“Look, you’re corrupt, we’re corrupt. There’s one difference. We’re honest about it.” – Get the Gringo
A hitman makes people nervous people past tense.
News came out this week that high officials of the Federal Reserve® were allegedly caught front-running trades. I use the word “allegedly” because that’s the word you use when you are dealing with people who might be allegedly low-life allegedly stinking allegedly thieves.
What’s front-running? Well, if you know that a client is going to buy a LOT of stock, you buy at the price before the big news. Why? Well, when the price goes up, you benefit from the price increase. Duh.
Why was the Fed™ buying stock (or bonds), anyway?
The quote was that the Fed® was buying securities to “help markets function smoothly.”
Huh. I thought, you know, actual people buying and selling stuff was supposed to do that. Silly me. I missed that part in Econ 101 where the professor said, “Oh, and if the market doesn’t do what the government wants it to do, it can cheat on a massive scale with money it printed just because.”
If you hear someone scream in space, does that mean the vacuum is broken?
When the “Plunge Protection Team” was originally formed by Federal Reserve® in the late 1980s, it was secret. It would (in theory) see a down day on the stock markets and swoop in late in the day with well-timed purchases to keep the market from going down.
We can argue all day about the morality of that. My take is that it’s about as moral as Joe and Hunter Biden teaching in a pre-school. The market serves a function – to give prices. Prices provide real-time data and information. To distort prices creates artificial winners and losers.
To be clear, a stock going down in price can be a very good thing. Bad companies should die. If they serve a purpose, someone else will do it. For the Fed© to purchase stocks (or bonds, or debt) to prop up companies isn’t helping them, it is rewarding financial morons by giving them more money.
Regardless, because it’s 2021, the Fed™ is out there buying stuff willy-nilly on a regular basis to manipulate markets. And the big dogs at the Fed© know what the Fed® is buying. So, for one of them to buy stocks in a company whose assets the Fed® is purchasing?
That’s what is normally called criminal.
There’s a show for criminal Democrats who go fishing. It’s called, “Off The Hook.”
But why single out the Fed®? I mean, it’s not like Federal Judges are doing it, too, right?
Sorry to disappoint you if you thought the judiciary was clean.
In the last decade, 131 Federal Judges took part in 685 lawsuits where they had a financial stake in a company that was a party to the lawsuit. This is a violation of Federal law. My bet? In the world of corruption that is 2021, this will be ignored. At most, the Federal Judges will get a slap on the wrist, perhaps a memo to their file.
Government employees are never punished unless they’re not acting in the interest of the system. They can ignore work. I have a friend who had been a Federal bank examiner. His job was to go in and evaluate the systems at banks to make sure they were good. He told me, point-blank, “If I were to get a smaller bank and find a violation, it would be okay, but a big bank? They just wanted good results for a big bank.”
Why? Corruption is rampant in every part of the financial system. It’s rigged.
In Soviet Russia you rob bank. In United States, bank rob you.
The stock market is rigged. The Federal Reserve© has a bias that stocks should go up, just like the value of the money that you worked for should always go down.
Does gold always go down?
No. But the value of a dollar should always decrease.
The reason for this is fairly simple. The Federal Government has taxes on wages. It has taxes on imports. It has taxes on death, it has taxes on (checks list) tanning. I’ll repeat: there are Federal taxes on tanning.
Inflation is nothing more and nothing less than a tax on money, or, more properly, a tax on productive people who saved and earned that money.
A is for apples. B is for bananas. What is C for? A plastic explosive.
So, what is it that we know, without a doubt, is corrupt?
- The Federal Reserve®.
- Federal Judges.
- Financial regulators.
- Money.
I’ll add one more: the overall justice system. George Soros has bought election after election for District Attorneys that allow Leftists committing crimes to walk free. As I’ve written before, this is the final poison for Western judicial systems. Without the promise of a fair and impartial trial, without the certainty that we are a nation of laws rather than men, justice will fall to the hands of ordinary men.
Unlike Batman®, ordinary men will use guns.
We live in an amazingly risky time. The problem with corrupt systems is that they fail when trust erodes. If citizens don’t trust that the outcomes are fair? I mean, what if the elections were fraudulent?
Failure. Corruption breeds more corruption. Injustice? It breeds more injustice.
A society based on corruption and injustice will devolve into anarchy or totalitarianism.
I have some candy canes that are in mint condition.
Saving our systems requires justice. Justice requires a moral people.
Hmmm. However do we get that?
I wouldn’t ask a Federal Reserve® governor or a Federal Judge. After all, Pa Wilder told me not to hang around with people of poor character.
