here's some ingredients to add to the soup:
quote:
Follow the money is a cliche because its truth became trite by matching an overly-familiar pattern. Like the scorpion that jabs the turtle carrying it to shore, the power elite can't forego an opportunity to make a sting. "It's in my nature."
"Does Alan Greenspan have some explaining to do?" begins a provocative analysis of the actions of the Federal Reserve in the hours before the London bombings by The Cunning Realist - an "executive in the financial industry" who describes himself as a "lifelong conservative with a strong independent streak." (And judging by his blogroll, which includes links to Andrew Sullivan, The National Review and Talking Points Memo, I'd say he pegged himself pretty well.)
He writes:
It is difficult to overestimate the importance to the financial markets of Fed-created liquidity. In a paper from August 2003, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis wrote, "Open market operations are not another weapon in the Fed's arsenal, but the only weapon in its arsenal."
With that in mind, what happened last week is fascinating. Here are two charts of the Fed's recent level of activity. The first shows the expanding and shrinking daily size of the temporary liquidity pool. The date (ending on July 8th) is indicated on the bottom of the chart, and the size of the pool in billions is on the left:
The second graph represents the Fed's injections of permanent liquidity:
The Cunning Realist adds:
"The terrorist attacks in London took place on Thursday. The Fed dramatically increased the pool of liquidity available for stocks to a multi-year high 48 hours before that---an ideal amount of time for that liquidity to filter into the market---and kept it elevated for the next few days. And indeed, it worked. The stock market saw heavy buying right at the opening bell on Thursday and has shot straight up since then.
"Why did the Fed do this? Was it just another coincidence in our financial markets that somehow managed to immediately precede a major geopolitical event?"
Fintan Dunne of breakfornews.com has also picked up the story, and writes that the Federal Reserve "has previously supported financial markets by increasing liquidity to boost the stock market - as happened after 9/11. But... the Fed had already hugely increased liquidity 48 hours before [the London attacks], just in time for that liquidity to filter into the market."
I found it interesting that the Cunning Realist writes "financial professionals generally consider this 'man behind the curtain' stuff. Those who are aware of it don't like to discuss it, because it implies that stocks rise and fall based on something other than fundamentals and their own acumen."
They say you have to be lucky to be good, but they would say that. After all, they're the carnies calling the suckers into the tent of the marketplace. You pay your money and you take your chance. And if you play the game, you might get lucky, but you don't get to roll with Rockefeller and Greenspan. Because maybe to be good, more than being lucky, you need to be bad.
posted by Jeff at 1:00 AM 26 comments
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Pictures from a demolition
I don't know what to make of this yet, except to say look at this:
The photo is the BBC's, taken in the immediate aftermath of the London bus bombing. Notice the white "Kingstar" van parallel-parked opposite the site of the blast? (The van is facing the opposite direction of the bus; the front of the bus had just passed.) Any guess what business is Kingstar's? Would you believe, "Controlled Demolition...in areas where minimal disruption and minimal noise requirements are paramount"?
It may turn out to be nothing, as things sometimes turn out to be, but it's at least another curio for the increasingly curious case of the suicide bombers who weren't. "Why did they buy return train tickets to Luton? Why did they buy pay & display tickets for cars? Why were there no usual shouts of 'Allah Akhbar'? Why were bombs in bags and not on their bodies?" asks The Daily Mail.
end quote
just when you thought it couldn't get weirder....along comes part 5!
great snooping soj ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
"We tried to open the doors but the doors were fixed shut and the ash was settling everywhere," said Loyita Worley, 49, who had also been travelling in the third carriage.
As some passengers used their mobile phones to let loved ones know they were alive, some of the walking wounded were moving into less damaged carriages through connecting doors to get away from the smoke. "There was blood dripping off them, they were all white," Ms Worley said.
Odd - It is impossible to use mobile phones in the tunnels.
According to eyewitnesses and police, the device appears to have been placed somewhere near the back of the bus's top deck. Raj Mattoo, 35, who works at the charity Scope, said: "As I looked at the bus I saw it explode. The explosion was at the back. It ripped off the roof that was thrown 10 metres in the air ..."
"There was what seemed like a muffled bang and a huge plume of smoke," said Neil Courtis, 34, a financial journalist. "I went towards the blast and saw a woman with her left leg blown off. She looked in a bad way. I could smell cordite."
The airliner crashed between two and three hundred feet from my office in the Pentagon, just around a corner from where I work. ... I walked to my office, shut down my computer, and headed out. Even before stepping outside I could smell the cordite. Then I knew explosives had been set off somewhere.
A personnel attorney at the Pentagon, Goldsmith was riding a shuttle bus to work on Tuesday, Sept. 11, when she learned of the attack on the World Trade Center. ... "We saw a huge black cloud of smoke," she said, saying it smelled like cordite or gun smoke.
Our contact works a route roughly one mile from the site of the bus bombing on July 7. The bus driver pointed out that the number 30 bus was the only one to be re-routed after the initial bombs went off in the London Underground, every other bus carried on its normal journey, but for some reason this bus was diverted.
The driver notes the following about CCTV maintenance. "CCTV gets maintained at least 2 or 3 times a week and can digitally store up to 2 whole weeks worth of footage. this is done by a private contractor....So when I heard that the CCTV wasn't working on a vehicle that's no more than 2 years old since last June.....I'm sorry that's rubbish, I work for the company I know different."
~~~
USA WELCOME: Make Yourself Known @BooMan Tribune and add some cheers!
