and 22%, respectively.”

Here is a list of the canceled stock trades, courtesy of Nasdaq:

http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/07/markets/explaining_wall_street_turmoil/

China: Overcapacity – Commodity Stockpiling

http://urlet.com/schedule.anything

http://www.rgemonitor.com/emergingmarkets-monitor/257856/chinas_september_data_suggest_that_the_long-term_overcapacity_problem_is_only_intensifying

Bank failures hit 106 on year

By Greg Morcroft, MarketWatch

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Seven more banks failed Friday, pushing the 2009 total to 106 and marking the first year since 1992 that at least 100 have gone under

Experts suggest we could be no more than 10% of the way through this cycle of bank collapses, which is sure to be the worst run of closures since the Great Depression.

http://urlet.com/len.man

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bank-failures-hit-100-for-year-2009-10-23

Matt Taibbi on Wall Street Criminals

Like all the great merchants of the bubble economy, Bear and Lehman were leveraged to the hilt and vulnerable to collapse. Many of the methods that outsiders used to knock them over were mostly legal: Credit markers were pulled, rumors were spread through the media, and legitimate short-sellers pressured the stock price down. But when Bear and Lehman made their final leap off the cliff of history, both undeniably got a push — especially in the form of a flat-out counterfeiting scheme called naked short-selling.

The new president for whom we all had such high hopes went and hired Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive who accepted a $2.2 million bonus after he joined the White House, to serve on his economic transition team — at the same time the government was giving Citigroup a massive bailout. Then, after promising to curb the influence of lobbyists, Obama hired a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist, Mark Patterson, as chief of staff at the Treasury. He hired another Goldmanite, Gary Gensler, to police the commodities markets. He handed control of the Treasury and Federal Reserve over to Geithner and Bernanke, a pair of stooges who spent their whole careers being bellhops for New York bankers. And on the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, when he finally came to Wall Street to promote “serious financial reform,” his plan proved to be so completely absent of balls that the share prices of the major banks soared at the news.

http://urlet.com/go.caught

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30481512/wall_streets_naked_swindle

History of the Wall Street Transaction Tax

For readers with a historical bent, it’s worth recalling that the federal government — as well as several states — has repeatedly imposed a tax on the sale or transfer of securities. The first stock transfer tax can be traced to the early Republic, and it reappeared during the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. In 1914, faced with yet another military conflict, Congress again turned to the stock transfer tax. But this time the levy remained on the books for more than 50 years.

The Revenue Act of 1914 levied a tax of 2 cents per $100 of par value on all sales or transfers of stock. The tax was designed principally to raise revenue, not regulate markets. But that didn’t stop advocates from predicting that it would also curb speculation.

http://urlet.com/deuces.likely

http://www.taxhistory.org/thp/readings.nsf/ArtWeb/6062A8E3B6C9C7C585257480005BFEE6?OpenDocument