“Justice requires a moral people.
Hmmm. However do we get that?”
Kill the immoral people, obviously.
But getting moral people to kill people is the tricky part.
So then we’ve just got to figure out how to get the immoral people to kill themselves/each other.
Vaccine with serious/fatal adverse reactions would do the trick.
@Steve – Unfortunately, that only works (or, I’ll concede – mostly works) if it’s primarily the immoral folks that get the shot(s).
To be honest, the worst of the immoral bunch are going to be getting ‘shots’, eventually – but they may not be coming from a syringe.
Morality doesn’t mean being weak, it means being strong enough to do what is necessary for the big picture even if it is repugnant at the personal level.
And to keep it from spilling over . . . .
I was sufficiently naive as of just a couple of years ago to suppose that crime is inevitably found out and punished. Especially big crime. Why? Because that is the rule of law, which was the solid bedrock of the free and just country I thought I grew up in. “Other” countries had corrupt governments. Not us.
It’s been a gut punch to learn that not only are our governing bodies riddled with corruption, but it is no longer even hidden. The 2020 election was stolen in plain sight, and the responsible parties boast openly about having done it. How can this be? This is AMERICA! We don’t DO that here!
Well, apparently we do. But only one ‘side’ does it. My parents always admonished me to take the high road and never get down in the gutter with those who go low and fight dirty. But sadly, going high when they go low does not work. Not in the near term.
Our differences have become irreconcilable, and there is no easy road back. We’ve devolved from the world’s lone surviving superpower to banana republic in just one generation.
It happened in 1 generation, but the planning and actions leading to us becoming a banana republic started in the early 20th century. Or 2300 years ago, depending on ones belief in conspiracies. But early 1900s at the latest.
@ TwoBuckChuck
The problem with living in a society of free and virtuous people, of the kind the Founders wanted – is that there are insufficient opportunities for graft, influence-buying/selling, and racketeering, to mention just a few. And virtuous people, since they are self-disciplined and to a large extent, possess self-control of their impulses and urges – have no need of a large and intrusive national government.
“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”
Benjamin Franklin
A corrupt and ignorant people, on the other hand, are ripe for tyranny. Since they lack self-control, they will be controlled by others, namely a powerful central government. Either man masters himself, or some other “master” will control him instead. The former isn’t a very profitable model for the statists, whereas the latter is very profitable indeed.
As far as the “rule of law” (so-called) is concerned, the U.S. has had a two-tiered “justice system” for a long time now. Arguably for more than a century, but certain since 1969 – when Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) killed poor Mary-Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick and got away with it cleanly without so much as a misdemeanor, thanks to his father, kingmaker and wealthy scion of the Kennedy political dynasty, Joseph P. Kennedy – who called in every favor under the sun to get young Teddy off the hook. The fix was in…. way in. The younger Kennedy was not even censured meaningfully by the so-called “world’s greatest legislature,” the U.S. Congress, neither the House nor the Senate individually. It’s nice to be king, isn’t it?
You get more of what you tolerate, and thanks to the tolerance of past generations, the leviathan is now totally above and beyond the very laws it insists that everyone else follow, to the letter.
They don’t care anymore. They’re staring us straight in the eye while they cheat and daring us to do something.
@Chuck – I suspect that if you scratch the surface deeply enough, you will find that corruption in elections is not as partisan as you’d like to believe. Unfortunately. 😕
The wife and I had a minor tiff when she brought up the distraction of the week, the camper girl that went missing.
I said I don’t know whether he offed her, or if she went psycho and he left her to her own devices to sink or swim on her own, but I could understand why he won’t just walk into a LEO hub and turn himself in.
She was getting really mad until I said “Maybe he thinks his name is Chauvin…”
With her latent Blue Line sympathies (mainly due to K-9s) it defused the situation.
Ahh, Gabby Potato. A big, big distraction.
Corruption is a natural human result of a concentration of power of any kind. A position of power will attract those who wish to benefit from it’s exercise. This is why we can’t make a government that will last. The life of any particular governmental style is directly related to how long it takes for the worst among us to find the reins of power.
In the US, corruption has metastasized into every government ‘oversight’ bureau, as well as into the organizations they are supposed to regulate. The country still limps along because most people can’t believe that this is happening here, so they go on about their businesses as usual despite increasing headwinds. It becomes more difficult to carry on every day.
I read about NY’s mandates this morning, and wonder why the Antifa types and Dims can’t tell that they are the fascists. The new governor is going to use the National Guard troops as necessary. Things are coming to a boil.
Have a plan. Be ready.
