NYT – Opaque markets breed insider profits and abuse of investors. Sunshine can bring competition and lower costs even if regulators do little beyond letting the sunlight shine.

You might think that as Congress considers just how much regulation is needed for the shadow financial system — the one that largely escaped regulation in the past — letting in such light would be an easy and uncontroversial move.

But it is not proving to be easy at all, and is one part of the Obama administration’s financial reform package that is most in jeopardy.

Timothy Geithner, the secretary of the Treasury, will testify before the Senate Agriculture Committee next week in an effort to hold on to important provisions of the proposal that have come under attack by banks fearful of losing one of their most profitable franchises — the selling of customized derivatives to corporate customers. Remarkably, the banks have persuaded customers that keeping the market for those products secret is in their interest.

Last week, Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, faced the same panel, and ran into questions that indicated at least some senators were sympathetic to efforts to keep large parts of the derivatives market in the dark.

Those markets allow companies to bet on — or, if you prefer, hedge themselves against losses from — changing interest rates and commodity prices. They also allow investors to use credit-default swaps to bet on whether a company will go broke. The administration wants to standardize those products when possible, and force the trading of them onto exchanges when possible.

Banks want to whittle away the reforms if they can, and to minimize the roles of the C.F.T.C. and the Securities and Exchange Commission, experienced market regulators who have been generally kept away from over-the-counter derivatives in the past. Instead, the banks would like to leave it to banking regulators to oversee the dealers, something regulators totally failed to do in the past. Unless Mr. Geithner can persuade legislators otherwise, one of the great bank lobbying campaigns will have succeeded, in large part because some companies that buy derivatives from banks have been persuaded that their costs will rise if needed reforms were made.

The opposite is probably true. The history of nearly all markets is that customers suffer if dealers are able to keep them ignorant of what is actually going on.

Until the beginning of this decade, that was true in the corporate bond market, where actual trades were kept confidential. That made it easy for bond dealers to charge big markups when they sold bonds to customers.

After regulators forced timely disclosures, the bid-ask spreads — the difference between what customers paid when they bought bonds and what they could get when selling them — declined significantly. The result was smaller profits for bond dealers, and better returns for bond investors.

“It is now time,” Mr. Gensler testified, “to promote similar transparency in the relatively new marketplace” for derivatives traded over the counter.

“Lack of regulation in these markets,” he added, “has created significant information deficits.”

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The ‘Fall of the Republic’, Obama’s unkept promises and lies, the economic crisis as part of a bigger new world order strategy, the swine flu hoax, the fraud behind the Federal Reserve – Alex Jones talks about all this in an exclusive interview with RT’s Anastasia Churkina.

Reuters – U.S. regulators are increasingly looking beyond stocks in their insider trading investigations to examine derivatives and credit default swaps, a top Securities and Exchange Commission official said.

The expansion comes as the SEC, state and federal criminal authorities pursue the biggest insider trading case involving hedge funds — a case that has already ensnared the billionaire founder of Galleon Group, traders, lawyers and other Wall Street personnel.

“Insider trading can take place in several different venues,” Scott Friestad, SEC associate director of enforcement, said in an interview. “In many of these investigations, we are looking at trading across markets whether it involves options, the underlying common stock, or nontraditional securities like credit default swaps.”

Friestad had no comment on Galleon and its founder Raj Rajaratnam, both targets of an SEC civil lawsuit.

The government remains under heavy political and investor pressure to more aggressively bring perpetrators of financial fraud and illegal profits to justice.

Earlier in November, the Obama administration set up a task force that includes the SEC, the Treasury Department and the Justice Department to thwart financial fraud after a rise in mortgage scams and Wall Street trading scandals.

The SEC, headed by chairman Mary Schapiro, faces its own pressure to be more vigilant, after ignoring tips that could have led it to stop Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion fraud sooner.

HARDER TO DETECT

In April, the SEC said it had about 150 active hedge fund investigations and more than 50 probes involving credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and other derivatives.

“Individuals with material nonpublic information have the potential to profit through nontraditional means,” Friestad said. “In some cases, people believe that they can avoid detection by trading where they think investigators aren’t looking.”

In May, the SEC brought its first case involving credit default swaps, which insure corporate debt against default. It charged a former hedge fund manager and a Deutsche Bank AG (DBKGn.DE) bond salesman with trading swaps of Dutch media conglomerate VNU NV.

