Title: Mcgowanjm Wire 2012 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Feb 26, 2012 Author:Various Post Date:2012-02-26 09:15:13 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:1372119 Comments:2390
"The two reasons I’m rarely satirical about neocon economics is (a) it’s bad form, and lousy sport, to shoot ducks in a barrel; and (b) the effects of such braindead thinking are every bit as destructive as the ramblings of old Beardy Marx. This stuff can be funny – up to a point. After that point, it’s damned irritating…especially if you’re one of the poor folks. Ronald Reagan remains one of the most revered US Presidents because he cut taxes to create super-wealth which, he said, would trickle down. Well, it didn’t: it gushed upwards into f**kwitted $94m bonuses. "
11 May 2012 JP Morgan Failure Shows the Incompetency of the Fed As Regulator And a Corrupted Government
The spin machine is revving up, and the spokesmodels are gesticulating wildly, in an effort to direct and deflect this failure of governance at JPM.
See how manfully Jamie Dimon has come clean on this. And look how well the Fed's capital standards are protecting us from a failure at JPM because of this unfortunate but 'manageable' trading mistake. This will be a buying opportunity!
HSBC has a derivative exposure of $4.321 Trilion dollars. HSBC is a Hong Kong based bank and its original name is The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited.
You will find HSBC working a lot with JP Morgan Chase.
Both HSBC and JP Morgan Chase have strong interest in gold & precious metals. HSBC and JP Morgan Chase are often involved together in financial scandals.
Lately HSBC has been sued for allegedly funneling more than $8.9 billion to the largest ponzi-scheme in history - Bernie Maddof's investment business. HSBC (along w/ JP Morgan Chase) has been sued for alleged conspiracy suppressing the price of silver and gold, partially through precious metal DERIVATIVES and making billions of dollars on it.
State of Hawaii is suing HSBC (and other banks) for deceptive credit card lending practices. DZ Bank in Germany is suing HSBC (and JP Morgan) for deceptive (lying) practices when selling home-loan-backed securities.
HSBC is also under investigation for laundering billions of dollars. Bank of New York Mellon - Derivative Exposure Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs has a derivative exposure of $44.192 Trillion dollars. The $1 Trillion pillars towers are double-stacked @ 930 feet (248 m). The White House is standing next to the Statue of Liberty.
Goldman Sachs has advantage over other banks because it has awesome connections in US Government. A lot of former Goldman employees hold high-level US Government positions (chart).
Mitt Romney's top donor is Goldman Sachs, and one of Obama's best donors. Ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson became the Secretary of Treasury under Bush and during the 2008 financial crisis authored the TARP bill demanding $700 billion bail-out.
In UK, Goldman Sachs escaped £10 million bill on a failed tax avoidance scheme with help of good connections. The bank is the largest player in the food commodities market, earned $955m from food speculation in 2009" - That's your $$$.
Goldman Sachs employees are arming themselves with guns in case there is a populist uprising against the bank. Goldman Sachs calls their investors "muppets". and use clients to make money for themselves, disregarding the clients.
The bank was fined $22 million for sharing valuable nonpublic information with top clients (Think insider trading with best clients). Goldman Sachs was part-owner America's leading website for prostitution ads until the ownership stake was exposed.
Goldman Sachs helped Greece conceal its debt with secret loans, while simultaneously taking advantage of Greece. Goldman Sachs got a $814 billion SECRET bailout from the Federal Reserve during the 2008 crisis.
Goldman Sachs got $10 billion of the 2008 TARP bailout, and in the same year paid $10.9 billion in employee compensation and "benefits", while paying a tax rate of 1%. That means an average of $327,000 to each Goldman Sach's employee.
JP Morgan Chase has a derivative exposure of $70.151 Trillion dollars. $70 Trillion is roughly the size of the entire world's economy. The $1 Trillion dollar towers are double-stacked @ 930 feet (248 m).
