The Financial Markets: A Year After

Asked on MSNC.com

• A year after the crash, a few financial giants are back to making millions, while average Americans face foreclosure and unemployment. What's wrong with this picture?

Yup, tell me what's so wrong with it?

The world markets are up, stocks are flying. Hooray!

• If you lose your job and fall behind on your $1,500 monthly mortgage payment, no one's going to bail you out. But Citigroup can lose $27.7 billion (as it did last year) and count on the federal government to hand it $45 billion.

Yup, tell me what's so wrong with it?

Has the financial markets became so important that nothing else matter?

But the world stock markets are flying now!

Don't ye be such a party pooper!

The yeat after article was published by Newsweek and posted on MSNBC, Wall Street’s New Gilded Age

The following article, Iceland: what ugly secrets are waiting to be exposed in the meltdown?, was featured by Jesse in his posting "It has now become clear that this was no ordinary crash."

• "Almost a year since the collapse of the Icelandic banks, the rotten nature of these financial corpses is slowly beginning to emerge. Iceland: what ugly secrets are waiting to be exposed in the meltdown? For months rumours of share-ramping, market manipulation, excessive loans to their owners and unusual transfers off-shore have been circling Kaupthing, Glitnir and Landsbanki, whose failure last October left 300,000 British customers unable to access their money. It has now become clear that this was no ordinary crash. Iceland's special investigation into "suspicions of criminal activity" at the three banks is likely to stretch from Reykjavik to London, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands. Eva Joly, the French-Norwegian MEP and fraud expert hired by Iceland and now working with the Serious Fraud Office, now believes it will be "the largest investigation in history of an economic and banking bank collapse". - Telegraph

And the following passage is also highlighted by Jesse.

• That's because the institution itself is fatally flawed. If the American or European central bank broke down, and investigations were held into the relationships, all holy hell would likely break loose. How can it be otherwise? These central banks are run by small groups of (mostly) men, who grow up with each other and go to the same clubs and run in the same social circles and have the same interests.
  
  In the case of the Federal Reserve, the best of Goldman Sachs tend to matriculate to government work, and to believe that Goldman Sachs has not benefited from its relationships at the highest levels of Western government is likely naïve in the extreme.
  
  According to Danielsson, the Iceland crisis is "unique among European financial institutions." In fact, we believe it is no such thing. If any one of these other institutions crashed, the "uniqueness" would turn out to be commonplace. The interwoven old boys network does not stop at the doors of central banks. Central banking IS an old boy's network. It is the best and biggest network of all. In this one, you actually get to print money, and if anyone asks you for an accounting, you simply claim that if you release too much information, you will destabilize this or that financial institution.
  
  We think there is a reason that the Federal Reserve, for instance, is resisting the Congressional move for a thorough audit, and it has little to do with a professed concern for the destabilization of banking institutions. We believe, as with Iceland, that central banking is infested with private dealings in millions and even billions of dollars. How could it be otherwise?
  
  Conclusion: Central banking is a franchise of the utmost power and authority, but the men who run it are neither priests nor eunuchs. They are merely human beings, and, after all, while power corrupts, infinite power corrupts infinitely. Only the market itself can guarantee a level playing field. A market-based gold and silver standard would do away with the suspicions that are rife when it comes central banking. The smallest central bank in the world is central to a financial scandal that threatens to engulf much of the West. What secrets must the larger banks hold?

A market-based gold and silver standard???

Not so sure about such an idea.

For example, on Financialsense market wrap, Another Day in the Matrix

• The interplay between gold and silver is CLEARLY and CLEVERLY controlled. An alert and brilliant reader named Don recently pointed out that the manipulation is BIPHASIC – meaning the upward movements are demonstrably “just as controlled/measured” as the downward movements.
• This would help explain “how” the LBMA – which claims to be the centre of the world’s physical precious metals trade – makes claims that they trade 256,790.3 metric tonnes of physical gold per year when the entire world has only ever mined approximately 165,000 tonnes.

How about that issue for all gold bugs?

How could the physical gold traded per year be more than what the entire world has ever mined?

Does it matter?

Does it even matter that gold is only another piece of 'metal'?

Anyway, here is the article on UK Telegraph, Iceland: what ugly secrets are waiting to be exposed in the meltdown?

• One particularly murky incident revolves around the acquisition of a 5pc stake in Kaupthing by a company called QFinance linked to Mohammed bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Sheikh of Qatar. Several weeks before the banks collapsed, a press release stated that the transaction showed that "Kaupthing's position is strong and we believe in the bank's strategy and management."
  
  Only after the bank collapsed several weeks later did it emerge that the Qatari investor "bought" the stake using a loan from Kaupthing itself and a holding company associated with one of its employees. The bank appears, in effect, to have been purchasing its own shares, which does not seem to be uncommon; investigators are also looking at a similar purchase of a 2.5pc stake in Kaupthing by London-based property entrepreneurs Moises and Mendi Gertner.
  
  Officials have also questioned why loans to senior Kaupthing employees to buy shares in the bank were allegedly written off days before the collapse

Yeah, another year has passed.

And the financial markets is still another gold mine for many!

Life is evil.

Life is good!