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A Conspiracy Theory I Just Can’t Buy
A confidential report from the Pentagon just made public says that the 2008 financial crisis was the result of targeted attacks by terrorists groups. A ramp up of oil prices that began in 2007 led to the bear raids against Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in 2008. The final phase may be in place now, forcing the US to engage in massive and unsustainable borrowing to cope with the Great Recession that followed. The consequent collapse of the dollar is assured.
Two firms, left anonymous in the report, were particularly aggressive in the execution of this plan, which engaged in highly leveraged purchases of credit default swaps and the shorting of stocks. It is believed they were acting as agents on behalf of unnamed enemies of the US. Was it China? Jihadists? Or the Duchy7 of Grand Fenwick?
I know that parties with advanced knowledge of the 9-11 attacks bought a massive position in American Airlines puts just days before, executed through Swiss banks. They never collected a windfall profit thought to exceed $200 million. So we know that at least terrorist friends are active in the market in big size.
However, this report sounds more like a John le Carre novel than having any bearing in reality. Did terrorists force Alan Greenspan to keep interest rates artificially low? Did they intimidate millions of subprime borrowers into taking out loans they could never repay. Did terrorists drug the SEC, putting them to sleep while bankers ran wild? Did Chinese agents lobby for the repeal of Glass Steagle?
I doubt it. It all sounds like a fantasy that squeezed through the cracks on a slow news day. I think the Pentagon better stick to their day job of blowing up stuff rather than analyzing financial markets.
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Why do people grasp at silly conspiracy theories, when the truth is out in plain site. The financial crisis was caused by, in no particular order:
1. Too low interest rates and too easy monetary policy from the Fed.
2. The Community Reinvestment Act that virtually forced banks to make bad loans.
3. Fannie & Freddie making a market for crappy mortgages via there perceived (correctly) government credit guarantee.
4. Fraudulent mortgage industry selling unaffordable mortgages for a quick buck, empowered by Fannie, Freddie, and the big money center banks.
5. Greedy and/or foolish individuals buying houses they couldn't afford, bidding up the price of housing to stupid levels, all with cheap credit, often with fake income data.
6. Stupid investors buying up crappy CDO's & MBS's, doing no due diligence, assuming the housing bubble would go on forever.
7. Idiotic, greedy rating agencies slapping AAA ratings on crappy mortgage paper, as long as the check cleared.
8. Moronic politicians defending banks, the mortgage industry, and Fan & Fred, so long as the check cleared.
I know that's a lot less interesting that a vast international conspiracy, but come on!
Janet Yellen blamed the developing nations for the crisis - them and their shortsighted surpluses - http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/03/04/yellen-places-blame-for-crisis...
anyone but us
"I think the Pentagon better stick to their day job of blowing up stuff rather than analyzing financial markets."
I have issue with that since it is above your pay grade and above mine also. Also this Game is not going to abate either since all issues are Fire Wall issues on soft targets.
Where is my tin foil hat??? LOL
Where is my tin foil hat??? LOL
Could be that whoever might have decided to bring the system down realized the peices were already in place (Greenspan, Glass Steagle, SubPrime, etc). Just a nudge was needed to throw the system into the abyss.
Hanlon's Razor: 'Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity'
That is all.
A slave has no clue who rules them, why or the bigger picture.
And so your ramblings have always been one of a wannabe insider ... not an actual insider, who would know better.
Welcome to the club, fellow slave.
So I go up to the site, there is no link to the article, no source material other than the author. no links to other sources to verify. These types of short cuts are the reason I have stopped reading your material for a long time. then something I'd read, but the usuall crappy job.
Link to the report:
http://www.freemanglobal.com/uploads/Economic_Warfare_Risks_and_Response...
@silver,
thanks
To determine "Who is responsible?" we need only look at who benefited from the financial crisis.
"The American people are finally learning the incredible and jaw-dropping details of the Fed's multitrillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and corporate America," said Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a longtime Fed critic whose provision in the Wall Street regulatory overhaul required the new disclosures. "Perhaps most surprising is the huge sum that went to bail out foreign private banks and corporations."
http://goo.gl/beBxz
considering I have thought goldman engineered this thing before matt tabbi's article
Goldman sachs was behind all the stuff if you connect the dots,
Yes, know your history. Bin Laden actually said right after the horrible tragedy of 9-11 that he did it to prompt US to destroy itself financially. Which we did by going all gung ho on low interest rates and "free" money in the name of patriotism. He knew this would happen and said as much 5-6 years before Lehman tanked. It was a trap he knew we would go into.
