The Bankster's Facebook Con

I am certainly no high finance expert by any means,but this whole business with Facebooks IPO stinks.The banksters on Wall Street knew Facebook's stock was over priced before it was offered publicly.Instead of informing all their investors,Morgan Stanley,JP Morgan,and Goldman Sachs,only let their 'sophisticated institutional investors'(their rich friends) know that Facebook was over hyped,while their 'smaller investors' (the working man) were left in the dark.The SEC and FINRA both say the will investigate,but nothing will come of it because the banksters have them in their hip pocket.

Wall Street is nothing more than an corrupt gambling house now and your a fool to gamble with them!

Hat tip to Riehl World View.

'Bank Of America Abuses'

From TL In Exile:

The Bank of America is the country’s largest bank with assets of $2.3 trillion. This bank currently has $75 trillion in credit derivatives.

Here is a list of additional grievances:

This financial institution has been found guilty of laundering South American drug money in 2006 ($7.5 million settlement).

They received $20 billion in US Treasury support with an additional $118 billion government backstop to buy Merrill Lynch.

They failed to properly disclose employee bonuses and financial losses at Merrill Lynch before shareholders approved the merger of the companies: $150 million settlement with the SEC.

Bank of America Illegally Foreclosed on Active Service Members’ Homes. Settlement agreement was $20 million.

Their purchase of Countrywide resulted in a loss of $65 billion to stockholders.

They paid $335 million to settle Countrywide’s housing discrimination claims.

They paid $410 million to settle a class-action lawsuit affecting more than 13 million Bank of America customers who accused the bank of charging excessive overdraft fees for electronic transactions.

 Bank of America moved approximately$18 trillion worth of derivative obligations from Merrill Lynch and the BAC holding company to the FDIC insured retail deposit division. This transfers the risk from the bank to the taxpayers since the FDIC cannot cover this amount.

Their executives are major donors to the president’s reelection campaign.

The president will give his acceptance speech for the Democrat nomination for president at the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte.

Warren Buffett injected $5 billion into Bank of America for special considerations for stock warrants and a 6% annual return for ten years. This bank's regular personal savings account pays 0.05% annually.

We propose the following actions to be taken immediately:

1. Close out any personal or business accounts with Bank of America.
2. If you are a business, do not accept their debit or credit cards for purchases.
3. Sell your personal stock in this bank.
4. If your retirement or mutual fund owns stock in this bank, request that they divest it from their portfolios.
5. Help spread this effort in any manner that you can.
6. Fill out the form at this link showing what actions you took based on this project.

I don't have any funds whatsoever in this den of thieves and if I did I would assuredly join in on this project.One point I would like to add though,don't just remove your money from BOA and then put it into another den of thieves,Mellon,Wells Fargo,etc. - all your doing is removing money from one beast and feeding another.Take your hard earned money and find a local state bank to do business with,feed your own community.

 Also,for those of us who believe elections don't really matter anymore -because their is not much difference between the 2 major parties -the Democrats and Republicans- and this will continue until if and when people like Ron Paul wrest control of the GOP from the neo- cons- I have often thought the best path for those of us who are liberty minded is to follow the Polish Solidarity movement as our  example and this boycott of BOA is a step in the right direction.

Update:

Here is a link to an updated list of those who are taking their business elsewhere from Bank of America at Free North Carolina.

Crony Capitalist John Kerry

From The Washington Free Beacon:

Failed Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry’s (D., Mass.) long history of ethically dubious investments could invite controversy as he takes on a new role as a “top surrogate” for President Obama’s reelection campaign.
Kerry’s net worth as listed on his 2011 financial disclosure form is at least $193 million and likely much higher, making him the wealthiest member of the Senate. He is also a prolific investor, maintaining an array of stocks and other holdings through a mix of family trusts, marital trusts, and commingled fund accounts with his wife, Big Ketchup baroness Teresa Heinz.
The five-term Senator has a well-documented history of investing in companies that would benefit from policies he supports, as well as making conveniently timed and highly profitable trades coinciding with the passage of major legislation and, in some cases, the dissemination of privileged information.
For years, Kerry has invested millions in a number of green energy companies that have benefitted from the president’s efforts to aggressively subsidize the industry with taxpayer dollars.
These companies include Exelon, which received a $646 million taxpayer-guaranteed loan in 2011 to build a solar facility in California and created only 20 permanent jobs, as well as Fisker Automotive, the fledgling electric car company that offshored its manufacturing operation to Finland after receiving a $529 million federal loan guarantee in 2010.
The loan guarantees, approved by the Department of Energy, were made possible by funding allocated in the 2009 stimulus bill, which Kerry supported. According to Kerry’s own office, the Senator “played a key role” in crafting the portions of the legislation designed to offer federal support for green energy projects.

