Replies to post #262859 on $Stock*Shop*Charts*News*Option$

[Stock Lobster]

Secrets Of The Plunge Protection Team

The Four Derivative US Dictators
By Michael Edward
5-13-4

There are just four people who control all of the U.S. markets through their use of dangerous and explosive DERIVATIVES. They are risking the assets and retirement funds of all Americans. Because of their manipulations, especially since 2001, U.S. financial markets are now based on the gambling whims of a special fraternity of Federal Government DERIVATIVE dealers.

This group is known among Wall Street as the Plunge Protection Team (PPT). Their "official" role was to prevent another 1987 "Black Monday". They have the entire U.S. Treasury at their disposal to manipulate the markets through DERIVATIVES (futures options). In other words, they are using the assets behind the U.S. Treasury to rig the prices of commodites (gold, currencies, etc.) and stocks.

This fraternity comprises of Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the heads of the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Association. It works closely with all the U.S. exchanges and Wall Street banks, including the largest DERIVATIVE risk holders Citibank and JP Morgan Chase.

Few people are aware of Executive Order 12631 signed by Ronald Reagan on March 18, 1988. In a nut shell, this is the "authority" behind the four dictators and the [sic] "laws" and "regulations" that have backed their casino-style DERIVATIVE gambling spree since 2001. Here are some highlights of this Executive Order to ponder:

Executive Order 12631 - Working Group on Financial Markets - Mar. 18, 1988; 53 FR 9421, 3 CFR, 1988 Comp., p. 559.

"By virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, and in order to establish a Working Group on Financial Markets, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Establishment. (a) There is hereby established a Working Group on Financial Markets (Working Group). The Working Group shall be composed of:

(1) the Secretary of the Treasury, or his designee; (2) the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or his designee; (3) the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, or his designee; and (4) the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or her designee.

Section 2. Purposes and Functions. (a) Recognizing the goals of enhancing the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of our Nation's financial markets and maintaining investor confidence, the Working Group shall identify and consider:

(2) the actions, including governmental actions under existing laws and regulations (such as policy coordination and contingency planning), that are appropriate to carry out these recommendations.

(b) The Working Group shall consult, as appropriate, with representatives of the various exchanges, clearinghouses, self-regulatory bodies, and with major market participants to determine private sector solutions wherever possible.

Section 3. Administration. (c) To the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of funds therefore, the Department of the Treasury shall provide the Working Group with such administrative and support services as may be necessary for the performance of its functions."

Get out of the markets before the inflated DERIVATIVE bubble bursts

The pre-911 U.S. markets showed an astounding - yet confounding and puzzling - rise for the 4 months proceeding 911. The U.S. media dubbed it a "patriotic rally". The European Press called it a "PPT [Plunge Protection Team] rally". Obviously, the U.S. markets were manipulated and rigged to an inflated value in advance of the 911 disaster. Was this a coordinated measure in anticipation of what was to come? Only The Powers That Be can answer that question directly.

Since 911, there have been at least three major long-term stock market rallies. In all 3 instances, when the markets opened all the indexes began to quickly plunge. In each incidence, by early afternoon the markets were brought back from the brink of collapse to the surprise of everyone, including historical analysts.

An event that should have sent markets spiraling downward was the Enron, et al, unprecedented corporate accounting scandals. Yet despite this, an unprecedented accross-the-board markets rally began on July 24, 2002. Once again, the European Press called it a "PPT rally".

Outside the U.S., it's no secret who is behind these secretive "no-name" purchases of high risk DERIVATIVE gambling wagers:

On September 16th, 2001, The Guardian reported "that a secretive committee... dubbed 'the plunge protection team'... is ready to coordinate intervention by the Federal Reserve on an unprecedented scale. The Fed, supported by the banks, will buy equities from mutual funds and other institutional sellers... "

On Feb 21, 2002, the Financial Times featured an article about Japan's Stock Buying Body. The article stated that "...government backed equity markets, as Japan has recently become aware, do not work... Plunge protecting the world's markets may be a hazardous pursuit."

In each of these occurances, a large "no-name" buyer in the futures market secretly plunged in and bought up massive quantities of DERIVATIVES through banking groups such as JP Morgan. These were completely reckless gambling bets that the futures index [S&P] would rise even though it was obvious that it was going to fall. Because such a large amount of money was wagered on the S&P's rise, in each instance, it reversed the market's free-fall.

At the Federal Open Market Committee meeting on Jan 29-30, 2002, the Federal Reserve System (Greenspan) openly discussed the use of "unconventional methods" to stimulate the economy. Recently, the Financial Times of London quoted an anonymous U.S. Fed official who stated that one of the extraordinary measures "considered" in January 2004 was "buying U.S. equities".