Yet unlike stocks, options and bonds that trade on exchanges, credit default swaps and most derivatives trade over the counter, making it harder for regulators to rout out wrongdoing.

“It is much more difficult for the SEC to detect insider trading using derivatives because there is no central market and hence no ability to conduct real-time surveillance,” said Mark Schonfeld, a former director of the SEC’s New York office.

“Insider trading in equities and options is almost always detected by market surveillance,” said Schonfeld, who now co-chairs the securities enforcement group at law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP.

Bills pending in Congress would impose new rules designed to shed light on the $450 trillion over-the-counter private swaps market, including requiring derivatives dealers to report trades and forcing more derivatives onto exchanges.

Even if new rules are imposed, some parts of the market will remain opaque.

The challenge of detecting insider trading in some markets was highlighted at the height of the financial crisis in September 2008.

When the SEC was trying to figure out whether investors were manipulating the stock of financial institutions, it ordered two dozen hedge funds, broker-dealers and investors to hand over information about their trading and credit default swap positions in several companies.

With more and more people changing their minds about ‘global warming’ as a consequence of the increase in alarmist propaganda on behalf of the warmists, Al Gore’s lies are increasingly being confronted in the public arena. He is shamelessly profiteering off this global warming hoax and will make billions more when new, pointless, very expensive and wide ranging ‘carbon taxes’ are soon to be forced on everyone.



Alex Jones, the renowned filmmaker and radio host, dubs the ‘global warming’ scandal as one of the biggest hoaxes and financial frauds in the history of mankind. He says that it appears to be a global ‘Ponzi scheme’ which allowed bankers to profit from bogus carbon taxes for years.

Bloomberg – The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will focus on financial instruments such as derivatives as it broadens a crackdown on insider trading by hedge funds, enforcement director Robert Khuzami said.

“The days of insider-trading scrutiny being focused almost solely on the equity markets are now gone,” Khuzami said today at a New York legal conference on hedge-fund regulation. After bringing its first insider trading case tied to credit default swaps in May, the SEC will “roll back the curtain on those markets and look at patterns across all markets,” he said.

Insider trading has become “systemic” behavior in the hedge-fund industry and the SEC is working with criminal authorities to ferret out misconduct, Khuzami said this month. Billionaire Raj Rajaratnam and his New York-based Galleon Group are among more than 20 people and firms the agency has sued since Oct. 16 in its probe of hedge funds.

The SEC brought its first insider-trading case tied to credit-defaults swaps in May, when it sued a Deutsche Bank AG salesman on claims he illegally fed information on a bond sale to a hedge-fund money manager. Prices on credit-default swaps, which insure investors against bond defaults, have surged before corporate takeovers in recent years, fueling speculation that traders are abusing inside information. The SEC has said since at least 2007 that it’s examining the trades.

Credit-default swaps are financial instruments based on bonds and loans that are used to speculate on a company’s ability to repay debt. The contracts, typically expiring after five years, pay if a borrower fails to meet obligations.

Khuzami, in an interview today, declined to say whether the SEC has any current insider-trading investigations involving derivatives.

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Ashby Monk

In October, David Murray, in his role as Chair of the IFSWF, noted that front running had become a real problem for SWFs:

“Because we are generally large institutional investors, there is the whole community of investment banks, brokers, analysts and others who want to front-run our investments in the market.”

As it turns out, Murray was right to be worried. In a recent high-profile insider trading bust in the Bay Area, it was shown that one individual used inside information to front run two SWFs.

According to SF Gate’s Andrew Ross, Anil Kumar, who is a senior partner at McKinsey in Palo Alto, was arrested for allegedly sharing inside information about pending transactions involving Sunnyvale’s Advanced Micro Devices and two Abu Dhabi SWFs. Based on the information, Raj Rajaratnam made some trades in AMD options.

This illustrates that SWFs, like all large investors, are targets for this type of opportunistic behavior. However, despite Murray’s suggestions in October, I still don’t see transparency as the culprit here; insider trading is the problem. These guys (allegedly) broke the law, and they will pay the price. (It’s also interesting to note that they didn’t even profit from the front running.) So, in my view, this is not an excuse to scale back disclosure at SWFs; it’s a reason to continue cracking down on the abuse of insider information.

