"In yet another move to make a mockery of so-called market transparency, and again with mad props to Zerohedge, we have this: 'The Exchange has filed with the SEC to implement the decommissioning of the DPTRrequirement following the July 10, 2009 trade date. Accordingly, the last required submission of the DPTR will be on July 14, 2009, which is the second business day after the last trade date for which the DPTR is required.'Posted by Tyler Durden at 1:26 PM: 'In a move set to infuriate and send many Zero Hedge readers over the top, the NYSE has taken action to make sure that nobody will henceforth be able to keep track of the complete dominance that Goldman Sachs exerts over the New York Stock Exchange. This basically ends our weekly Program Trading updates disclosed every Thursday indicating that Goldman has singlehandedly captured all of NYSE's program trading.' Entire article:
Go read the entire Zerohedge article; what this means, in short, is that the ability of people (like you and I) to see the fact that a handful of banks, most specifically Goldman Sachs, constitute the majority of NYSE trading volume - and they're trading for their own book, not for customers, will no longer be disclosed. This "back and forth trade" between a handful of institutions is nothing more than the old "pump and dump" game that has been played in the OTC market forever - and almost always screws the individual investor. This is no different than you and I selling a house back and forth between us repeatedly, each time at a higher price. We both appear to be geniuses as we're both making a "profit", right?
Well, no. One of us is destined to take a horrifying loss if we do not find a sucker to make the final transaction with. The embedded scam is that real gains require real parties at interest and not a closed system of a couple of guys passing an asset back and forth in a transparent attempt to "bait" someone else into becoming the sucker to offload that asset to.
The parallels to the housing bubble are not coincidence. There is no "value" being created nor is there any actual value appreciation taking place when people pass an asset back and forth at ever-higher prices. Only when there are lots of parties participating on their own, organically, does a market truly exist and does value align with price. Otherwise the so-called "price" is nothing other than a cheap parlor trick. Zerohedge has been documenting this game now for months as Goldman in particular has come to represent an outrageously large percentage of the entire NYSE volume.
The parallels to the housing bubble are not coincidence. There is no "value" being created nor is there any actual value appreciation taking place when people pass an asset back and forth at ever-higher prices. Only when there are lots of parties participating on their own, organically, does a market truly exist and does value align with price. Otherwise the so-called "price" is nothing other than a cheap parlor trick. Zerohedge has been documenting this game now for months as Goldman in particular has come to represent an outrageously large percentage of the entire NYSE volume.
The problem of course is that, at least on paper, market manipulation, irrespective of what form of parlor trick you choose to use, is a serious violation of the law. Of course these violations of the law have been ignored for so long that nobody seems to care any more, but the fact remains that should the public come to believe that the NYSE has turned into nothing more than a gigantic pump-and-dump scheme operated by a handful of banks trading between themselves with publicly-guaranteed funds the consequences could be catastrophic.
So rather than stop it, the NYSE is doing what all good robber barons do - they're obscuring the data so nobody can see it any more. More "change we can believe in"; the blackjack dealer is once again stashing a whole bunch of aces and kings under the table for his use whenever he deems that he "should" have a blackjack, and you, once again, are the sucker just as you were in the housing bubble. Wanna play some 21?
Update: The NYSE apparently didn't like Zerohedge's characterization and issued a response; my comment is the same as theirs - why not ADD to the disclosure instead of redacting the "older" format? I'm with them on this - more disclosure always beats less.
- Karl Denninger, http://market-ticker.denninger.net/
"According to a recent Baltimore Sun report, "the richest two percent of adults own more than half of the world's household wealth," and it seems clear that the average American, to say nothing of the average world citizen, has little to no influence in exchanges this size. Once you add the reality that the top one percent of Americans take 16 percent of the nation's income and hold 32 percent of its wealth, and the argument for middle-class and blue-collar America's solvency seems like the lunacy that it is.
And some will tell you that Goldman Sachs' windfall is good news for the American economy. Others, like the always readable doom prophet James Kunstler, will not only tell you that "the financial 'industry' decoupled from the US economy sometime in the past decade," but also that "Goldman Sachs was rumored to have driven the price of oil down for the election season by applying huge sums of money to twiddle the futures market."
So who's zooming who? To answer that, you need to understand the hyperreal futures market, in which Rush Limbaugh sized bags of cash change hands for things yet to come. As the wiki puts it, "the social utility of futures markets is considered to be mainly in the transfer of risk," and risk, well, we have a shitload of that today. Wars, famines, genocides, and other ugly sides of global transactions definitely have an upside to them, especially if you're into, as are most of Goldman Sachs clients, mergers and acqusitions. Naomi Klein calls it disaster capitalism. I call it one of the only valuable exports America has left since it let its manufacturing base go the way of the dodo.
Which is why I always find it hilarious that average Americans continue to venture forth into the world trumpeting their citizenship -- in wars, in biz, in dick contests, in whatever -- while the very economic foundations of citizenship's success over the last century deteriorate more and more each day. What's in a word, indeed. Try this one: Multinational. Where in that term do you see a loyalty to the United States, an unshakeable preference for the dollar, a firmly entrenched citizenship? Nowhere, that's where. Multinationals, like Goldman Sachs which hosts offices everywhere from Bangalore to Paris, have their money invested across the world, not solely in your hood, school, or church. And as such, they're interested in making sure their bottom line is more important than any one country's. Including ours.
But no matter how you slice it, it is painfully obvious that the United States are going to wake up and realize that their economy is in serious trouble, and that America is at the mercy of a world market that is quickly tiring of its currency, its poor education scores, its dumbshit foreign policy and pretty much everything else -- including, yes, its tolerance. Sure, our currency keeps the machine running for now, but that's just because we're the big dog with the big guns. Iran and China should take care of that within the next century, if global warming and its own particular economic scenarios don't do it first. And then where will we be?
Screwed, that's where. So swallow hard, average American. That giant sucking sound you hear is your own future, trading lower every day and running out of air while you sleep. Better wake up now and lessen the pain somehow. Or suffer the fate best described by Roy Batty in Blade Runner: "Wake up. Time to die."
http://www.morphizm.com/blog/2006/12/goldman-sucks-you-swallow.html
Again, and again, and again, at the heart of the thievery, Goldman Sachs...
Again, and again, and again, at the heart of the thievery, Goldman Sachs...
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