Yes, it's absolutely absurd that people are suggesting that terrorists were involved in taking the market down.
I remember during the 2008 crisis Cramer was jumping up and down about how terrorists were shorting the financial system. Nonsense.
n a February 8, 1920 article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald, Churchill wrote:
"(From) the days of Spartacus Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, to those of Trotsky, Bela-Kuhn, Rosa Luxembourg and Emma Goldman, this world-wide conspiracy ... has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definitely recognizable role in the tragedy of the French Revolution.
It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads, and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the bringing about of the Russian revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews."
http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=Final...
Furthermore, I expect financial terrorism to resemble a car bomb, not an earthquake.
I read this last week. I agree with MHF. The regulators are high 5 low 6 figure guys, the bad guys are 7 figure guys. Think high school ref calling a pro game. This whole idea sounds like a good dark closet to point a 5 figure finger at.
Jeesus. H. Christ, don't you remember Hank Paulson? FinancialTerrorist par excellence?
He should be taken care of just as a whoring wife in a Muslim country would be: Stone his ass.
I trillion dollars and counting ALL for his buds, 90% of whom are terrist jews of Wall Steet and Fleet Street.
if by terrorist, they mean banksters, then yes. I want to know who was pulling X100 $billions on September 15, 2008.
at 1:54 Senator Kanjorski describes the attack,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD8viQ_DhS4
how many of you have heard this video?
hmmm, so country-wide, AIG, GS, LEH, BSC, these are terrorist organizations? Makes sense. When do wee Blankfein and Cassano in Guantanamo?
Fuck Amerika, look in the mirror.
something happened at 2000, Bush immediately turned on his campaign promises. Then the hard right on Israel, and then 9/11, which was pretext to Iraq. Even before 2000 Heritage and the Conservatives were spending tons of money to "get" Clinton. The Bushes were always globalists, Prescott, Poppy, they played the field. GHWB ran the Iran Contra war, using pilfered S&L money. Ross Perot was willing to spend millions of his own dollars to see Poppy never saw a second term.
But no Democrat has questioned their integrity, not Clinton or Obama. The GOP despite any leadership or policy, now calls the shots. the 2008 crisis is the inevitable consequence of political policy run from behind the scenes, just as the Koch brothers front the Tea Party, a grass roots populist movement run by billionaires? If anything the wealth and income disparity gap has widened. Does that tell you who is winning?
Stop, the oppressive and corrupt governments worldwide are all innocent saints just ask any self loathing neomarxist sheep.
US banks and insurance companies fall under 100 different alphabet agencies and held reserves to the moon but a legion of unaccountable, corrupt beaurocrats has nothing to do with anything just ask the greeks. In fact the solution is add more. Fractional banking is the boogeyman as if locking 100% reserves in a closet somewhere isn't the most inefficient thing since wind power came on board, not oppressive in the slightest in fact it is a great use of resources just ask any zeromoonbat.
Exactly the tea party is a front but the folks rioting in the middle east are all peasants.
Europe is broke because of the evil greedy bank and corporate bastards and not the overwhelming euroliberalsocialscumbagism,
and best of all lending money to anyone who could make an X at historically low rates was benign afterall the elite super wealthy dropped the ball by allowing access to capital for all. Should go back to 40yrs ago where the only folks that could borrow were those who didn't need to, that was a better environment for the poor and middle class in the zeropretend world. A huge loss for the perpetual downtrodden victims.
the banks could have worked for free and nothing changes, they could reset capital back to zero and in 20yrs it is largely in the same hands it is today but don't let anything that stupid get in the way of a good whackjob theory.
jump off a bridge and aid the war on illiteracy.
otherwise blame the jews, buy silver and vote Ron Paul like the rest of the zerosheep.
Xk... Paneful
Well now... thank you for the lesson in literacy and cogent argument.