JP Morgan is rumored to hold 50->80% of the copper market, and manipulated the market by massive purchases. JP Morgan (JPM) is also guilty of manipulating the silver market to make billions.
In 2010 JP Morgan had 3 perfect trading quarters and only lost money on 8 days. Lawsuits on home foreclosures have been filed against JP Morgan. Aluminum price is manipulated by JP Morgan through large physical ownership of material and creating bottlenecks during transport. JP Morgan was among the banks involved in the seizure of $620 million in assets for alleged fraud linked to derivatives.
JP Morgan got $25 billion taxpayer in bailout money. It has no intention of using the money to lend to customers, but instead will use it to drive out competition.
The bank is also the largest owner of BP - the oil spill company. During the oil spill the bank said that the oil spill is good for the economy. JP Morgan Chase also received a SECRET $391 billion dollar bailout from the Federal Reserve.
In 2012, JP Morgan (JPM) took a $2 billion loss on "Poorly Executed" Derivative Bets. Bank of New York Mellon - Derivative Exposure 9 Biggest Banks' Derivative Exposure - $228.72 Trillion
Note the little man standing in front of white house. The little worm next to lastfootball field is a truck with $2 billion dollars.
There is no government in the world that has this kind of money. This is roughly 3 times the entire world economy. The unregulated market presents a massive financial risk. The corruption and immorality of the banks makes the situation worse.
If you don't want to bank with these banks, but want to have access to free ATM's anywhere-- most Credit Unions in USA are in the CO-OP ATM network, where all ATM's are free to any COOP CU member and most support depositing checks. The Credit Unions are like banks, but invest all their profits to give members lower rates and better service. They don't have shareholders to worry about or have derivatives to purchase and sell.
Keep an eye out in the news for "derivative crisis", as the crisis is inevitable with current falling value of most real assets. Derivative Data Source: ZeroHedge
Let's see, the average couple is going to need nearly a quarter of a million dollars to cover their health care costs in retirement, and yet half of all American adults have no retirement savings of any kind, let alone for health care.
RawStory: Geraldo Rivera: I was ‘manually raped’ by the TSA Fox News host Geraldo Rivera on Friday claimed that an employee of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) had “manually raped” him and “was getting off on it.”
Then they took the 18 month terrorist baby off the plane.
PeakOil.com: OPEC oil production climbs to 31.71 million barrels per day in April | Peak Oil News and Message Boards - The latest Platts’ monthly survey of OPEC production shows two highly significant trends: sanctions are starting to pinch Iranian output, and other OPEC countries are stepping in to fill the gap.
WSJ: Chesapeake Deals Carry $1.4 Billion in Undisclosed Liability - Embattled Chesapeake Energy Corp. has saddled itself with about $1.4 billion of previously unreported liabilities over the next decade through off-balance-sheet financial deals. Most of these costs will hit this year and next, at a time when the company needs to raise substantial cash to cover operating expenses and its move into the more lucrative oil business. Chesapeake, the second-largest natural-gas producer in the U.S., has made a number of long-term commitments to Wall Street banks that require it to deliver specific amounts of oil and natural gas each month through 2022, in exchange for upfront cash.
Thank God, CHK never drilled my land....what a fucked up company riding on a trumped up Gas Bubble....;}
How can the USSA mount successful False Flags if the story gets out before Intel is ready?
LMFAO
"The operation appears to have been a joint venture between the British, Saudi Arabian and U.S. intelligence services, some analysts say, and its exposure in the U.S. media has caused widespread concern in the U.S. intelligence community.
The Saudis and British appear to be concerned too.
"The Saudis are not happy with the leaking of this information," said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst with good contacts among Gulf Arab governments.
"It is potentially harmful for future operations. And it is the Saudis who have the agents on the ground to get these things done."
Another hulking character who identified himself as a member of Unit 51 from the Israeli army’s Golani Brigade paratrooper corps barked at the activists, “The only thing you are is a bunch of traitors. Every day people here are fighting… This is unbelievable. You are traitors and if we had the chance we would shoot you one by one. One by one we would shoot you…”
The demonstration concluded with police violently arresting three participants including one man for the crime of reading aloud the names of destroyed Palestinian villages.