These gambling interventions by the "Four Financial Dictators" have successfully brought the markets back each time... despite the inflated financial realities that existed. The purchase of these gambling DERIVATIVES at a great loss have transformed each market crisis into a rally. By manipulating the markets in this way, they have further inflated the highly overvalued market indexes.

Perhaps Americans can now understand why the major U.S. banks, such as JP Morgan, are holding TRILLIONS of gambling derivatives on their books as the PPT group of four use them to rig the markets. Sooner or later, these market "fixes" will no longer hold the bubble from bursting.

Thus, we have witnessed the creation and growth of the financial bubble that is on the brink of explosion... and we know who rigs and controls the markets to create this inflated bubble of gambling debt.

Paper Stocks Rise as Metals Lose - PTT Rigging is Obvious

In the same motus opperandi, the PPT group of 4 are currently buying metals futures (DERIVATIVES) in great amounts on the New York and Chicago exchanges. For the past two weeks, they have created a loss in silver and gold indexes by purchasing (at U.S. taxpayer's expense) large gambling bets (derivatives) against the true value of intrinsic metals.

The result is that they have rigged the value of metals to discourage investors from purchasing gold and silver instead of U.S. Federal Reserve Notes. This is a measure by the PPT to plug a large hole in the bursting dam of the financial bubble, but even Hans Brinker cannot stop this leak.

The bottom line? Stick with history and prepare for the financial explosion. When the bubble deflates and pops, economic deflation will control our daily lives. The PPT cannot continue to spend what it doesn't have. The retirement funds they are "borrowing" from are already exhausted. Get yourself some gold and silver... it will buy your bread to survive in the coming future... while paper Federal Reserve Notes will burn in your furnace to heat your homes.

http://worldvisionportal.org/wvpforum/viewtopic.php?t=204

[Stock Lobster]

RegisteredRep: The Stock Market's Da Vinci Code

Mar 1, 2006 12:00 PM,
By Jonathan Moreland

Is the Federal government manipulating the equity markets? For years, there have been whispers on Wall Street of secret government-backed actions — like stepping in to buy equity index futures to prevent investors from catastrophic plunges.

It sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory for sure, but it is one that has currency and won't go away. The conspiracy goes like this: There is a group of federal government officials — the Treasury secretary, the Fed chairman — plus senior NYSE officials who make up, the Plunge Protection Team. It is said they intervene to put a floor under stocks whenever they are at risk of penetrating important levels of technical support, such as when the 50-day moving average slips under the 200-day moving average. Technicians call this the Death Cross, because, when that happens, it can trigger a larger, steeper rout caused by ask-no-questions programmed selling, which can lead to outright panic selling.

The conspiracy theory holds that these officials buy S&P 500 index futures through major Wall Street trading desks, with money from the Exchange Stabilization Fund, a $38 billion Treasury Department account to buy currencies on the open market and secret government offshore accounts. Believers say these activities are coordinated out of the Fed's New York branch on Liberty Street in Manhattan, just a block from the NYSE.

True believers — many on the Internet, as might be expected — point to public statements by no less than Alan Greenspan. During a speech given on Jan. 14, 1997, at a university in Leuven, Belgium, Greenspan said: “We have the responsibility to prevent major financial market disruptions through development and enforcement of prudent regulatory standards and, if necessary in rare circumstance, through direct intervention in market events.”

Richard Russell, who has seen it all in his nearly 50 years of publishing the Dow Theory Letters, is no conspiracy theorist by any means. But even he has openly wondered about the remarkable ability of the indices he tracks so closely to recover so consistently from the technical trading fault lines they have flirted with so often in recent years.

Russell told his 12,000 subscribers in mid-October of last year that he has “never been a big believer in manipulation and the so-called ‘Plunge Protection Team.’” But, he proceeded to muse about the events of a trading day that month. “Manipulation? This morning's breadth on the NYSE was down by a big plurality of 1400, but the S&P and the Dow were actually higher? This was truly extraordinary, and I wondered whether possibly the Fed was buying S&P futures in an effort to put a floor under the market.”

The Invisible Hand

What? The U.S. Federal Reserve putting a “floor” on stocks? It has happened overtly in moments of crisis. In the days following the Oct. 19, 1987 debacle, the Fed flooded the banking system with money, announcing that it would be a willing lender of last resort for important financial institutions and “encouraging” banks and Wall Street houses to relax their loan covenants for a brief period. Fed officials do appear to have helped prevent things from getting worse. The 22.6 percent plunge in the Dow that day did not spread into the deeper catastrophe it could have become. The Fed's action and statements allowed cooler heads to start placing reasonable bets that a bottom was nigh.

H. Robert Heller, a Fed governor between 1986 and 1989, had a front-row seat to the stock market crash of 1987 and recalls what happened. “Everybody's attention was tightly focused on containing the damage and preventing a spread of the financial disruptions throughout the financial system,” Heller wrote years later. “Do not forget that at that time we were also dealing with a severe S&L crisis and almost 200 bank failures per year. Without swift supportive action on behalf of the Fed, the stock market crash could well have been the straw that broke the back of an already weak camel.”

