Major Wall St. Titan, Founder NANEX, ECHOES BERNIE: The System Is Absolutely Rigged

[amborin]

Last edited Thu May 12, 2016, 01:15 PM - Edit history (2)

Eric Hunsader, founder of Nanex, has been at the vanguard of warning about the dangers and the rampant fraud that the rise of high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithims have let loose in today's financial markets.

While he usually feels like a lone voice in a world happy to deceive itself, he was shocked to receive a $750,000 whistleblower award from the SEC for his efforts. He's been sadly less shocked to see that since the award was publicly announced, the abuses he reported have only become more extreme and frequent.

Of the situation that led to his award, he says:

The folks at the NYSE were selling their direct feed for north of $30,000 a month versus the SIP which is under a thousand dollars a month. Their customers are not buying it because it has that much more rich data. The thing that makes it worth $29,000 more is that it is faster, but that is illegal. Up until this point they deny that that is the case. And somehow it works. So the exchanges make all their money from their highest paying customers which are the high frequency traders. And the high frequency traders pay the exchanges exorbitant amounts of money to have a slight advantage.



That's how the whole system works. It is absolutely, positively rigged. There is no question about it. It is rigged on many different levels in many different ways -- for example, no retail order ever gets to see the light of day of the stock exchange. That's one of the many eye openers. People who aren’t pros in the market don’t realize that it's all a rigged game.

snip

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-19/eric-hunsader-financial-system-absolutely-positively-rigged

[brooklynite]

1. We're not having any problems...

...and no, we don't have stockbrokers with "access" whispering deals into our ears.

We simply invest methodically into a diversified portfolio of stock, bond, commodity and currency mutual funds; the kind that anyone with an account at Fidelity or Vanguard can buy. We don't panic when the market drops or try to "get in" when the market is going up.

The only exception to that pattern is our Apple stock (I'm a mac fan and have studied the company closely) which we bought at an equivalent price (after stock splits) of...65c a share.

- - - -

Now, all that said, what does this have to do with GP ?

[Octafish]

2. If Wall Street only had a candidate who understood Wall Street problems.

Last edited Thu May 12, 2016, 12:27 PM - Edit history (1)

Their problems would be solve-ed. Like deregulation and repealing same.

Who doesn't want to get government off their backs? Besides the US taxpayer bailing out Wall Street over and over and over again?

[amborin]

4. Mexican taxpayers bailing out Wall St., too, according to this:

A little-known clause in NAFTA meant that Mexico had to allow foreign ownership of its banks (and major industries).

So, Clinton Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, of Citi Bank, took over Banamex, Mexico's largest bank. It subsequently had to be "rescued" by the Mexican government---and Mexican taxpayers----so that foreign investors would not suffer.

CitiGroup was then allowed to buy/takeover Mexico's remaining largest airline, Aeromexico, although there were Mexican businessmen who had submitted a better bid for the airline. Mexican taxpayers had to foot the bill for all of this foreign ownership.

.... Zedillo rescued the Too Big to Fail Banamex by buying its largely worthless portfolio of uncollectible loans–on credit. Mexican taxpayers are still paying Banamex interest for the government purchase of the bank’s junk securities a dozen years ago. The exact amount of the subsidy is buried in obscure government accounting, but a 2004 estimate was that the government still “owed” Banamex roughly $4 billion.

In 2003 the Mexican government subsidy to the banking industry–by then almost totally owned by foreign corporations–was three times what it was spending on roads, school buildings, health facilities and other infrastructure. This, in a country where 42 percent of the people don’t earn enough to support a minimum Mexican market basket of food, clothing and other essentials.

In 1999 Rubin resigned as Treasury Secretary to become chair of the executive committee of Citigroup. Two years later, shortly after the date on which Mexico had to open up its banks to foreign ownership, Rubin flew to Mexico to buy Banamex for $12.5 billion plus a seat on the Citigroup board for Hernández. The Mexican press reports that the well-connected Hernández masterminded the Aeroméxico deal, which will provide Citigroup/Banamex with substantial revenues from financing airplane leases and insurance, along with being the preferred banker for the airline’s suppliers.

As the icing on this very lucrative cake, the Calderón government decided that the Citigroup/Banamex gang should not have to pay the normal sales tax. Sales taxes, it was explained with a straight face, really fall on the seller, not the buyer (try this out next time you go to the store), and since the seller was the government, there is no point in the government paying the sales tax to itself. Neat. No wonder the Citigroup board just elected Rubin to be its chair.

So here is your global free enterprise system (a k a socialism for the rich) at work: Citigroup/Banamex, which is Too Big to Fail in the United States, has also been deemed Too Big to Fail by the Mexican government and is being subsidized by Mexican taxpayers to buy Aeroméxico, also Too Big to Fail.

The World Bank, IMF and other neoliberal hangouts are still pushing developing countries to open up their financial markets to multinational banks, precisely on the grounds that it will eliminate crony capitalism. ....

http://www.thenation.com/article/citis-mexican-cronies/

[Octafish]

5. Gee. WTO really is SOCIALISM for the rich.

Thank you, amborin! I was wondering how Poppy and Company got their hooks into Mexico's oil bidniss.

Drill, bebe, drill.

Hillary Clinton’s State Department Emails, Mexico’s Energy Privatization and the Revolving Door

By Steve Horn
DeSmogBlog/TruthDig, Aug 13, 2015

Emails released on July 31 by the U.S. State Department reveal more about the origins of energy reform efforts in Mexico. The State Department released them as part of the once-a-month rolling release schedule for emails generated by former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now a Democratic presidential candidate.

Originally stored on a private server, with Clinton and her closest advisors using the server and private accounts, the emails confirm Clinton’s State Department helped to break state-owned company Pemex‘s (Petroleos Mexicanos) oil and gas industry monopoly in Mexico, opening up the country to international oil and gas companies. And two of the Coordinators helping to make it happen, both of whom worked for Clinton, now work in the private sector and stand to gain financially from the energy reforms they helped create.

The appearance of the emails also offers a chance to tell the deeper story of the role the Clinton-led State Department and other powerful actors played in opening up Mexico for international business in the oil and gas sphere. That story begins with a trio.

The Trio

David Goldwyn, who was the first International Energy Coordinator named by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009, sits at the center of the story. As revealed by DeSmog, the State Department redacted the entire job description document for the Coordinator role.

Goldwyn now runs an oil and gas industry consulting firm called Goldwyn Global Strategies, works of counsel as an industry attorney at the law firm Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, and works as a fellow at the industry-funded think tanks Atlantic Council and Brookings Institution.

CONTINUED w/links...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/hillary_clinton_state_department_emails_mexico_energy_reform_20150813

Greg Palast warned us:

Larry Summers
and the Secret "End-Game" Memo

Thursday, August 22, 2013
By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine

EXCERPT...

The year was 1997. US Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin was pushing hard to de-regulate banks. That required, first, repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act to dismantle the barrier between commercial banks and investment banks. It was like replacing bank vaults with roulette wheels.

Second, the banks wanted the right to play a new high-risk game: "derivatives trading." JP Morgan alone would soon carry $88 trillion of these pseudo-securities on its books as "assets."

Deputy Treasury Secretary Summers (soon to replace Rubin as Secretary) body-blocked any attempt to control derivatives.

But what was the use of turning US banks into derivatives casinos if money would flee to nations with safer banking laws?

[font color="green"]The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five: eliminate controls on banks in every nation on the planet – in one single move. It was as brilliant as it was insanely dangerous. [/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo/

Bookmarking your post on my own Favorites thing.

[GreatGazoo]

3. it is as if no one told them to "knock off the shenanigans"