Lia Tarachansky of the Real News Network filmed the melee. Her footage is below:"
And he would. Sharon's buddies would shoot them....;}
The repression of Zochrot’s educational action was the street level manifestation of the campaign the Israeli government has waged to mute discussion of the Nakba and punish those who violate the code of silence.
Israel’s Education Minister, declared that merely allowing students to learn about the mass expulsion of Palestinians during 1947 and 1948 would encourage them to work against the Jewish state.
“If a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm,” the book read, “then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society.”
Quantcast EPA Grossly Misrepresents The Toxicity Of Corexit Used In Gulf Of Mexico EPA Grossly Misrepresents The Toxicity Of Corexit Used In Gulf Of Mexico thumbnail
Quite incredibly, the EPA issued a positive report on May 1, 2012 regarding the safety and toxicity of various dispersants use in the BP Gulf Oil Spill. Included in this assessment was the use of Corexit.
This report “indicated that all eight dispersants had roughly the same toxicity, and all fell into the “practically non-toxic” or “slightly toxic” category. Scientists found that none of the eight dispersants displayed endocrine-disrupting activity of “biological significance.” The same report went on to say that “dispersant-oil mixtures were generally no more toxic to the aquatic test species than oil alone.”
Hidden Crisis in the GULF. Barbara Wiseman, TEO President, has been an ardent advocate for safer oil remediation measures since the very beginning of this oil spill. She has said that:
“At the beginning of the disaster, TEO investigated to find effective, non-toxic technologies currently available in adequate supply to clean up an oil spill of this size. Once we isolated the best solutions, we then investigated to find what the barriers to getting them implemented were. The barriers have all come down to specific people in the EPA. They are, in effect, holding the Gulf hostage and, for some unexplained reason, won’t let it be cleaned up.”
A 2nd Anniversary Report on the BP Gulf Oil Spill as follows:
“The toxic dispersants add absolutely nothing to EFFECTIVE RESPONSE. There is no scientific basis for it, and their use violates The Clean Water Act, EPA’s charter and common sense.”
“Corexit’s label clearly states it can cause kidney failure and death and the MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) specifically warns, “Do not contaminate surface water” with it. Additionally, toxicity testing in regards to marine species shows little tolerance by all forms of sea life; thus, applying it on spills as a preferred response method increases the toxicity of the spilled oil on which it is used.”
Print Afghan police kill two British soldiers in Helmand Province Sun May 13, 2012 8:50AM GMT Latest reports indicate that members of the Afghan national police force have shot dead at least two British soldiers in the troubled Helmand Province of Afghanistan.
4 US-led soldiers killed in Afghanistan Sat May 12, 2012 3:9PM GMT At least four US-led troops have been killed in separate incidents in Afghanistan in the past 24 hours, as attacks against the United States and its Western allies have increased in the war-wracked country.
Brave Afghan shoots 12 US-NATO invaders in Kunar Zabihullah Mujahid E-mail Print PDF Friday, 19 Jamadil Akhir 1433 Friday, 11 May 2012 12:59
KUNAR, May 11 – A brave Afghan, apparently working as soldier of puppet forces turned his gun on the US-NATO terrorist troops in the invaders’ army base located in Agam, Ghazi Abad district of Kunar province on Friday, killing as many as 12 US-Nato cowardly troops and wounded a dozen more, a Mujahideen’s official said Friday, adding that the said spirited Afghan had been enlisted in the puppets’ army for the very purpose and after accomplishing his heroic mission joined Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate safe and sound with his machine gun and an American heavy machine gun.
Enemy sustain severe losses in Kabul Zabihullah Mujahid E-mail Print PDF Sunday, 21 Jamadil Akhir 1433 Sunday, 13 May 2012 07:01
KABUL, May 13 – Later on Saturday, Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate confronted a great number of the puppets in Sarubi, Kabul, triggering a one-hour fight in which a number of the enemy soldiers got killed and wounded.