On a separate point, McKinsey has some damage control to do here (which it has already started with the removal of Kumar). My experience is that trust and discretion are absolutely critical in forging and maintaining relationships with SWFs. In the short-term, this leak may affect McKinsey’s ability to work with SWFs (either through their clients or as clients of their own).

“Now, we, the taxpayers, will be insuring these new mortgages as Morgan and Goldman try to dig themselves out of their toxic derivatives hole,” said Still. “They can’t lose because Congress is going to back them. They are privatizing the profits and socializing the losses. Any money they gain from those who actually pay their mortgages, they pocket as profit, but they pass on the bad loans to the government and we, the people, end up paying for them in increased taxes. They can’t get any more bankrupt than they are now.”

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Huffington Post – Wall Street titans, recognizing that they have something of a credibility problem when it comes to opposing regulatory reform, are enlisting more sympathetic, everyday folks to lobby on their behalf on Capitol Hill.

Bankers, brokers and swaps dealers have been browbeating their clients — farmers, fuel companies, airlines, municipal power companies — who are the “end users” of financial derivatives: Lobby Congress against reform of the derivatives market, the bankers say, or the cost of your derivative deals will skyrocket.

“There are many end users who just don’t understand the issue, so they’re heavily influenced by anybody who does,” said Jim Collura of the New England Fuel Institute.

“Many of these guys are influenced by one or both of the following: It’s either someone from the financial community whom they’ve known or respected. It may be their broker, their financial adviser, their swap dealer, whoever. Or they’re a member of a trade group and they’re getting hammered constantly with: ‘You’re going to be put out of business; you’re not going to be able to hedge; you’re not going to be competitive anymore’ — including some of my members,” Collura said.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) said he sees evidence of the bankers’ influence when end users lobby him. “The end users have been basically used by the major investment banks,” he told HuffPost Tuesday.

Dodd explains to them that, contrary to what they may have been told, one purpose of regulating derivatives is to protect people like them against predatory bankers. “When you tell them how they benefit from this, they say, ‘Well, no one told us this part.’”

The question being debated: Should derivatives – oil or corn futures, or foreign-currency or interest-rate swaps, for instance – be traded in the light of day on a regulated exchange? Or should this multi-trillion dollar market that was a major cause of the last financial crisis continue to just swash around in the dark?

So far, the forces of darkness are prevailing with the end users. Early last month, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) pulled together a coalition of end users who drafted a letter to Congress repeating the precise fears that brokers have been instilling in them. “Some reform proposals would place an extraordinary burden on end-users of derivatives in every sector of the economy–including manufacturers, energy companies, utilities, healthcare companies and commercial real estate owners and developers. Specifically, proposals that would require all OTC derivatives used by business end-users to be centrally cleared, executed on exchanges or cash collateralized or subject end-users to capital charges, would inhibit companies from using these important risk management tools in the course of everyday business operations. These proposals, which would increase business risk and raise costs, are at cross purposes with the goals of lowering systemic risk and promoting economic recovery,” reads a letter signed by several pages worth of end users and provided by ISDA.

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NYT – The Obama administration and Congress have vowed to regulate derivatives, the complex and often highly speculative financial instruments that were at the heart of the meltdown. Two House committees have approved legislation, but — after heavy lobbying from the banking industry and corporate America— both versions are weak and unlikely to prevent another fiasco.

Right now, many derivative deals are executed as private one-on-one contracts, outside the view of the public or regulators. This lack of transparency — about participants, prices and volumes — proved disastrous. In the bailout of American International Group, tens of billions of taxpayer dollars went to pay the world’s biggest banks for derivative bets gone spectacularly wrong.

The bills require that many derivatives be traded on public exchanges, but then carve out far too many exceptions. One huge loophole would exempt derivatives from exchange trading for corporations that use them to hedge operational risks, say, an airline that wants to lock in fuel prices. The supposed logic is that corporate derivative users did not cause the crisis.

But such derivatives make up a big chunk of the $592 trillion industry. If they are exempted, potentially trillions of dollars worth of transactions could avoid the exposure — and stability — that comes with exchange trading. Even worse, under the current wording, this exemption could be read to apply to many more companies, including hedge funds and other investor groups.