The National Guard troops that are *already* working in medicine. Just allocating resources to those she wants to favor. More corruption.
I think the problem of systemic corruption is the biggest challenge we face. I’ll add a few more corrupt parties to the list:
–Congress
–The White House
–State Governments
–Local Governments
–The Medical Industrial Complex
–Education
–Food Inc.™
Sadly, even that list doesn’t encompass all of it. If one or two of those institutions, we could possibly count on the others to clean them up. However, we’ve gone so far down the road of corruption and injustice that there is no one left to clean it up. Well, except for We The People®, and I’m not sure we have the stomach for that.
The only good news that I see is that we’re starting to see corrupt factions begin to fight each other. A few weeks ago, Big Country posited that the Intel Kids are fighting Mil.gov who is fighting the Executive. We saw Rainbow Milley throw a bunch of people under the bus before Congress. So, maybe there is hope after all…
Yup, but remember, it’s one corrupt bunch versus another, and both think the same things about common folks.
We’re are SO very lucky that California has solved the problem of corruption and stolen elections for all time with its wise application of fairness and equity (joining Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Vermont):
https://ktla.com/news/california/gov-newsom-signs-bill-making-universal-vote-by-mail-permanent-in-california/
Every registered voter in the State now gets an official ballot sent to them by mail a month before any election they can then return up to a week after Election Day to a central location that has relaxed discretion about matching any signatures required on that ballot.
What could possibly go wrong?
The event horizon for California is at hand . . .
Here in Washington we’ve had that for a while. Ever since the D party has slowly increased it’s hold on every level of government. Coincidence? Maybe. Correlation? Definitely. Causation? Hard to tell since any effort to analyze the election is mocked by the media and the general public left, and blocked by the left appointed courts. Began in earnest when Dino Rossi won the governor’s election three times before the courts gave it to Christine Gregoire by throwing out evidence of fraud. Since then we’ve pretty much had a D majority even though it was briefly tempered by some fiscally conservative Ds in the Senate. They are gone now.
“True freedom can never exist, unless Rule of Law exists.”
Anon comment made by: Kikknback
Yup.
Well written, as always, John.
Thank you! More to come – especially Monday, I think.
Biden(‘s handlers) plans to root out all corruption in America by getting the IRS involved, proposing to require banks hand over to the IRS the full transaction records for all bank accounts holding $600 or more starting in 2022.
https://news.yahoo.com/irs-track-bank-transactions-over-140000522.html
Bezos and Zuck tremble! Great times await, comrades!
As I read it, it was all transactions over $600, not transactions on accounts over $600. It’s a proposed modification to the current law that requires reporting of all transactions over $10,000 (as if deflation has made the dollars MORE valuable?) Think of it this way: they used to want to see how you bought the car or house, now they want to see every monthly payment! (And of course they’ll need to add thousands of IRS employees to review the data.)
Well, for the record, here is what the “$600 proposal” really says.
From Page 88 here:
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/131/General-Explanations-FY2022.pdf
“This proposal would create a comprehensive financial account information reporting regime.
Financial institutions would report data on financial accounts in an information return. The annual return will report gross inflows and outflows with a breakdown for physical cash, transactions with a foreign account, and transfers to and from another account with the same owner. This requirement would apply to all business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts,2 with the exception of accounts below a low de minimis gross flow threshold of $600 or fair market value of $600.”
This proposal is considerably different from the current requirement for banks to report each and every transaction over $10K in a “Suspicious Activity Report (SAR)”:
https://www.occ.treas.gov/topics/supervision-and-examination/bank-operations/financial-crime/suspicious-activity-reports/index-suspicious-activity-reports.html
This proposal of siccing the IRS on just about every checking account in America is nothing but political smoke and mirrors:
https://mishtalk.com/economics/biden-wants-to-fix-a-7-trillion-tax-evasion-problem-with-a-brain-trust
and every gun you bought that wasn’t by cash.
I think they tabled that one – thankfully. But it will come back soon enough.
I had a great idea for a clean, quiet snack food for jurors, but I could never get the packaging printed right. It was supposed to say “TRIAL MIX”.
Hahahahaha!
“So, what is it that we know, without a doubt, is corrupt?
The Federal Reserve®.
Federal Judges.
Financial regulators.
Money.”
TEN THOUSANDTH TIME, FOR THE REMEDIAL CLASS:
FIATBUX ARE **NOT** “MONEY”
“Write that 100 times. If it’s not done before sunrise, we’ll cut your balls off.”
Fiatbux aren’t money.
Fiatbux aren’t money.