We’re Fighting in a War We Lost Before the War Began by Phyllis Bennis, May 12, 2012 Print This | Share This
It shouldn’t surprise anyone, but support for the longest U.S. war is dropping further and faster than ever. The latest national U.S. poll, released on May 9, shows 66 percent of Americans are against the war in Afghanistan – with 40 percent "strongly opposed."
We can expect to hear the usual spin, claims that it’s a hard slog but Afghans are still better off and we have to finish what we started.
With all due respect to Phyllis, no one will hear Any spin because none is necessary.
No one is reporting anything about the Afghans. Refute silence? ;}
If that money ($571 billion according to the National Priorities Project) had not been wasted on the war in Afghanistan since 2001, it could instead have paid for ten years of health care for 12 million low-income people, or hired 840,000 elementary school teachers for ten years, or paid for converting 246 million households to all solar energy for a year."
us spends more in 5 hours on defense than in 5 years on healthcare
The move reveals for the first time the desperation of Mr Cameron, then Leader of the Opposition, and Mr Osborne, to win over the Murdoch empire as they manoeuvred to secure a general election victory.
As the Leveson inquiry prepares to hear more evidence this week about the relations between News International and the Tories, The Independent on Sunday has learnt that Rebekah Brooks and her husband spent a weekend at Dorneywood, the Chancellor's official residence, during a key period in the bid by News Corp to take over BSkyB.
The previously undisclosed "pyjama party", in 2010, which also featured Mr Coulson and his wife, Eloise, will add fuel to demands for the Chancellor to be called to give evidence to Leveson in person.
The IoS piece goes on to point out that Cameron, Hunt, Brooks and most of Newscorp’s lawyers were more or less sharing bodily fluids nonstop during the crucial BSkyB bid run-up, and even more so once Vince Cable was conveniently pushed out of the juggernaut’s way. In a normal world, there is no way either Hunt or Cameron should survive such a clear case of Prime Ministerial favouritism.
The Combat-Application-Tourniquet is the 1st choice of the U.S. Army and is deployed with our troops around the world. If you are looking for a light weight, ...
A scaling law, or power law, is a simple polynomial functional relationship, i.e., f(x) depends on a power of x. Two properties of such laws can easily be shown:
* a logarithmic mapping yields a linear relationship, * scaling the function’s argument x preserves the shape of the function f(x), called scale invariance.
See (Sornette, 2006).
Scaling-Law Distributions Scaling-law distributions have been observed in an extraordinary wide range of natural phenomena: from physics, biology, earth and planetary sciences, economics and finance, computer science and demography to the social sciences; see (Newman, 2004). It is truly amazing, that such diverse topics as
* the size of earthquakes, moon craters, solar flares, computer files, sand particle, wars and price moves in financial markets,
* the number of scientific papers written, citations received by publications, hits on webpages and species in biological taxa,
* the sales of music, books and other commodities,
* the population of cities,
* the income of people,
* the frequency of words used in human languages and of occurrences of personal names,
* the areas burnt in forest fires,
are all described by scaling-law distributions. First used to describe the observed income distribution of households by the economist Pareto in 1897, the recent advancements in the study of complex systems have helped uncover some of the possible mechanisms behind this universal law. However, there is as of yet no real understanding of the physical processes driving these systems.
AND
For how long have we known about the fat tails?
"Heavy tails: the (unconditional) distribution of returns seems to display a power-law or Pareto-like tail, with a tail index which is finite, higher than two and less than five for most data sets studied.
In particular this excludes stable laws with infinite variance and the normal distribution. However the precise form of the tails is difficult to determine."
Cont (2001) # MANTEGNA, R.N. and H.E. STANLEY, 1999. Introduction to Econophysics: Correlations and Complexity in Finance. books.google.com. "The degree of leptokurtosis is much larger for high-frequency data (Fig. 8.2)." Mantegna and Stanley (2000)
What JP Morgan's MANY theoreticians are desperately trying to wrap their heads around at this very moment:
"However the precise form of the tails is difficult to determine."
