SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - The Old Whipsaw Ahead of Quad Witching Expiration

"Those that have so much power over others as to be able to oppress them have seldom so much over themselves as not to oppress."

Matthew Henry

There was some profound whipsawing in the stock futures market today as rumours were spread liberally by trading desks attempting to exit positions and square their books ahead of tomorrow's big option expiration and the exogenous events of the next five days.

Blaming the Victim and Other Biases and Their Use by the Predator Class To Subvert the Unwary

It is an occasional human fault to get pulled into the habit of 'blaming the victim.'

Most people do not do it regularly, except in the case of some uninformed prejudice or in response to misinformation.

But some people seem to do it more often and sometimes habitually. Why is that?

As we might imagine, nothing can make a certain type of person feel better about themselves than attributing the misfortune of another to foolishness or stupidity. Since a similar misfortune has not happened to them, they must therefore be a superior type of person, and not the ordinary person that they fear they might be who just happened to get lucky.

In my experience this 'distancing' of oneself from the rest of humanity is at the root of much of the bad behaviour that can become institutionalized into the corruption of an organizational structure that eats at the fabric of society.

Sometimes people do engage in serial risky behaviour that leads them into trouble.  It seems as though everyone knows at least one person who gets themselves into a bad situation by acting foolishly and recklessly. Sometimes it is caused by mental illness, alcoholism or some other negative influence. Everyone can think of someone who 'brought it on themselves.' And our imaginations can extend that instance quite easily and broadly.

We can use these few anecdotal examples to blame the victims unjustly on a more general and uninformed level. And we often fall into this bias on the prompting of con men and sociopaths of the predator class who use it to justify their own criminal actions and personal injustice. They are not burdened with empathy for their victims, and even delight in their misfortune. But they must find ways to make their actions more acceptable to society as a whole that normally does have such concerns for equity and justice.

Personal exceptionalism is rooted in pride, and is the antithesis of the old saying, 'There but for the grace of God go I.'

Those MF global customers? They had it coming because they should have known better. Those people who lost money in the stock market? Well, no one MADE them buy those fraudulent paper assets that professionals recommended to them. That family who lost their home to foreclosure because the father was severely injured by sickness or accident? They should have planned better and taken more precautions.

In its extreme example, the subornation of human caring becomes a form of madness, the 'demonization of the other.' That whole group/class/race/nation of people who are being mistreated, brutalized, cheated, starved, and even murdered? It is unfortunate of course, but they are lazy/cheap/stupid/dirty/sneaky/different/subhuman and so they had it coming. But we are not like that so we are doing well and even prospering.

But these are just thoughts from my own direct experience.  Here is a systematic and more thorough analysis that I found to be interesting.

Blaming the victim – why do we do it? For example, are rape victims responsible for what happens to them? Are victims of car crashes or other accidents responsible for what happened to them? These are the kinds of questions we examine as we look at the strange human tendency to blame the victim.

Here is the concept map for the biases discussed in this show:

Download Podcast here.

Source: Blaming the Victim and Other Biases

Attribution Map Quiz

1: Fundamental Attribution Error
•“people do what they do because of the kind of people that they are, not because of the situation they are in”
•“people tend to underestimate external influences when explaining other people’s behavior”

2: Actor/Observer (bias) Difference
•“Whereas we are very likely to find internal causes for other people’s behavior, we tend to look …to the situation to explain our own behavior”
•Example: in a murder trial, the prosecution will call the person a murderer, defense will focus on the difficulty of the person’s life at the time or their childhood, characteristics of the person murdered. “That person drove my client to do what he/she did”

3. Self-serving Attribution (bias): while we tend to take credit for our successes (attribute success to internal causes), we blame our failures on external causes
•I earned an A, my professor gave me a C
•Why? Because it threatens our self esteem to think that failures were caused by something about ourselves
•Example: sports – when a team wins, they attribute it to talent or skill, when they lose, they attribute it to bad luck, poor playing conditions, bad calls from the umpires rather than “I didn’t train hard/study hard enough”, “Our team wasn’t as good”
•It feels bad to attribute our failures to ourselves

4. Optimism bias: “good things are more likely to happen to oneself than to others and bad things are less likely to happen to oneself”
•A kind of “defensive attribution”
•Why do we tend to hold this belief? Because the world is a scary, unpredictable place and that makes us feel anxious. The only way to feel a little better is to believe that it couldn’t happen to me. “I would have acted differently”, “That wouldn’t happen to me because…”I would make different decisions”

5. Belief in a Just World: bad things happen to bad people, “or at least to people who make mistakes, poor choices, etc.” thus, bad things won’t happen to me because I wouldn’t make those mistakes.
•“the belief in a just world keeps anxiety-provoking thoughts about one’s own safety at bay” Aronson, et. al.
•when the world seems chaotic or dangerous, this is anxiety provoking. so we attempt to reassure ourselves by blaming the victim

Allen Stanford Sentenced to 110 Ten Years in Prison For Ponzi Scheme

Breaking news...

High living Texas banker Sir Allen Stanford, often referred to as 'the other Madoff,' was sentenced today to 110 years in prison for the Ponzi scheme he operated by selling fraudulent certificates of deposit issued by his Antigua-based Stanford International Bank Ltd., and sold in the U.S. by his Houston-based securities firm, Stanford Group Co.

The US Justice Department had referred to Mr. Stanford as 'a ruthless predator responsible for one of the most egregious frauds in history.'

The reigning champions who currently hold the title for ruthless-financial-predators-responsible-for-THE-most-egregious-fraud-in-history could not be reached for comment, as they prepared to leave for their weekend vacation homes in the Hamptons, according to their Personal Assistants at the New York Federal Reserve.

