Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association

This is just the beginning. The bond bubble will take months to completely implode. And eventually it will consume even sovereign nations. Globally the bond bubble is $100 trillion in size: larger than even global GDP.

The Federal Reserve was supposed to serve the nation, however as even Bloomberg observes today, ended up "steamrolling" Main Street. One reason why: directors such as this one. Presenting former Morgan Stanley CEO, James Gorman, whose former employer got a $107 billion loan from the Federal Reserve to avoid implosion.

“I can’t even say with conviction that I’m sure, looking strictly on a cost-benefit basis, that FATCA’s... benefits are going to outweigh the cost.” FATCA constitutes theft. The US government is generating a little bit of revenue and the great expense of foreign banks and governments (not to mention the thousands of Americans who have had to renounce their citizenship because of FATCA’s idiotic rules).

The following story is guaranteed to make you sick. Once again, we’re shown that following trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts and backstops, TBTF Wall Street banks immediately went ahead and focused all their attention obtaining loopholes in order to transfer risk and make billions upon billions of dollars in the financial matrix, as opposed to adding any benefit whatsoever to society.

Despite the authorities' best efforts to keep everything orderly, we know how this global Game of Geopolitical Tetris ends: "Players lose a typical game of Tetris when they can no longer keep up with the increasing speed, and the Tetriminos stack up to the top of the playing field. This is commonly referred to as topping out."

"I’m tired of being outraged!"

Dear NSA Employees, You Now Have a Green Light to Loot and Pillage. It’s Time to Get Paid: Are you just another one of those frustrated NSA employees who feels that unconstitutionally spying on your fellow citizenry under false pretenses isn’t giving you same thrill it once did? If so, have no fear.

Regardless of the origins of the Ebola crisis, whether it be conspiracy or gross incompetence, there are a number of aspects to the entire situation which simply do not add up. While one would not argue that preparedness on the part of the federal government regarding a possible pandemic is a bad thing, its behavior thus far has exuded anything but preparedness. Considering America’s sordid history with national emergency exercises, the ongoing FEMA pandemic exercise cannot help but raise red flags.

One thing that has become crystal clear since the Edward Snowden revelations, is that much of Congress has no problem at all with unconstitutional spying. Rather, they are primarily upset it was exposed and are dead set on making sure no other whistleblower can ever do the same. Enter CISA, or The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act.

Want to hear the worst idea in the history of horrible ideas? How about we take the industry responsible for destroying the U.S. economy and wrecking the lives of tens of millions of people, and then allow it to create a “government-industry cyber war council.” It appears that trillions in taxpayer bailouts simply wasn’t enough for Wall Street. Noting that it can seemingly get whatever it wants whenever it wants, the industry is now positioning itself to overtly control U.S. “cyber” policy. What could go wrong?

So what’s a Peeping Tom, anti-democratic, Constitution-trampling intelligence crony to do after leaving decades of “public service?” Move into the private sector and collect a fat paycheck from Wall Street, naturally. So what is Mr. Alexander charging for his expertise? He’s looking for $1 million per month. Yes, you read that right. That’s the rate that his firm, IronNet Cybersecurity Inc., pitched to Wall Street’s largest lobbying group the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA)

To summarize, the SEC which admits it was clueless in analyzing the modern, fragmented market (yet which found definitively that the culprit for the May 2010 flash crash was Waddell and Reed, and nobody else, using what technology at the time, nobody knows), uses a platform developed by High Frequency Trading firm Tradeworx... to reach a conclusion that High Frequency Trading firms are innocent of every flash crash resulting from an HFT algo gone haywire...

Behold the definition of a "revolving door" - Judd Gregg: from US Senator, to Goldman Sachs advisor, to SIFMA head, all in under two years.

We will release the full list of named recipients once we get it, but here is what we now for now, via BBG and CNN:

• EMPLOYEES AT GOLDMAN SACHS, BARCLAYS, JP MORGAN, CITI, NOMURA, UBS, HSBC RECEIVED FED MINUTES EARLY YESTERDAY
• MOST OF THE BANK EMPLOYEES APPEAR TO WORK IN GOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS (Lobbies)
• ABA, SIFMA, SENATE STAFFERS RECEIVED FED MINUTES EARLY
• FED NAMES 154 RECIPIENTS OF EARLY RELEASE OF FOMC MINUTES
• FED MINUTES SENT EARLY TO BANKS, LAW FIRMS, PRIVATE EQUITY
• FED EARLIER SAID RELEASE WENT MAINLY TO CONGRESS, TRADE GROUPS
• NONE OF THE PEOPLE ON THE LIST ALERTED THE FED THAT THEY RECEIVED NONPUBLIC INFO A DAY EARLY

In other words: absolutely everyone who trades risk assets for a living.

It is cloudy out there as Sandy enters the mid-Atlantic region, although for all the pre-apocalypse preparations in New York, the Frankenstorm may just be yet another dud now that its landfall is expected to come sufficiently south of NYC to make the latest round of Zone 1 evacuations about overblown as last year's Irene hysteria (of course it will be a gift from god for each and every S&P company as it will provide a perfect excuse for everyone to miss revenues and earnings in Q4). That said, Wall Street is effectively closed today for carbon-based lifeforms if not for electron ones, and a quick look at the futures bottom line, which will be open until 9:15 am Eastern, shows a lot of red, with ES down nearly 10 ticks (Shanghai down again as the same old realization seeps day after day - no major easing from the PBOC means Bernanke and company is on their own) as the Friday overnight summary is back on again: Johnny 5 must defend 1400 in ES and 1.2900 in EURUSD at all costs for just two more hours.

It is not news that California, despite what the money laundering practices aided and abetted by the NAR at the ultra-luxury segment of housing may indicate, is and has been for the past 5 years neck deep in a massive housing glut (with millions of houses held off the books in shadow inventory), which together with a complete economic collapse of this once vibrant economy, which happened to be the world's 7th largest, led various cities to resort to the socialist practice of expropriation, or, as it is known in the US, eminent domain, whereby a citizen's rights in property - in this case their home - are forcefully expropriated with due monetary compensation, naturally set by the expropriator. It is also no secret, that Wall Street, which has the most to lose by handing over property titles on mortgaged houses in exchange for money that is well below the nominal value of the mortgage, is not happy about this draconian quasi-communist measure, and has apparently told California to cease and desist. It is, apparently news that California has had enough of these bourgeois capitalist pawns, and has decided to, appropriately enough, channel El Duderino, and to tell Wall Street that this aggression against forced socialist expropriation, by broke deadbeats, will not stand... man.