The stated aim of the exemption is to keep transaction costs low when corporations use derivatives to hedge their various risks. But there is no compelling evidence that exchange trading will drive up costs. And even if the cost were to rise somewhat, transparency is a more important goal.

The bill approved by the Financial Services Committee has an additional weakness: it denies regulators powers they need to fully police the market. For instance, they would not have the authority to ban dangerous products and abusive practices. Bans are a heavy-handed tool. But the ability to impose bans on toxic instruments should be part of the tool kit.

Both versions must be improved, on the House floor and in the Senate. In a sign of what we hope will be tough battles ahead, Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington and a member of the Finance Committee, has written to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, asking him to explain the administration’s support for the flawed bill from the Financial Services Committee.

Insisting on strong derivatives reform is a matter of putting taxpayers first — ahead of the big banks and corporate America that are fighting hard for a return to risky business as usual.

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Greg Gordon, a reporter for McClatchy Newspapers, talks with Alex Jones about Goldman Sachs Group peddling more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages and never telling the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Part 2, Part 3

Fall Of The Republic documents how an offshore corporate cartel is bankrupting the US economy by design. Leaders are now declaring that world government has arrived and that the dollar will be replaced by a new global currency.

President Obama has brazenly violated Article 1 Section 9 of the US Constitution by seating himself at the head of United Nations’ Security Council, thus becoming the first US president to chair the world body.

A scientific dictatorship is in its final stages of completion, and laws protecting basic human rights are being abolished worldwide; an iron curtain of high-tech tyranny is now descending over the planet.

A worldwide regime controlled by an unelected corporate elite is implementing a planetary carbon tax system that will dominate all human activity and establish a system of neo-feudal slavery.

The image makers have carefully packaged Obama as the world’s savior; he is the Trojan Horse manufactured to pacify the people just long enough for the globalists to complete their master plan.

This film reveals the architecture of the New World Order and what the power elite have in store for humanity. More importantly it communicates how We The People can retake control of our government, turn the criminal tide and bring the tyrants to justice.

McClatchy – When Goldman Sachs decided it was time to ditch the subprime mortgage business, it put together a sales pitch through a Cayman Islands subsidiary that may have seriously understated the riskiness of the securities it was selling. One bond analyst told his clients that the deal was “a not so cleverly disguised way for Goldman … to unload its unwanted exposures … onto foreign investors.” But many investors bit — and lost.

Inside the thick Goldman Sachs investment circular were the details of a secret, $2 billion deal channeled through a Caribbean tax haven.

The Sept. 26, 2006, document offered sophisticated U.S. and European investors an opportunity to buy into a pool of supposedly high-grade bonds backed by residential, commercial and student loans. The transaction was registered through a shell company in the Cayman Islands.

Few of the potential investors knew it, but the ratings of many of the mortgage securities hid their true risks and, in some cases, Goldman’s descriptions exaggerated their quality.

The Cayman offering — one of perhaps dozens made through the British territory — occurred as Goldman began to ditch the subprime mortgage business before the U.S. housing market collapsed under an avalanche of homeowner defaults.

In all, Goldman sold more than $57 billion in risky mortgage-backed securities during a 14-month period in 2006 and 2007, including nearly $39 billion issued from mortgages it purchased. Meanwhile, the firm peddled billions of dollars in complex deals, many of them tied to subprime mortgages, in the Caymans and other offshore locations.

Many of those securities later soured, but the sales allowed Goldman to become the only major U.S. investment bank to escape the brunt of the subprime meltdown.

One bond analyst who reviewed the 2006 Cayman deal dismissed it in a report to clients as “a not so cleverly disguised way for Goldman Sachs & Co. to unload its unwanted exposures to the subprime real estate market onto foreign investors.”

Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally said that the firm “sold mortgage securities only to sophisticated investors” and disclosed “all the appropriate information available.”

McClatchy also found at least two instances in which Goldman appeared to mislead investors. In one, the firm said that $65.3 million in securities were backed by safe “prime” mortgages when the same loans had been labeled a cut below prime in a U.S. offering. In the other, Goldman listed $10 million as “midprime” loans when the underlying mortgages had been made to subprime borrowers with shaky finances.

