Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" of Crooks

[unhappycamper]

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Adam-Smith-s-Invisible-Ha-by-Eric-Zuesse-Conservatism_Conservative-Christian_Economics_Economy-Recession-140121-893.html



Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" of Crooks
OpEdNews Op Eds 1/21/2014 at 12:36:49
By Eric Zuesse

The world's best blogger about government and politics, who goes by the pen-name of "George Washington," headlined on January 16th, "Top German Regulator: Precious Metal and Currency Manipulation Are WORSE Than Libor," and he linked to a news report from BusinessWeek datelined the very next day, titled "Metals, Currency Rigging Is Worse Than Libor," which reported that gold prices and currency prices are probably manipulated by the mega-banks at least as much as the interbank loan rate, or "LIBOR," is, and that the mega-banks are probably skimming even more by manipulating these prices than they are by manipulating LIBOR -- which is already trillions of dollars of manipulation.

"George Washington" also linked there to numerous other reports, showing that the mega-banks systematically skim from trading derivatives, oil, all commodities, "and everything that can be manipulated by high-frequency trading." He also documented that they are "engaging in Mafia-style bid-rigging fraud against local governments," and are "shaving money off of virtually every pension transaction," and "charging 'storage fees' to store gold bullion ... without even buying or storing any gold," and "pledging the same mortgage multiple times to different buyers," and so forth.

He didn't even get around to mentioning their laundering of billions for drug-traffickers, violations for which some wrist-slap fines were issued, but he had already covered that in an article just two days earlier, where he noted that "The HSBC employee who blew the whistle on the banks' money laundering for terrorists and drug cartels says ... : "America is losing the drug war because our banks are (still) financing the cartels', and "Banks financing drug cartels 'affects every single American'."

What these mega-bank crimes show is that the aristocracy, the people who move big sums of money, function by colluding together within their specialties so as to make their profits not really from investing but from their insider knowledge of which way prices (which they can manipulate) will head, of gold, currencies, loan-rates, bond-yields, commodities, etc., so that these individuals can profit from these changes in prices, not from the prices themselves. They make their money "on the margin," not on the goods themselves; they make it by the change in prices. They manipulate prices merely in order to make money by their advance-knowledge of the direction prices will head.

[snot]

1. K&R'd.