The investor no longer has anything to go on.
The credit ratings are at best bollocks, at worst rigged.
The liquidators of two Bear Stearns hedge funds filed a lawsuit on Monday against the three major U.S. rating agencies, accusing them of fraudulently assigning inflated ratings to securities in the run-up to the financial crisis.The lawsuit seeks to recover damages from Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings in connection with more than $1 billion in losses sustained by the hedge funds. The complaint, which was filed in New York state court in Manhattan, cites messages and emails by employees of the ratings agencies to help build a case that the agencies misrepresented their independence and objectivity.
“It could be structured by cows and we would rate it,” the 141-page lawsuit quotes an S&P employee as messaging a colleague.
White House used QE to lie about the economy, and Bernanke lied about what QE was for
The Obama Administration has been including the cash infusions from the various QEs into the GDP number. When you take the QE injections out of the GDP, the result is four consecutive quarters of declining GDP: A depression.
So much for Dan Hannan’s booming economy. Had Americans known this, would Mitt Romney now be President?
Meanwhile, a Mr. Huszar, senior fellow at Rutgers Business School andformer Morgan Stanley managing director, managed the Federal Reserve’s $1.25 trillion agency mortgage-backed security purchase program during 2009-10. He was thus a senior Fed official administering QE, and this is what he says today:
“We went on a bond-buying spree that was supposed to help Main Street. Instead, it was a feast for Wall Street.”
He adds:
“I can only say: I’m sorry, America. I was responsible for executing the centerpiece programme of the Fed’s first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognise the programme for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.”
Actually, Wall Street was bailed out, money was siphoned off to underwrite further multinational deals, and the Stock Market was pumped up….to the ludicrous 17,000 where it sits today.
Tokyo Government gave a false picture to the IOC, and lied about Fukushima from Day One
Japan’s government is finalising plans to borrow an additional 3 trillion yen to pay for compensating Fukushima evacuees and cleaning up the area outside the wrecked nuclear plant, said people with knowledge of the situation. That’s a lot to pay to people who have nothing to worry about.
The costs mark both a recognition of the project’s escalating costs, and the difficulty of dealing with the remaining rods. Oh and – um – byt the way, the 3 trillion excludes the cost of decommissioning Fukushima’s six reactors, a process now “expected to take decades”.
Had the IOC known all this, it seems extremely unlikely that even the mad folks running that cross between an asylum and a bordello would’ve gone ahead to award a future Olympic games to Tokyo.
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Suppose you’re an investor looking to get into West Coast American property. Or playing the stock market and wanting reassurance about the post-bailout solvency of US banks. Or seeking a Spanish property as an asset alternative to fiat funds that risk being stolen in a bailin. Or a marketing manager investigating a major Olympics sponsorship in Japan. Or staying long in gold. Or wondering whether to get out of T-Bonds. Or a European wondering what currency you should move into while paying for some eurozone building costs.
Auditing the news for the last ten working days (which I’ve just finished doing) suggests that 90% of the data upon which you based your decisions will either have been sexed up, or censored, to give you a completely false impression.
In real-life Civvie Street, doing that would be fraud. Good old-fashioned open-and-shut fraud that would get you banged up for six years minimum.
Anyone aware of people at Barclays, RBS, The Fed Reserve, the Bank of England, the ECB, Istat, Elstat, the Coop, the Treasury or the FSA facing a trial for these frauds? Anyone know of a single government agency anywhere in the West offering to compensate people who took logical investment decisions on the basis of the fraud, and got wiped out?
There is no equality before the Law in our culture any more, because there is no Rule of Law any more. Everything will change, and nothing is reliable.
Last night at The Slog: Monitoring and censoring – the continuum of liberty destruction
The Slog 