DuVally said that the descriptions were consistent with the standards set by Moody’s, the bond-rating agency.

The secret Cayman Islands deals provide a window into one method that Goldman and other Wall Street firms used to draw European banks and other foreign financial institutions into investing hundreds of billions of dollars in securities tied to risky U.S. home loans.

Experts estimate that Wall Street investment banks sold 25 percent to 50 percent of these bonds and related securities overseas, resulting in massive losses in Europe and elsewhere when the market collapsed.

Last spring, the International Monetary Fund projected that global write-downs on “U.S.-originated assets” stemming from the subprime disaster could reach $2.7 trillion.

Underscoring the role of tax havens as a Wall Street marketing tool, a Treasury Department report found that as of June 30, 2008, $164 billion in U.S. mortgage-backed securities were held in the Cayman Islands and $22 billion more were held in Luxembourg, another tax-friendly zone.

Gary Kopff, a securitization expert who analyzed unpublished industry data, said that Goldman packaged or marketed offshore deals worth at least $83 billion from 2002 to 2008. These deals, called collateralized debt obligations, amounted to a $1.3 trillion global market, and Goldman reaped as much as $1.66 billion for assembling and selling them.

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“The Secrets To Goldman Sachs’ Success: Contrary Bets, Predatory Lending, Government Connections, Offshore Tax Havens” – Huffington Post

McClatchy – In 2006 and 2007, Goldman Sachs Group peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages, but never told the buyers it was secretly betting that a sharp drop in U.S. housing prices would send the value of those securities plummeting.

Goldman’s sales and its clandestine wagers, completed at the brink of the housing market meltdown, enabled the nation’s premier investment bank to pass most of its potential losses to others before a flood of mortgage defaults staggered the U.S. and global economies.

Only later did investors discover that what Goldman had promoted as triple-A rated investments were closer to junk.

Now, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are facing large losses, and a five-month McClatchy investigation has found that Goldman’s failure to disclose that it made secret, exotic bets on an imminent housing crash may have violated securities laws.

“The Securities and Exchange Commission should be very interested in any financial company that secretly decides a financial product is a loser and then goes out and actively markets that product or very similar products to unsuspecting customers without disclosing its true opinion,” said Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University economics professor who’s proposed a massive overhaul of the nation’s banks. “This is fraud and should be prosecuted.”

John Coffee, a Columbia University law professor who served on an advisory committee to the New York Stock Exchange, said that investment banks have wide latitude to manage their assets, and so the legality of Goldman’s maneuvers depends on what its executives knew at the time.

“It would look much more damaging,” Coffee said, “if it appeared that the firm was dumping these investments because it saw them as toxic waste and virtually worthless.”

Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s chairman and chief executive, declined to be interviewed for this article.

A Goldman spokesman, Michael DuVally, said that the firm decided in December 2006 to reduce its mortgage risks and did so by selling off subprime-related securities and making myriad insurance-like bets, called credit-default swaps, to “hedge” against a housing downturn.

DuVally told McClatchy that Goldman “had no obligation to disclose how it was managing its risk, nor would investors have expected us to do so … other market participants had access to the same information we did.”

For the past year, Goldman has been on the defensive over its Washington connections and the billions in federal bailout funds it received. Scant attention has been paid, however, to how it became the only major Wall Street player to extricate itself from the subprime securities market before the housing bubble burst.

Goldman remains, along with Morgan Stanley, one of two venerable Wall Street investment banks still standing. Their grievously wounded peers Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch fell into the arms of retail banks, while another, Lehman Brothers, folded.

To piece together Goldman’s role in the subprime meltdown, McClatchy reviewed hundreds of documents, SEC filings, copies of secret investment circulars, lawsuits and interviewed numerous people familiar with the firm’s activities.

McClatchy’s inquiry found that Goldman Sachs:

* Bought and converted into high-yield bonds tens of thousands of mortgages from subprime lenders that became the subjects of FBI investigations into whether they’d misled borrowers or exaggerated applicants’ incomes to justify making hefty loans.

* Used offshore tax havens to shuffle its mortgage-backed securities to institutions worldwide, including European and Asian banks, often in secret deals run through the Cayman Islands, a British territory in the Caribbean that companies use to bypass U.S. disclosure requirements.