This is what you get when Washington gets to pick the winners and losers instead of the free markets,corruption.

'Repo Men'

Kevin D. Williams:

On and on and on it goes: Sen. John Kerry invested aggressively in health-care companies while shaping health-care legislation. Rep. Spencer Bachus (R. Ala.) was a remarkably apt options trader during the days when he had a front-row seat to Congress’s deliberations on the unfolding financial crisis. The Obama administration poured billions of dollars into solar companies, of which the failed Solyndra is the most infamous. But a lot of that money went to other firms, including First Solar, which is owned by billionaire Obama supporter Ted Turner and by Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs is omnipresent. And during the financial crisis, a big piece of Goldman Sachs was bought by Warren Buffett, who stacked up a lot of cash when the government poured money into that struggling investment bank with the support of Barack Obama. When the federal government bought into Goldman Sachs, it negotiated for itself a 5 percent dividend. Warren Buffett got 10 percent — on top of the benefit of having Washington inundate his investment with great rippling streams of taxpayers’ money. Republicans are no saints, either, but Democrats were running the congressional show during such crucial episodes as the implementation of the bailouts and the health-care debate — which were big investment opportunities for political insiders with access to market-moving information. Congress has effectively exempted itself from insider-trading rules, not that the SEC would have the guts to go after a Senator Schumer or a Speaker Pelosi for these exploits. And that — not campaign contributions, not lobbying — is the really stinky petri dish of festering corruption at the nexus of Washington and Wall Street. You want a case for limited government? That’s it. And Wall Street is on the wrong side of the argument, which is one reason free-market conservatives should not romanticize the lords of finance.

These 'lords of finance' and there hench men in Washington are doing nothing less than raping their country.

Everyone is looking for another Reagan to set things straight.Maybe we should be looking for another Andrew Jackson to end the corruption that prevails in Washington and on Wall Street.

Ann Barnhardt Is Calling It Quits

Ann Barnhardt:

Dear Clients, Industry Colleagues and Friends of Barnhardt Capital Management,

It is with regret and unflinching moral certainty that I announce that Barnhardt Capital Management has ceased operations. After six years of operating as an independent introducing brokerage, and eight years of employment as a broker before that, I found myself, this morning, for the first time since I was 20 years old, watching the futures and options markets open not as a participant, but as a mere spectator.
The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not. And this goes not just for my clients, but for every futures and options account in the United States. The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse. Given this sad reality, I could not in good conscience take one more step as a commodity broker, soliciting trades that I knew were unsafe or holding funds that I knew to be in jeopardy.
The futures markets are very highly-leveraged and thus require an exceptionally firm base upon which to function. That base was the sacrosanct segregation of customer funds from clearing firm capital, with additional emergency financial backing provided by the exchanges themselves. Up until a few weeks ago, that base existed, and had worked flawlessly. Firms came and went, with some imploding in spectacular fashion. Whenever a firm failure happened, the customer funds were intact and the exchanges would step in to backstop everything and keep customers 100% liquid – even as their clearing firm collapsed and was quickly replaced by another firm within the system.
Everything changed just a few short weeks ago. A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let’s not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem “complex” and “abstract” by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. Knowing Jon Corzine, and knowing the abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime and its cronies, this is not really a surprise. What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate. This is unfathomable. The risk exposure precedent that has been set is completely intolerable and has destroyed the entire industry paradigm. No informed person can continue to engage these markets, and no moral person can continue to broker or facilitate customer engagement in what is now a massive game of Russian Roulette.
I have learned over the last week that MF Global is almost certainly the mere tip of the iceberg. There is massive industry-wide exposure to European sovereign junk debt. While other firms may not be as heavily leveraged as Corzine had MFG leveraged, and it is now thought that MFG’s leverage may have been in excess of 100:1, they are still suicidally leveraged and will likely stand massive, unmeetable collateral calls in the coming days and weeks as Europe inevitably collapses. I now suspect that the reason the Chicago Mercantile Exchange did not immediately step in to backstop the MFG implosion was because they knew and know that if they backstopped MFG, they would then be expected to backstop all of the other firms in the system when the failures began to cascade – and there simply isn’t that much money in the entire system. In short, the problem is a SYSTEMIC problem, not merely isolated to one firm.