Fiatbux aren’t money….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8
A pound of gold is always worth a pound of gold.
A pound of silver is always worth a pound of silver.
A pound of Yapian rai stone discs are always worth a pound of Yapian rai stone disks.
(We’re not sure how many coconuts are the current exchange rate for that last example, but reasonably certain those could be carried by an African swallow, if gripped by the husk…}
That’s why those things are MONEY.
A pound of fiatbux notes are only always a collection of finely engraved toilet paper.
Sometimes they can also buy stuff.
Sometimes they don’t.
{cf. Rome, Tudor England, The Continental US, the Confederacy, Weimar, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, US circa 2022, etc.}
That’s why they are currency, Not MONEY, i.e. :”something CURRENTLY accepted by people, in lieu of actual money.”
And pretending they’re money – when they manifestly are no such thing – is exactly the fraud.
Anyone who forgets this should be sentenced under the Pink Floyd Protocol to hear “Wroooooo-oooooong, do it again! Wroooooo-oooooong, do it again!” from Another Brick In The Wall,endlessly, until they sign the confession that stipulates that they killed Christ, started the Chicago Fire, sunk the Titanic, undermined the glorious Communist Revolution, wrote the Designated Hitter Rule, and were the second shooter on the Grassy Knoll.
“C’Mon, man!”
Money is not corrput.
Coinage and paper currency can be, and inevitably will be.
That is the immutable evidence of history.
Plan accordingly.
Someone on another blog speculated that Federal influence might simply wither, as one shutdown after another trains people (including local governments) not to depend on the Federal government for services, and participation in Federal programs becomes more burdensome. (E.g., if your college accepts federal funds, it must require vaccination.) Unfortunately, it looks to me as though dependence on federal “fiatbux” is growing, since state and local government debt is bounded, and federal debt is not… as long as fiatbux retain some value.
Dmitri Orlov asserts that China (and some other Asian countries) are using the dollars we sent them (in exchange for the items we import) to bid up the price of natural gas and leave Europe (especially the UK) shivering through the coming winter. Don’t be surprised if your own gas bill soars, too, because it’s a global marketplace for hydrocarbons, and if the Chinese want “green energy”, natural gas is the substitute for dirty old coal. And we’ve given them the money to buy the rug out from under our feet.
No, LNG can’t compete with pipeline gas, which is what we burn in the US because we have a lot of gas reserves…There’s no global marketplace for domestic pipelines…
This, Mr. Aesop, is why I keep banging on that “first they come for our words”
Currency is not money
Therapeutic shots are not vaccines
Racism is a fake sin
Pride, envy, rage, laziness, greed, indifference, cruelty, and self-indulgence are real ones
There are (in English) 3 genders
In life, 2 sexes
And it is 2021 Anno Domini
ca ira.
It’s money: bad money.
Remember Gresham’s Law . . . bad money drives out good.
Speaking of corruption, how long has it been since college football teams were selected from actual college students (and not high-school football players, recruited by the college)? 50 years? 80?
They told us that tobacco wasn’t harmful, nor addicting.
They told us that oxycontin wasn’t harmful, nor addicting.
They told us that anyone could afford a no-interest mortgage (in the 2000s).
They told us that any college degree was better than any non-college experience.
They told us that crack was 100 times worse than powdered cocaine.
And now they want us to believe WHAT?
… not to mention Thalidomide, Vioxx, and “300,000 Afghan Security Forces will resist the Taliban (at least, for a while)”.
Where do you want to start . . . 🙂
“To be clear, a stock going down in price can be a very good thing. Bad companies should die. If they serve a purpose, someone else will do it. For the Fed© to purchase stocks (or bonds, or debt) to prop up companies isn’t helping them, it is rewarding financial morons by giving them more money.”
IOW – kinda like foreign aid…
Exactly. Or welfare.
Since we’re talking about corruption….
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-09-29/is-stock-market-rigged-insider-trading-by-executives-is-pervasive-critics-say
Yup.
“I’ll repeat: there are Federal taxes on tanning.”
As a Person of Low Melanin Content, can I get a tax write-off?
++
“Government employees are never punished unless they’re not acting in the interest of the system.”
The key takeaway. So much of the news makes sense once one grasps this.
++
From my pinned gab at https://gab.com/Zorost/posts/105647418666728574 :
”
In case anyone thinks stock market corruption is a recent thing or only about hedge funds:
“U.S. central bankers not only regularly leak secret information about monetary policy, but the leaks are so predictably timed that a savvy investor without access to the leaked information could make money just by buying stocks in certain weeks.