* Has dispatched lawyers across the country to repossess homes from bankrupt or financially struggling individuals, many of whom lacked sufficient credit or income but got subprime mortgages anyway because Wall Street made it easy for them to qualify.

* Was buoyed last fall by key federal bailout decisions, at least two of which involved then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former Goldman chief executive whose staff at Treasury included several other Goldman alumni.

The firm benefited when Paulson elected not to save rival Lehman Brothers from collapse, and when he organized a massive rescue of tottering global insurer American International Group while in constant telephone contact with Goldman chief Blankfein. With the Federal Reserve Board’s blessing, AIG later used $12.9 billion in taxpayers’ dollars to pay off every penny it owed Goldman.

These decisions preserved billions of dollars in value for Goldman’s executives and shareholders. For example, Blankfein held 1.6 million shares in the company in September 2008, and he could have lost more than $150 million if his firm had gone bankrupt.

With the help of more than $23 billion in direct and indirect federal aid, Goldman appears to have emerged intact from the economic implosion, limiting its subprime losses to $1.5 billion. By repaying $10 billion in direct federal bailout money — a 23 percent taxpayer return that exceeded federal officials’ demand — the firm has escaped tough federal limits on 2009 bonuses to executives of firms that received bailout money.

Goldman announced record earnings in July, and the firm is on course to surpass $50 billion in revenue in 2009 and to pay its employees more than $20 billion in year-end bonuses.

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Dylan Ratigan explains what dark pools are and how Citibank lobbyists are trying to create loopholes in financial reform legislation that will benefit the very wealthy over the average investor.

According to Max Keiser Goldman Sachs is pocketing at least 100 million dollars a day with high-frequency front-running trading. Small wonder they want to keep dark pools dark.

Reuters – Anonymous trading venues known as “dark pools” are a technological evolution that have benefitted both institutional and retail trading by bringing down transaction costs, Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) said in a memo to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Last week, the SEC voted unanimously for ways to make the dark pools more transparent, such as revealing the electronic trading messages that are sent to a limited group of market participants.

In a report submitted to the SEC on October 22, Goldman said the investing community — especially retail — has benefitted from the evolving market structure and industry competition.

The Goldman report, posted on the SEC website, summarized a meeting held on September 24 between its executives and the commission staff to discuss issues involving market structure including short selling and dark pools.

In the report, Goldman stated five common myths regarding dark pool trading and supplied arguments in an effort to dispel those myths.

Dark pools are trading platforms where buyers and sellers can anonymously match large blocks of stock, keeping details of the deals and prices concealed to prevent distorting prices in the broader market.

Dark pools, the largest of which are run by banks such as Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse (CSGN.VX), account for an estimated 10 to 15 percent of overall U.S. equity volume.

Goldman said in the report that increased competition from dark pools pushes all execution venues to compete for retail order flow in a superior manner.

“While market structure evolution has not been without its challenges, they have been accompanied by a secular decline in both implicit and explicit trading costs, benefiting primarily retail investors,” Goldman said in the report.

Info Wars – ‘Fall of the Republic’ will reveal once and for all the nationwide heist and economic takeover that has been maneuvered through the bailout and action taken by the private Federal Reserve.

Experts including William K. Black, Max Keiser, Dr. Webster Tarpley, George Humphrey, Gerald Celente and more join Alex Jones in the most detailed analysis ever of the fall of the Dollar, the push for a new global currency through the G20 and the international bankers who have worked tirelessly to bring the United States to its knees.

Fall Of The Republic documents how an offshore corporate cartel is bankrupting the US economy by design. Leaders are now declaring that world government has arrived and that the dollar will be replaced by a new global currency.

President Obama has brazenly violated Article 1 Section 9 of the US Constitution by seating himself at the head of United Nations’ Security Council, thus becoming the first US president to chair the world body.

A scientific dictatorship is in its final stages of completion, and laws protecting basic human rights are being abolished worldwide; an iron curtain of high-tech tyranny is now descending over the planet.

A worldwide regime controlled by an unelected corporate elite is implementing a planetary carbon tax system that will dominate all human activity and establish a system of neo-feudal slavery.

The image makers have carefully packaged Obama as the world’s savior; he is the Trojan Horse manufactured to pacify the people just long enough for the globalists to complete their master plan.

