So, I was scanning the financial headlines, contemplating the evil that men do to one another, and what did I find?
Oh, nothing. Just B of A divesting themselves of their prime brokerage arm. You know, the same prime brokerage arm named in the OSTK suit alleging criminal racketeering, in a mega-billion dollar action about to get to discovery. The same prime brokerage that generated billions and billions in profits, from, well, nobody is quite sure what. But apparently, it's time to stop whatever it is it does, and get rid of the beast.
Now, I may be somewhat jaded, and maybe the timing really is due to one bad quarter arising from subprime messes, however I can't help but wonder out loud whether this isn't somehow related?
The way Wall Street works, is, it is always selling. It sells when nobody should really be buying, and only buys when nobody should be selling. The card trick is to convince all the rubes to buy when it sells, and sell when it wants to buy. Works well every time. But in illiquid markets, sometimes it sells because it has to get the hell out, because of the train rolling down the tracks, headed right at it.
I'm just wondering if this is one of those times.
Imagine, for a moment, that these prime brokers did, in fact, act as a criminal syndicate, to deliberately counterfeit, and facilitate the counterfeiting of, OSTK shares, routinely, in a coordinated effort to commit felony after felony, and profit from the crime. Just imagine that all the allegations in the suit are fact, not fiction. Then, imagine that discovery commences, and all the pretense and noise and diversions are stripped away, and it is perfectly obvious to a jury of 12 good men and women that what was perpetrated was a cartel-like racketeering scheme, executed by very well educated gangsters. And imagine that the damages are in the many billions. And further imagine that there are plenty more companies behind OSTK who will now go after the bad guys for ripping off their investors to the tune of hundreds of billions.
Time to get out. Buh bye, adios, adieu, thanks for playing, but the water is too hot and the thrill is gone.
Tell me that isn't what is happening. Because if I am right, we are going to see a lot of banks suddenly decide that their prime brokerages need new homes. You know, strictly coincidentally.
Wanna bet?
BTW, if anyone doubts that this is how it has always worked - Wall Street profiting at the nation's expense, and its owners taking over assets during crashes for pennies on the dollar - consider that someone bought all the assets sold during the Great Depression, at the bottom, when dollars were selling for fractions of pennies. Who do you think bought all that land? All those factories? All those buildings? Who do you think the fortunes were shifted to? At the foreclosure sales, who bought the farm when there was nobody else standing?
Whenever the wealth builds to the point where it is plucking time, a crash or crisis hits. Last time it was the dot com scam. This time, the real estate contrived crisis (everyone see how Greenspan, Mr. Raise Rates at the worst possible moment for reasons unknown, causing the current crisis, went to work for a hedge fund that directly benefited from that unfortunate state of affairs, as did Goldman Sachs, our current Treasury Secretary's recently former employer?).
Once you understand what you are looking at, it is pretty clear. The game, of course, is to keep everyone from trying to make out the shape of the actual animal. That's where the media, the education system, and the government come in. Foster dissension of all kinds, trot out drama after drama, wage war, strike fear into the nation's heart....anything to keep the rubes occupied and fighting, if not among themselves, then fighting bogeymen. Preferably in unwinnable wars designed to last generations. Wars on crime. Wars on drugs. Wars on poverty. Wars on Obesity. Wars on terror.
When we go in and overthrow legitimately elected governments, lying about and inventing their misdeeds, in order to stoke the popular flames of hysteria and patriotism, and create armies of terrorists to wage underground guerrilla warfare...are we not actually sponsoring terrorism? Oh, don't worry, I'm not talking about Iraq, necessarily. Or our current transparent positioning on Iran (yeah, we lied last time about the bad guys, but this time, really, we are telling the truth). Or even Venezuela. Or El Salvador. Or Nicaragua. No, you only have to consider the case of tiny Guatemala during the 1950's, when we literally overthrew their government so United Fruit could continue getting cheap Bananas (hence the coining of the term, Banana Republic), inventing a Communist menace and broadcasting the lie via our media, and funding a terrorist army to terrorize the population under the guise of being "rebels"...
Ya don't hear that discussed much these days, huh? Best left under the rug. Shhhh. That was then. We are different and better and improved.
But I digress.
No wonder nobody teaches history anymore, and the populace is encouraged to revel in being imbeciles and gangstas.
The point is, a nation divided and dumb, is easy to rape. We have been easy marks for a generation or three. We have forgotten the idea that government works for us, and instead rely on it for handouts - our own money, redistributed back to us, minus 50% or so.
And we have forgotten the lessons learned in the Pecora hearings, when it was revealed that Wall Street is as bad, or worse, than any organized crime syndicate you can imagine. No, you won't see that taught in any economics classes, or discussed on CNBC.
Which brings us to today, and suddenly the banks are selling the brokers off.
I'm sure there is no pattern to this. If only there was one.
A pattern, I mean.
Going to be a very interesting year.