Sarah Palin in 2012: economic crisis

Showing posts with label economic crisis. Show all posts

Saturday, October 24, 2009

History's Biggest Rip Off...........

by Janet Crain
If anyone doubted that the Stock Market Crash in September 2008 which caused so many damaging repercussions, was manipulated, maybe this article will change their mind.

On Tuesday, March 11th, 2008, somebody — nobody knows who — made one of the craziest bets Wall Street has ever seen. The mystery figure spent $1.7 million on a series of options, gambling that shares in the venerable investment bank Bear Stearns would lose more than half their value in nine days or less. It was madness — "like buying 1.7 million lottery tickets," according to one financial analyst.

But what's even crazier is that the bet paid.

At the close of business that afternoon, Bear Stearns was trading at $62.97. At that point, whoever made the gamble owned the right to sell huge bundles of Bear stock, at $30 and $25, on or before March 20th. In order for the bet to pay, Bear would have to fall harder and faster than any Wall Street brokerage in history.

The very next day, March 12th, Bear went into free fall. By the end of the week, the firm had lost virtually all of its cash and was clinging to promises of state aid; by the weekend, it was being knocked to its knees by the Fed and the Treasury, and forced at the barrel of a shotgun to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase (which had been given $29 billion in public money to marry its hunchbacked new bride) at the humiliating price of … $2 a share. Whoever bought those options on March 11th woke up on the morning of March 17th having made 159 times his money, or roughly $270 million. This trader was either the luckiest guy in the world, the smartest son of a bitch ever or…

Or what? That this was a brazen case of insider manipulation was so obvious that even Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman of the pillow-soft-touch Senate Banking Committee, couldn't help but remark on it a few weeks later, when questioning Christopher Cox, the then-chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission. "I would hope that you're looking at this," Dodd said. "This kind of spike must have triggered some sort of bells and whistles at the SEC. This goes beyond rumors."

Cox nodded sternly and promised, yes, he would look into it. What actually happened is another matter. Although the SEC issued more than 50 subpoenas to Wall Street firms, it has yet to identify the mysterious trader who somehow seemed to know in advance that one of the five largest investment banks in America was going to completely tank in a matter of days. "I've seen the SEC send agents overseas in a simple insider-trading case to investigate profits of maybe $2,000," says Brent Baker, a former senior counsel for the commission. "But they did nothing to stop this."

The SEC's halfhearted oversight didn't go unnoticed by the market. Six months after Bear was eaten by predators, virtually the same scenario repeated itself in the case of Lehman Brothers — another top-five investment bank that in September 2008 was vaporized in an obvious case of market manipulation. From there, the financial crisis was on, and the global economy went into full-blown crater mode.

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.

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What really happened to Bear and Lehman is that an economic drought temporarily left the hyenas without any more middle-class victims — and so they started eating each other, using the exact same schemes they had been using for years to fleece the rest of the country. And in the forensic footprint left by those kills, we can see for the first time exactly how the scam worked — and how completely even the government regulators who are supposed to protect us have given up trying to stop it.

Monday, July 20, 2009

A trillion here, a trillion there........

A trillion here, a trillion there........pretty soon it starts to add up to real money. JC

: In an Ideas piece, Bobby Jindal says Washington is trying to tax and spend our way back to prosperity. Photo: AP

POLITICO 44

Things in Louisiana are looking up. We are announcing major economic development wins and private capital investment and reducing government spending in order to live within our means. We just completed a grueling legislative session where we all had to work together, Democrats and Republicans, to find a way to do more with less.

We trimmed government spending, protected vital services and refused to raise taxes. (As is the case in any legislative body, some gave it a try). I can’t say our legislative session was much fun, but it was necessary, and it is the American way. Or, at least we thought it was.

In the meantime, I’ve been catching up on the news in Washington. I wish I had not.

Let’s review: the Troubled Asset Relief Program, bailouts for American International Group

and others, CEOs of bankrupt businesses that receive billions of tax dollars running off with millions in bonuses, a $ 3.5 trillion budget, a nearly trillion-dollar stimulus that has not stimulated, unemployment continuing to climb, government in the banking business, and of course, the U.S. government now making cars.

