DC’s role in stock market a growing question
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Things are getting interesting in the most important financial topic of our time: Has Washington ever rigged the stock market?
Ben Bernanke recently told a Congressman that the Federal Reserve has not intervened in the stock market. But the Fed chairman dodged the rest of the question from Florida Democrat Alan Grayson: “Has the Federal Reserve — alone or in concert with the Treasury Department or any part of government — ever taken any action with the purpose or effect of supporting the stock market or an individual stock?”
A few weeks ago Grayson finally got answers to that and 16 other questions he asked Bernanke in writing back in February. Sources in Grayson’s office judged Bernanke’s answer to the stock market question as “evasive.”
I agree.
Washington is currently considering all sorts of reform to the financial system, including prohibiting Wall Street firms from certain kinds of trading and investments. But hold on — a big whoa!
Before any sort of overhaul can or should be undertaken, this question about the past integrity of the American financial markets must be addressed. The financial community can’t be restructured, can’t be made pure again, can’t be trusted with investors’ money until we know what exactly it was up to.
Grayson’s questions were long and comprehensive and made known to me by a blog called The Cunning Realist.
In a nutshell, the Congressman wanted to know what I’ve been asking for years — just how bad is the collusion between Washington and Wall Street, which, as you know, contributes heavily to political campaigns. Is Wall Street being paid back for campaign money with extremely profitable access to information and help from Washington that you and I don’t have?
As longtime readers of this column know, I’ve already proven through phone records that Wall Street firms — especially Goldman Sachs — had a special relationship with the Treasury when it was topped by former Goldman head Hank Paulson.
The hotline that Goldman had to Treasury gave it the opportunity to know things that others didn’t. Indeed, I believe it was the Treasury — and not the Fed, as Grayson suspects — that was playing footsie with Goldman. But it would be shocking if Bernanke hadn’t known what was going on and offered his tacit approval.
I’ve already discussed these matters with some Congressional aides. Hopefully someone will eventually get the nerve to look into the most important fraud of our time.
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Alan Greenspan (remember him?) came out of hiding last week to tell us that America has a debt problem.
No kiddin’!
But before I waste too much of my precious space on this, let me ask: Why does anyone still care what this guy has to say? As chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan had an unlimited amount of time to tell Congress and President Bush what he thought.
Instead, Greenspan chose to string together equivocations and garbled sentences, thus coming as close as anyone could to showing contempt for Congress.
Now he wants to explain!
It was too late before our elected officials realized that Greenspan didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
Ol’ Alan may be correct about out-of-control government borrowing. But shut this guy up! He had his chance and he wasted it.
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The 2010 Census will be winding down in the next few weeks. But complaints from Census workers keep coming in. Read this one:
“Hi John: I wrote to you before and I thought you would like to know this last bit of lunacy. For the Non-Response Follow Up operation I was told (I’d get) three months of work, it lasted three and a half weeks, of which one week was training. Now we are being hired for VDC starting July 2. What is VDC? Vacant, Delete Confirmation.
We have to go back to a different district than our NRFU one that we enumerated and confirm that on April 1 the residence was vacant, did not exist, etc.
Perhaps a phone call would be easier — and more cost-effective — if even necessary?
John, at this point one can only say that we are deep into a ‘make-work’ position.
We are checking work that has been checked already, all of the ‘deletes’ were required to have a second set of eyeballs to confirm there was no valid housing unit at that address. Here in Sarasota we had 1,500 Enumerators for NRFU, now they want to hire 900 again. Is it possible that the July start
date — a Friday — was cho
sen to push up July’s em
ployment numbers?
Please keep my name
confidential. Anony
mous”
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Wall Street is trying very hard to get stock prices higher for the end- of-quarter reporting period.
I mentioned last week that this is the time of year when professional traders attempt to juice prices higher — and they’ve been succeeding. But yesterday’s attempt for a big rally stalled and all three indexes ended up down for the day.
If you aren’t a deft trader please be careful. The financial markets are a dangerous thing and the pros can’t keep the props under the market forever.