It is precisely the Crony Capitalism of the Banking Cartel and their Political Whores that collapsed the Bubble of their own creation.
You are a damn lousy apologist for the cartel and their ilk, but you are an apologist nonetheless.
who would believe the shit like that? somehow the shiity house selling for a couple of mils on the CA hills was bought by the terrorists too?
People who think this was organized need to go back and study the concept of the "invisible hand."
pyite
I think you're mixing up "heavy hand" and "back of hand" with invisible hand.
Adam Smith would look in disbelief at the "banking" services to pump and dump and churn and skim, that the banking cartel have conjured up.
Economic terrorism is nothing new. It's probably as old as money itself. When it comes to money there are no borders. Whatever they are allowed to exploit will be exploited. Many people in this country have taken large sums of money to facilitate our exploitation.
There are winners and losers. You can always win when you design the game and write the rules. When people finally catch on, you design the next game.
The people of the US have no say when it comes to economic policies, monetary policy, or government spending. A fake 2-party system is not a democracy. We have to wake up and realize that if we were a victim of economic terrorism, many of the terrorists were US citizens.
Unfettered human greed.
And placed into a risk free environment, a very dangerous combination.
How's your silver shorts MHFT?
The US military publishes a lot of reasearch that would be laughed at if they had to go thorough a more rigorous peer review system.
you all know goddamned good and well that the true financial terrorists are walking around free today, and that none of the people responsible for all the ongoing fraud have done the perp walk, even in light of their obvious guilt
yet the commenters here want to rule out conspiracy and any sort of concerted effort to produce the effects seen today globally
are you blind?
of course its a conspiracy, if it wasn't, people would be in jail for their personal portions of the crimes commited
the facilitators are involved
command from the top down
the conspiracy is just too damn large for you to wrap your heads around
The machiavellian hand of Soros is all over Wikileaks and since Wikileaks revelations are presumed to have spurred the MENA situations, it appears that the NWO folks are the real terrorists.
If you read the actual report, which I did, it does not dispute that lax regulation and greedy lenders and borrowers contributed to the crisis. It does bring up good questions about the bear raids on Lehman and Bear Stearns though. Who were the bear raiders and where did they get their funding? It brings up dark pool trading and sponsored access trading transparency problems as a mechanism that could be used as a weapon against our economic system. The key word is "could". The report states that there is no way to prove if there was a concerted attack or not because of the above stated problems with dark pool and sponsored access trading. It also brought up the possibility of sovreign wealth fund involvement as well.
I think it would be a good idea to at least study the report instead of dismissing it out of hand due to a hatred of the banktsterz. Trust me, I have no love whatsoever for the banking cartel but unless there is light shown on the dark pools to find out who is sponsoring the bear raids we will never know who is doing what.
One of the solutions in the report was to restore the uptick rule which was repealed in 2007. The full report can be read here:
http://www.freemanglobal.com/uploads/Economic_Warfare_Risks_and_Response...
it would be nice to verify that it's only one source of attack rather than a few.
I would believe Soros. Otherwise it's the usual suspects (terrorist groups); the FED, central banks and DC politicians.
In the report it mentions Soros by name a few times. It does not accuse him of any wrongdoing as there is no paper trail to tie anyone to the bear raids on Lehman and Bear Stearns. It is interesting to note that Soros was one of the few hedge fund traders to make money in 2008 to the tune of 1 billion dollars.
There never seems to be any legal wrongdoing. Either laws have been enacted to enable theft and/or they have so much wealth they can impact the market.
The "supected terrorist organizations" are reported to be The Snidely Whiplash Gang and none other than Lex Luthor himself.
I've got a phenomenal conspiracy theory. Maybe, just maybe, we have a slew or retards running the show that have no f'n idea what they are doing. Anyone ever heard of putting the "rats in charge of the cheese?" Well, here we are at that exact crossroad.
either that ,or they know exactly what they are doing
So what he is saying is that there is no need to cut his budget because there are no REAL financial problems? So it was all just a little terrorism blip?
That theory is a load of BS. It was caused by a combination of greed and incompetence and lack of risk aversion.
Basel II
So GS are terrorists?
YES
Sorry to bother anyone but I don't read the writers articles anymore - any mention of any experiences while flying first class?
Comment posting error dupe.