"The main concepts that are needed to understand stock markets are imitation, herding, self-organized cooperativity and positive feedbacks, leading to the development of endogenous instabilities. According to this theory, local effects such as interest raises, new tax laws, new regulations and so on, invoked as the cause of the burst of a given bubble leading to a crash, are only one of the triggering factors but not the fundamental cause of the bubble collapse. We propose that the true origin of a bubble and of its collapse lies in the unsustainable pace of stock market price growth based on self-reinforcing over-optimistic anticipation. As a speculative bubble develops, it becomes more and more unstable and very susceptible to any disturbance."
Jamie Dimon, the king of controlled risk, just now hearing about any of this
"statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the “logic of science”; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can’t be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but… let’s not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you.
In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let’s face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system)."
Clearly, with current International Monetary Fund estimates of the costs of the 2007-2008 subprime crisis, the banking system seems to have lost more on risk taking (from the failures of quantitative risk management) than every penny banks ever earned taking risks.
But it was easy to see from the past that the pilot did not have the qualifications to fly the plane and was using the wrong navigation tools:
The same happened in 1983 with money center banks losing cumulatively every penny ever made, and in 1991-1992 when the Savings and Loans industry became history.
After 1998, when a “Nobel-crowned” collection of people (and the crème de la crème of the financial economics establishment) blew up Long Term Capital Management,
a hedge fund, because the “scientific” methods they used misestimated the role of the rare event, such methodologies and such claims on understanding risks of rare events should have been discredited.
Yet the Fed helped their bailoutand exposure to rare events (and model error) patently increased exponentially (as we can see from banks’ swelling portfolios of derivatives that we do not understand).
Figure 1 My classical metaphor: A Turkey is fed for a 1000 days—every days confirms to its statistical department that the human race cares about its welfare "with increased statistical significance". On the 1001st day, the turkey has a surprise.
people tend to overweight small probability events.
So, what is behavioural economics?
Well, behavioural economics recognises the limits of human rationality, with ‘rationality’ being defined by the mainstream economic sense of the word, and comprises of a number of observations appertaining to human decision making that do not sit well with the neoclassical orthodoxy (Dolan et al. 2010). These include:
the observation that losses loom substantially larger than gains, a phenomenon known as loss aversion;
(ii) that reference points matter, such that people often care more about what they gain or lose around what they already have, rather than what they end up with;
(iii) that people tend to overweight small probabilities;
(iv) that people allocate their money to discrete bundles, so that the value that they attach to a particular amount of money will be contextual;
(v) the observation of motivational crowding, such that offering money to people to do something has been shown often to ‘crowd-out’ their intrinsic, altruistic motivation to do that very thing; and
(vi) ‘hyperbolic discounting’, which is the observation that people tend to place an enormous weight on the ‘immediate’ compared to the future, living for today at the expense of tomorrow.
In addition to the above stated observations, individuals often seemingly adopt a number of rules of thumb (or ‘heuristics’) when reaching their decisions, and apparently ‘satisfice’ rather than ‘optimise’, which goes against the grain of mainstream economics.
A far from exhaustive list of these rules of thumb include:
(a) the availability heuristic, in which people tend to assess the probability of an event by the ease with which similar instances can be brought to mind (e.g. many people erroneously think that the annual death rate from shark attacks is greater than that caused by falling coconuts);
(b) the anchoring heuristic, in which individuals often unconsciously focus upon, and can be manipulated by, entirely irrelevant cues when making decisions, and
(c) the overconfidence bias (e.g. most people think their driving ability is better than average), which has obvious implications for choices in financial markets, and elsewhere.