We have record deficits, which are unprecedented in recorded world history. We have debt that is even causing our creditors in the Middle East and China to be worried. Oops, I almost forgot the new national energy tax that just passed the House. If it isn’t bad enough that you may have lost your job and been fighting off foreclosure, the government now wants to make sure you, and every other American, pay more in energy costs so former Vice President Al Gore can be happy. This here is a fine pot of gumbo.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Tea Party Song Going Viral

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2H8xHFXC8U&feature=player_embedded

© Janet Crain

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Saturday, February 21, 2009

All We Need is Hopenchange and a Bigger Shovel

Friday, February 13, 2009

Saving the World with 935 Gazillion Gabillion Dollars

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Hope and Change has morphed into Gloom and Doom

Hope and Change has morphed into Gloom and Doom and Obama is the chief purveyor of pessimism. JC

In Elkhart, Ind., on Monday, President Obama spoke as if America were approaching a doomsday that only a massive increase in government could avert.

"The situation we face could not be more serious," he said. "We have inherited an economic crisis as deep and as dire as any since the Great Depression. Economists from across the spectrum have warned that if we don't act immediately, millions more jobs will be lost, and national unemployment rates will approach double digits. More people will lose their homes and their health care. And our nation will sink into a crisis that, at some point, we may be unable to reverse."

Do we really face the possibility of an irreversible crisis? Well, yes. Not the one Obama describes, but the one he may cause.

In fact, talking down the economy serves Obama's purposes. It helps sell his agenda for massively increasing government.

And it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy: America's economy has grown in the past because the American people have not been overburdened by government. Obama could cause irreversible decline by creating an unsustainable government.

Cont. here:

http://townhall.com/columnists/TerenceJeffrey/2009/02/11/obamas_doomsday_scenario_doesnt_add_up

Monday, February 9, 2009

Sarah Palin is Right About Drilling in the ANWR

by Janet Crain

How much longer are we going to keep shooting ourselves in the foot? In both feet? In the midst of the worst economic crisis in decades with no promise of relief in sight, our leaders are imposing severe hardships by cap and trade legislation, new automobile emissions and fuel standards, higher taxes on coal production and refusal to tap into the richest resource available.

I consider this an emergency and in an emergency ou do whatever it takes to survive. If you want to win a race you don't encumber yourself with shackles and weights and restrict fluids or deny them all together. Because if you were so insane as to do this, you would not only lose the race, you would most likely die.

Read what George Will has to say on this insanity:

Iowa's caucuses, a source of so much turbulence, might even have helped cause the recent demonstration by 10,000 Indonesians in Jakarta. Savor the multiplying irrationalities of the government-driven mania for ethanol and other biofuels, and energy policy generally.

Indonesians, like most Asians, love soybeans, the world price of which has risen 50 percent in a month and 125 percent in a year, partly because of increasing world population and incomes, but also because many farmers have switched land from soybeans to crops that can be turned into biofuels. In 2005, America used 15 percent of its corn crop to supplant less than 2 percent of its gasoline use. In 2007, the government-contrived U.S. demand for ethanol was more than half the global increase in demand. The political importance of corn-growing, ethanol-making Iowa is one reason that biofuel mandates flow from Washington the way oil would flow from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if it had nominating caucuses.

ANWR's 10.4 billion barrels of oil have become hostage to the planet's saviors (e.g., John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama), who block drilling in even a tiny patch of ANWR. You could fit Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Delaware into ANWR's frozen desolation; the "footprint" of the drilling operation would be one sixth the size of Washington's Dulles airport.

Clinton has an alternative to drilling: Oil should be released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve—which exists to protect the nation against major interruptions of supply—as "a signal to the market." A signal of what? Readiness to release more? All 698 million barrels? Then what?

Americans can still drill for … water. Water rights (T. Boone Pickens has bought 400,000 acres of them in the Texas Panhandle) are becoming more valuable as ethanol production, which is extremely water-intensive, puts pressure on supplies.

To avoid drilling for oil in ANWR's moonscape, the planet savers evidently prefer destroying forests, even though they absorb greenhouse gases. Will ethanol prevent more carbon-dioxide emissions than would have been absorbed by the trees cut down to clear land for the production of crops for ethanol? Be that as it may, governments mandating the use of biofuels are one reason for the global rise in food prices, which is driving demand for more arable land. That demand is driving the destruction of forests—and animal habitats. In Indonesia alone, 44 million acres have been razed to make way for production of palm oil.