That is the bottom line from new research by University of California Berkeley professor Annette Vissing-Jorgensen and colleagues, presented on Saturday at a conference attended by central bankers from around the world.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/11/22/the-federal-reserve-leaks-price-sensitive-information-enabling-stock-market-profits/?sh=6ab1abd43c0d
“European Central Bank-published study found suspicious trading ahead of seven regular U.S. economic releases, saying information leaks probably helped traders make more than $160 million in profits in two markets over six years.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-02/ecb-paper-finds-suspicious-trading-in-u-s-economic-indicators
“Government agencies routinely allow pre-release access to information to accredited news agencies under embargo agreements. Using high-frequency data, we find evidence consistent with informed trading during embargoes of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) scheduled announcements. The E-mini Standard & Poor’s 500 futures’ abnormal order imbalances are in the direction of subsequent policy surprises and contain information that predicts the market reaction to the policy announcements. The estimated informed trades’ profits are arguably large.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304405X16300812
Strangely, the search terms “economics paper, market reacts before federal reserve announcement” for 1995-2017 pops up most of the above articles on the front page of duckduckgo, but nothing on google…
The above is from about 30m of research, I’m sure there is plenty more out there.
“
Addendum:
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that all 4 of the US presidents that were assassinated had spoken out against the Federal Reserve, as had many of those who survived an assassination attempt.
https://gumshoenews.com/2017/06/26/a-list-of-assassinated-leaders-who-had-opposed-the-creation-of-money-ex-nihilo/
Volumes. Since the PPT formed, it’s been a straight giveaway.
Productive economic activity is a construct of the white male capitalist patriarchy.
After the printing presses go brrrr for the last time then equality of results for all can commence as we root in dumpsters for supper or get a shiny EBT card charged up by Uncle Joe.
Better use the card quickly as the prices are going up and away due to the tens of thousands of locusts err I mean replacements grabbing up everything in sight.
Meanwhile the BRICS nations are laughing their asses off and hoping for bigger challenge as the Long Marching fifth column of burn it all down Bolsheviks does all of the heavy lifting.
If we are going to be corrupt third world Chiquitastan turd then let’s at least be honest and open about it but a society that spends every waking moment running away from reality couldn’t handle it.
Yup, hence my quote to start it . . . at least they know they’re corrupt.
I love it when someone decries the killing of criminals who eventually go on to kill more innocent people unless stopped. The immorality resides in the fact that if you don’t kill the mad dogs, the communists, the thieves and all the other degenerates, they will destroy everyone and everything that is good in a civilization. Some how, goody two- shoes- Christianity has come up with the fallacy of non-violence being the way to health. Guess they need to read up on Joshua, King David, and so on. Naked violence has solved more problems in morality than any other thing in human history. Nations and peoples that forget that, have paid for it with with their freedoms and their lives. If you won’t lift a finger to defend what’s yours, you’re worthless.
@ Sean
Re: “The immorality resides in the fact that if you don’t kill the mad dogs, the communists, the thieves and all the other degenerates, they will destroy everyone and everything that is good in a civilization.”
Great philosopher Sir Karl Popper spoke of the “paradox of tolerance” when he said:
” Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
There are other ways short of killing which are effective in the defense of civilization, but as the existence of wars in human history shows, those methods sometimes don’t work – and things must be settled in that manner. The communists know that civilized people are loath to use violence except as a last resort, and they use this fact against those who oppose them. The trick is to be formidable-enough and growl convincingly-enough periodically, that the communists get too-scared to do what it is they do. Ronald Reagan used that approach to defeat the USSR and ultimately end the Cold War (well, that particular “cold war” anyway). Peace-through-strength and the known willingness to fight, should it come to that.
Ultimately, eradicating communism isn’t going to be solved on the supply side of things, i.e., by war and attrition. It is going to be solved via education and teaching people history. And also by allowing them to experience superior alternatives to communist ideas. Once people no longer desire communism, it will be relegated to the dustbin of history where it belongs.
I disagree about education eradicating communism. The problem with communism is that it is human catnip: “you are low status and low wealth, pledge your loyalty to this ideal and I double-pinkie swear that come the Revolution you will be high status and high wealth.”
A much more in-depth analysis of why communism is so seductive:
https://spandrell.com/2017/11/14/biological-leninism/
Perhaps education + propaganda combined with making it a capital crime, screw the 1A.
Communism is a nearly fatal mental condition. Once the rot takes over a mind, it almost never lets go. I’ve read book after book about these folks, and on their death bed they just want to see the world burn.
First they came for the communists . . . and then things got better!