Behavioural economists have thus uncovered a library of systematic preference patterns and heuristics that cannot be explained by standard economic theory. Interestingly, although perhaps for many, on reflection, unsurprisingly, several of the observations and rules of thumb (e.g. the importance of reference points, availability, anchoring)
appear to suggest that humans are influenced very much by prominent, or ‘salient’, attributes in choice options – once their attention is focussed (sic) upon a particular feature of a task, they tend to overlook somewhat other potentially important information (for an entertaining example of this phenomenon, see selective attention test).
When the world pushes you to your knees, your are in the perfect position to pray. ... Ali ibn abi Talib (radiAllah anhu)
Which is where Jamie Dimon should be right about now....;}
Now here's Dimon/JPM's muse from 2008, explaining why
The Black Swan: Quotes & Warnings that the Imbeciles Chose to Ignore
is/was worth ignoring.
I'm wondering if Jamie spent some time with
Posted by Eric Falkenstein at 8:31 PM Sunday, December 07, 2008
Now THAT's an amazing date to be pontificating on how Behavioral Economics/Power Laws/Central Limit Theorums/ and the risk of Untold exposure to Non Linear Heavy Tail Risk is TOTALLY out of fashion.
As bush43 and a traitorous Congress REWARD WALL ST BANKSTERS for bringing the SYSTEM to its KNEES.
When the world pushes you to your knees, your are in the perfect position to pray. ... Ali ibn abi Talib (radiAllah anhu)
But INSTEAD of praying, these BANKSTERS get to run the ship into ANOTHER iceberg in order to speed the sinking.....LMFAO...8D
Notice how Falkenstein/Dimon NEVER consider FRAUD CONTROL in the following (VaR analysis;)?
" Value at Risk is a broad concept, that basically is a framework that has as its goal estimating a 99% or 95% worst-case-scenario, over an arbitrary period of time (day, week, year). Now, clearly many people underestimated the risk in mortgage-backed paper of all sorts, but this error was not particular to Value at Risk, rather, the assumption that housing prices would not decline, which then lead to errors in your stress test, or whatever you call your 'worst case scenario'. This error was made at many levels, by investors, issuers, rating agencies, banks who warehoused these loans, regulators, etc. Again, Value at Risk is pretty independent of this error, though the error would be reflected in any VAR that had such erroneous assumptions (garbage in, garbage out). Further, Value at risk is pretty agnostic as to method, whether you use data with really fat tails, 99.99% worst case scenarios, whatever you want. Blaming Value at Risk for the latest crisis is like blaming soup, rather than sanitation, for Typhoid Mary.
And with Jamie Dimon's EPIC FAIL, this arguement from Falkenstein has proved prescient and yet Falkenstein thought it was beautifully insane to even think about.....;}
" My argument still stands: he's basically someone who makes the perfect the enemy of the good. Like a communist reveling in the Great Depression, Taleb may take heart in recent events vindicating his worldview, but as Taleb knows, there are always 'lucky fools' who merely were fortunate. I would like to see a risk management report from Taleb, perhaps a page always saying "risk=inf", because of course, we could lose everything in WW3, a new virus,
***** all the banks fail, etc.*****
Every assumption isn't true, so make no assumptions. Be prepared for anything. Go long volatility (especially extreme tails). I don't think that's very good advice, though clearly it worked great this year (and funds he's affiliated have done very well, being long tail volatility).
Note to the reader: this was written a decade ago. A deeper explanation (which tells you that Jorion & his financial engineering IDIOTS are dangerous to society) is here: "The Fourth Quadrant", an EDGE (Third Culture)
"These patterns suggest that standard economic models based on the notion of equilibrium — markets will fluctuate but then settle down like the surface of a still pond — may not capture the whole story. Freak events may be a normal part of long-term economic behavior. If that’s true, then the mathematical methods guiding Wall Street’s estimation of risk are seriously flawed, offering a dangerous false sense of security.
“You have to understand that the bad events can be really, really bad,” says J. Doyne Farmer, who is trained in physics and does research spanning several disciplines at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. “And there’s a significant chance that over a five-year period we will get hit by a really big event. That’s where the rubber really hits the road.”