Simon Johnson: The Institutional Flaw At the Heart of the Federal Reserve

This is a long 'thought piece' by Simon Johnson, an eminent US economist and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

It exposes the inherent conflicts of interest at the New York Fed, the history behind that structural flaw, and the problems it creates in a time of high powered money and financialization, with the Fed assuming even more regulatory powers from a craven Congress.

This is nothing new to readers here. The Fed is an institution fouled by privilege and insider dealing, involved so deeply in white collar crime as to be completely ensnared in the credibility trap of its own making.

We saw the heart of the problem when an arrogantly defiant Jamie Dimon faced down the august Senators, many of whom are at least his part time employees. As a financial and economic analyst put it even more bluntly:

"Jamie Dimon’s appearance before the Senate Banking Committee was a sickening display that clearly demonstrated that Congress has been thoroughly corrupted by Wall Street. Instead of grilling Dimon, Senators acted like overly affectionate puppies fighting each other for an opening to smooch their master."

M. Ramsey King, The King Report

So it is heartening when someone who is clearly in the establishment and not so easily ignored, dismissed, or shouted down is willing to stand and say that there is a problem, it is not incidental, and it will create more and serious problems in the future.

Certainly Simon Johnson is no Andrew Jackson, and most likely appropriately so as he is not a politician.  But his reputation and careful thinking will provide 'cover' for other economists and thinkers who are reluctant to speak out because of the academic and career sanctions that can be imposed on them by the banking cartel and their friends and associates in the universities, think tanks, major media, and positions of political power. And so it is an act of principled moral courage, which is something that has been in short supply for quite a few years now.

Obama was elected by the people as a reformer, but he has failed to deliver and often spectacularly so, probably due to a weakness in his character and circumstance, and a preference to facilitate rather than to lead.  And that is a tragedy, because it still leaves the nation desperately in need of reform and renewal that will almost certainly not be coming from the Republican party of Big Money and unwavering devotion to the organized hypocrisy of special privilege.

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained growth and recovery.

If the suffering becomes great enough, change will inevitably come, but it may not be orderly or as controllable as the monied interests often like to think.

An Institutional Flaw At The Heart Of The Federal Reserve
By Simon Johnson
June 14, 2012

On the PBS NewsHour in late May, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner indicated that the continued presence of Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, on the board on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York creates a perception problem that should be addressed. He used the diplomatic language favored by finance ministers, but the message was loud and clear: Mr. Dimon should resign from the board of the New York Fed.

Mr. Dimon has been an effective opponent of financial reform over the past four years. He remains an outspoken advocate of the view that global mega-banks can manage their own risks, and he has stated publicly that the new international and national rules on capital requirements are “Anti-American.”

Mr. Dimon now finds himself at the center of a number of official investigations into how his bank could have lost so much money so quickly in its London-based trading operation – including whether adverse material information was disclosed to regulators and to markets in a timely manner.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that serious concerns about the London trading operation had been raised – but not made public – two years ago; the New York Times has reported similar concerns. On Wednesday, the Senate Banking Committee interviewed Mr. Dimon; the event was inconclusive, perhaps because JPMorgan Chase is a major donor to some members of the committee.

On Monday, Lee Bollinger, chairman of the board of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and president of Columbia University, weighed in to contradict Mr. Geithner in no uncertain terms. The Wall Street Journal reported Mr. Bollinger’s view: Mr. Dimon should stay on the New York Fed’s board, and critics attacking the Fed have a “false understanding” of how it works. (Please note the correction to the original Wall Street Journal story, with an important change to the reporting of what Mr. Bollinger said.) This is a remarkable statement in part because Mr. Geithner is himself a former president of the New York Fed, so it is hard to see how he would have a false understanding of how the Fed works.

More generally, however, Mr. Bollinger’s intervention is inadvertently helpful, as it opens the door to a more productive conversation about the exact nature of the institutional weakness that lurks at the heart of the Federal Reserve System and that threatens our financial stability more broadly....

The problem is that sensible liquidity support can easily become inappropriate subsidies, particularly when some financial institutions are considered too big to fail. Outsiders will never observe the real-time information on which central banks make decisions, so we need to be able to trust the people running our central bank, otherwise the system will go badly wrong — again...

Mr. Bollinger’s intervention brings a fresh spotlight to a deep governance problem at the heart of the Federal Reserve System – prominent financial sector executives and their close allies are much too involved in how the New York Fed operates. This is partly an anachronistic holdover from the original Federal Reserve Act of 1913 – and reflects the political milieu of that time, in which bankers had to be persuaded to accept a central bank (for more background and a lot of relevant technical detail, I recommend Edwin Walter Kemmerer’s “The ABC of the Federal Reserve System,” published in 1920).

But it is also an all-too-accurate reflection of where we stand today with regard to global mega-banks and the large, nontransparent and highly dangerous subsidies they extract from the rest of society by being too big to fail.

The people who run global mega-banks get the upside when things go well – they are paid based on their return on equity unadjusted for risk, so they prefer a lot of debt piled on top of very little equity. When things go badly, the downside is someone else’s problem – in the first instance, typically, the Federal Reserve’s...

In the run-up to 2007, the complacency of the entire Fed System can be traced in part to the cozy relationship between the New York Fed (headed then by Mr. Geithner) and the Wall Street elite. We cannot let this happen again. Yet all too often with regard to financial reform today, we find the Fed lagging rather than leading the thinking and the implementation that Dodd-Frank calls for on many issues...

Read the rest here.