SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Technical Trade

Priceline getting hammered after hours for its miss.

Disney is slightly down after hours

This is all light volume technical trade. I think the wiseguys are pumping up a dull market to cheapen the costs of downside insurance (puts) in order to set up the next dump to the lower end of the trend channel.

But, one can never really tell which way the fraud is blowing.

Supposedly stocks rallied today because of the BLS' JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) which came out flat. Consumer Credit came in quite a bit light.

As I said, this was all technical, and one can apply whatever rationale they prefer.

BBC: Banking With Hitler

It is little known that some American and British banks and businessmen continued to do business with the Third Reich, even benefiting from slave labor and the victims of the Holocaust, while the war raged.

If you do not believe that this same mentality, and these same kind of people doing the same things, are at work today, then you may be quite the optimist, or perhaps naive.

Profit has no loyalty and greed has no conscience. And where there is no penalty, few of the nationless oligarchy will be discouraged from participating.

NY Times
Regulator Says British Bank Helped Iran Hide Deals
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG
August 6, 2012

Using its New York-based operations, a major British bank schemed with the Iranian government for nearly a decade to launder $250 billion, leaving the United States financial system vulnerable to terrorists and corrupt regimes, New York’s top banking regulator charged on Monday.

The New York State Department of Financial Services accused Standard Chartered, which the agency called a “rogue institution,” of masking more than 60,000 transactions for Iranian banks and corporations, motivated by the millions of dollars it reaped in fees.

Senior management at the 150-year-old bank used the New York branch “as a front for prohibited dealings with Iran — dealings that indisputably helped sustain a global threat to peace and stability,” according to a regulatory order sent to the bank. The order requires the bank to explain the apparent violations of law in a hearing later this month and justify why its license to operate in New York shouldn’t be revoked...

Read the rest here.

IMPACT 2012 in NYC: Chris Hedges and Robert Johnson

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.

Currency Wars: Move to Make Treasury's Geithner a Permanent Member of US National Security Council

"To put it crudely, the US wants to inflate the rest of the world, while the latter is trying to deflate the US. The US must win, since it has infinite ammunition: there is no limit to the dollars the Federal Reserve can create.

What needs to be discussed is the terms of the world’s surrender: the needed changes in nominal exchange rates and domestic policies around the world."

Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 12 Oct 2010


"...the Treasury secretary, who has primary authority on economic and financial issues in the cabinet, should be at every meeting to advise on how economic and security issues intersect, and to ensure that the United States is using its economic and financial strength in the most effective way."

Robert Kimmitt, NY Times, 23 July 2012

Looks like the US is getting ready to flex its financial muscle.  I don't think the Anglo-American banking cartel will relinquish the dollar reserve currency supremacy easily.  This is currency war.

I somehow missed this editorial when it first came out. But over the weekend and today I heard echoes of the same sentiment from various places in what looks like a loosely organized public relations campaign.

The National Security Council, formed in 1947 and comprised of the President, Vice-President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Director of the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The National Security Council has an unmistakable military flavor.

The move to add the Treasury Secretary as a permanent member is just another sign of the currency wars heating up. At least from the US perspective, there is an unmistakable convergence between military and economic action.

As I have noted before, the language used often suggests that the US considers its TBTF's to be a modern form of financial battleship, able to move key markets at will to support official policy. And the credit rating agencies are like agile destroyers.

I think this will become very interesting.

NY Times
Give Treasury Its Proper Role on the National Security Council
By Robert M. Kimmitt
July 23, 2012

THE National Security Act of 1947, which created the National Security Council, the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Central Intelligence Agency, turns 65 on Thursday. But it’s not ready for retirement; it needs, instead, to be rejuvenated by making the Treasury secretary a statutory member of the National Security Council, rather than an invited attendee.

The act and the organizations it created performed well during the cold war, the post-cold-war decade and the period after 9/11. But they need to be updated to recognize the close connection between security and economic issues as we look forward from the global financial crisis of the last few years. The concept of national security has broadened considerably since the N.S.C.’s early decades, elevating economic and financial issues to crucial elements to our nation’s security, alongside the traditional diplomatic and military issues. Diplomatic and military issues are still important, of course. Iran, Syria and North Korea make that clear. But the growth areas in national security policy are economic and financial.

During the cold war, the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, knew with precision the throw-weights of American nuclear weapons based in Germany; today, Chancellor Angela Merkel has to know with equal precision the spreads on Spanish and Italian sovereign debt.

It may seem odd that the Treasury secretary would have been left off the list of statutory members of the National Security Council by the generation of American leaders who helped lay the groundwork for Western Europe’s postwar revival with the Bretton Woods conference and the Marshall Plan. But at the time, military, diplomatic and economic policies were seen as largely separate tracks. And as the cold war deepened, the military challenge from the Soviet Union assumed overwhelming importance.

This is where the National Security Act has not kept pace. The statutory members of the National Security Council are still the president, vice president, secretary of state and secretary of defense, with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence as statutory advisers. This is a good, but incomplete, team. Even though the Obama White House says that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner is a regular attendee, along with the statutory members, it is now time to add the secretary of the Treasury to the list of statutory members. That would ensure that the economic and financial dimensions of national security challenges are given equal weight in council deliberations, now and into the future...

There are, of course, other officials integral to international economic and financial success, like the secretary of commerce and the United States trade representative. They should still be invited to N.S.C. meetings. But the Treasury secretary, who has primary authority on economic and financial issues in the cabinet, should be at every meeting to advise on how economic and security issues intersect, and to ensure that the United States is using its economic and financial strength in the most effective way.

Read the entire editorial here.