This film reveals the architecture of the New World Order and what the power elite have in store for humanity. More importantly it communicates how We The People can retake control of our government, turn the criminal tide and bring the tyrants to justice.

Select special interest financial trade groups are pushing hard to water down any proposed regulation over derivatives, leaving the door wide open for more epic scale financial meltdowns and complex rip-offs. In Washington it is business as usual. Expect additional multi-trillion dollar sweetheart banker bailouts to follow and more systemic risk to the financial system in general.

WP – An alliance of business trade groups is pushing to scale back the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate the multitrillion-dollar derivatives industry, arguing that the proposed changes could have consequences well beyond Wall Street.

While government officials are seeking to rein in the excesses that contributed to the financial crisis, business lobbyists have been warning key lawmakers that companies such as Ford, Johnson & Johnson and Coca-Cola could suffer if the new regulations are far-reaching.

Beyond Wall Street, many companies have traditionally bought derivatives as a way to hedge against investment risks. It is those “end users” that the alliance wants excluded from the coming legislation.

In the lead up to the financial crisis, trading in derivatives — securities that derive value from underlying assets, such as stocks, bonds and commodities — swelled into an immense global market, accounting for hundreds of trillions of dollars in deals. Often dubbed the “shadow market,” it allowed unregulated traders around the world to influence and speculate on a vast array of sectors, from how much companies pay to borrow money to the value of currencies and goods such as oil and cotton. Ultimately, derivatives acted as a catalyst in the downward spiral of the economy, and contributed to the meltdown of such financial giants as American International Group.

The ensuing debate about which firms to regulate in the vast, previously unregulated derivatives market has sparked a fervent lobbying effort on Capitol Hill in recent months. In August, the Obama administration proposed that most derivatives be traded on exchanges, like stocks and bonds, and that dealers — primarily large Wall Street banks and other financial firms — that buy and sell derivatives should meet robust requirements.

The Coalition for Derivatives End-Users, organized by groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers, sent a letter to lawmakers last week saying that “some reform proposals would place an extraordinary burden on end-users of derivatives in every sector of the economy — including manufacturers, energy companies, utilities, healthcare companies and commercial real estate owners and developers.” The letter was signed by more than 170 companies and trade associations.

“We definitely think the administration’s proposal went too far,” said Ryan McKee, senior director of the Chamber’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness. “End users were not part of the problem. They don’t pose systemic risk. They are not profiting from these transactions. They are not speculating.”

Wall Street firms such as J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, which have profited over the years from dealing in derivatives, have waged lobbying efforts along with industry groups, such as the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, to reshape parts of the proposed legislation.

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Zero Hedge points out illegal insider trading ahead of Dell’s purchase of Perot Systems so clearly even I can see it. The question is, why can’t the SEC?

Bonus: Lots of pretty pictures.

Dear Chairman Shapiro,

Subject: In support of the “Above Bid Short Selling Rule.”
 
As a seasoned investor and due to hedge fund organized short raids pounding all bid in sight, markets in general and financial institutions specifically collapsed in March and are still on very precarious grounds, despite help from the “invisible” hand of the Fed. Many smaller stocks have never recovered, despite a solid future ahead of them.
 
I understand that you are still soliciting commentary on the matter of the Uptick Rule (above bid rule) and short selling. Illegal short selling persists and investors are being unduly punished for the benefit of “rogue traders” and under the pretext of maintaining liquidity supported by academic studies and a large parade of self interested professors.
 
I have no problem with legitimate short sellers. Naked short selling (the most damaging of all) via Canada and other non-US sites persists, despite the fact it is considered illegal. What do you need to see to reinstate integrity to North American financial markets, and save investors, pensioners and businesses (large and small) that have been the foundation of a thriving America?
 
The time has come to take action. The frequency trading, front running, quasi-derivatives, insider trading and wanton naked short selling make a mockery of our markets. They make Mr. Madoff look like a Saint. Everyone knows it. Who will be left to trade at the end of this?
 
Chairman Shapiro, I realize it takes time to get up to speed on the issues confronting your organization. Please hurry, time is not on our side. You and I are getting older and future generations will pay the consequences of our inaction.
 
Thank you for listening,
 
Best Regards,
Jim Sinclair

Seconded – Al Walsh, CEO: Walsh Enterprises

front running