But a surprising number of investors think the government's invisible hand is active even in the absence of obvious threats, like the blow up of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 and the horrific Sept. 11 attacks. Specifically, diehard PPT believers claim that in three months in 2002 (June, July and October) and March 2003, and again in March, April and October 2005, equity indices were challenging widely followed technical supports — but miraculously recovered.

The avoidance of a stock market meltdown has stumped the logic of many big-picture investors, too. The Economist magazine has been sounding an alarm for years about the U.S.'s current account deficit (now at a record 6 percent of GDP), the inevitable bursting of the worldwide real estate bubble and the overindebted U.S. consumer and government. More recently, rising interest rates and/or inflation, a declining rate of corporate earnings growth, soaring energy and commodity prices and enormously costly natural disasters have added to strains on stock prices. Despite all this, the market has rallied each time off its numerous, relatively recent technical fault lines. For market bears the market's resilience is literally unbelievable. So much so, that the only explanation is the existence of the Plunge Protection Team. (The PPT is also purported to be active in the gold markets, which has recently been setting record highs after being depressed for two decades. But that's a whole other story.)

The first mention of “The Plunge Protection Team” was in a February 1997 article in the Washington Post. But surf the Web and you will find numerous articles that treat the existence of the PPT as a given. A Lexis/Nexis search yields 78 references; Google “Plunge Protection Team,” and you'll see nearly one million references as of this writing — and it's growing quickly. The Web is home to lots of drivel, of course. But reputable sources wonder, too. The U.K.-based Guardian and Evening Standard newspapers are particularly ready to give the PPT credit for actively intervening in markets. There are plenty of other references, however, which tie together publicly available information to reach intriguing conclusions. For instance, an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal in 1989 by Heller argued that the Fed should intervene directly in the stock market to prop it up if faced with a potentially catastrophic collapse. Heller even specifically proposed using the leverage of stock index futures to give the Fed more bang for its market-saving buck. (Heller, who conspiracists claim is the PPT architect because of that article, chuckled when told of his supposed role; he says he'd never heard of it.)

The latest instance of suspected PPT intervention came in an August 2005 report by Sprott Management, a well-considered Canadian firm with CDN $2.5 billion under management : “It is time that market participants, the media and, most of all, the government acknowledge what should be blatantly obvious to anyone who reviews the public record on the matter: These markets have been interfered with on numerous occasions. Our primary concern is that what apparently started as a stop-gap measure may have morphed into a serious moral hazard situation, with market manipulation an endemic feature of the U.S. stock market.”

Based on Fact?

If there is a PPT, it may be hiding in plain sight. Following the 1987 crash, the Reagan administration looked for ways to formalize responses to economy threatening market movers. The U.S. Executive Order 12631, signed on March 19, 1988, by President Reagan, established the “Working Group on Financial Markets.” The order states the purpose of the group as being “… to identify and consider: 1) the major issues raised by the numerous studies on the events in the financial markets surrounding Oct. 19, 1987… ; and, 2) the actions, including governmental actions under existing laws and regulations (such as policy coordination and contingency planning), that are appropriate to carry out these recommendations.”

Executive Order 12631 dictates that the Working Group be made up of the highest profile money types in the government, explicitly naming: the Secretary of the Treasury, the chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the chairman of the SEC and the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. To make sure this group has the resources to carry out its will, the order further made the Treasury responsible for providing the “support service” it needs-but only “to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of funds.” (No one at any of these agencies would comment for this article.)

So how did this team of crisis managers come to be viewed by some as a secretive fraternity of government and business interests, secretly manipulating stocks and gold and making a mockery of the concept of free markets? Brett Fromson, of the Washington Post, who went on to work for TheStreet.com and the Wall Street Journal, was the one who wrote the Washington Post story that came up with the PPT name. (He says a clever copy desk staffer came up with the name for a headline.) Fromson covered the Washington/Wall Street beat, which connected the ongoing relationship between the political and financial capitals. “I got the idea for the story after seeing that many of my sources were often in meetings together. I realized there was an enormous amount of planning going on.” He adds, “The story resulted from a lot of reporting and relied on the people I was talking with having a relationship of trust” with him. Fromson said no called him after the piece was published telling him that he got it wrong — or that he was insane.

Perhaps the only certainty about the PPT conspiracy theory is that it is not going away any time soon. While every rebound by the indices in the face of damning economic fundamentals and market technicals deepens the conviction of PPT believers; not even a market crash will likely convince them otherwise. After all, the market's massive slide from 2000 through 2002 didn't even unwind the theory. Either way, someone should make it into a movie. It might be called Wall Street's Da Vinci Code.

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