Note critique of tech and housing bubbles.
CB
^^^
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=548Itemid=1
The Obama Bubble: Why Wall Street Needs a Presidential Brand
Wednesday, 05 March 2008
by Pam Martens
Despite Barack Obama's claim that his campaign represents a mass movement of
average folks, the initial core of his support was largely comprised of rich
denizens of Wall Street. Why would the super wealthy want a percieved black
populist to become the nation's chief executive officer? The Obama bubble
was nurtured by Wall Street in order to have a friend in the White House when
the captains of capital are made to face the legal consequences for
deliberately creating current and past economic bubbles. Wall Street
desperately needs a president who will sweep all the corruption and losses,
would-be indictments, perp walks and prosecutions under the rug and get on with
an unprecedented taxpayer bailout of Wall Street. Who better to sell this
agenda to the millions of duped mortgage holders and foreclosed homeowners in
minority communities across America than our first, beloved, black president of
hope and change?
The Obama Bubble: Why Wall Street Needs a Presidential Brand
by Pam Martens
This article originally appeared in the print edition of Counterpunch.org.
We are asked to believe that those white executives at all the biggest Wall
Street firms now want a black populist president because they crave a level
playing field for the American people.”
The Obama phenomenon has been likened to that of cults, celebrity groupies and
Messiah worshipers. But what we're actually witnessing is Obama mania (as in
tulip mania), the third and final bubble orchestrated and financed by the
wonderful Wall Street folks who brought us the first two: the Nasdaq/tech
bubble and a subprime-mortgage-in-every-pot bubble.
To understand why Wall Street desperately needs this final bubble, we need to
first review how the first two bubbles were orchestrated and why.
In March of 2000, the Nasdaq stock market, hyped with spurious claims for
startup tech and dot.com companies, reached a peak of over 5,000. Eight years
later, it's trading in the 2,300 range and most of those companies no longer
exist. From peak to trough, Nasdaq transferred over $4 trillion from the
pockets of small mania-gripped investors to the wealthy and elite market
manipulators.
The highest monetary authority during those bubble days, Alan Greenspan,
chairman of the Federal Reserve, consistently told us that the market was
efficient and stock prices were being set by the judgment of millions of
highly knowledgeable investors.
Mr. Greenspan was the wind beneath the wings of a carefully orchestrated wealth
transfer system known as pump and dump on Wall Street. As hundreds of court
cases, internal emails, and insider testimony now confirm, this bubble was no
naturally occurring phenomenon any more than the Obama bubble is.
Nasdaq transferred over $4 trillion from the pockets of small mania-gripped
investors to the wealthy and elite market manipulators.
First, Wall Street firms issued knowingly false research reports to trumpet the
growth prospects for the company and stock price; second, they lined up big
institutional clients who were instructed how and when to buy at escalating
prices to make the stock price skyrocket (laddering); third, the firms
instructed the hundreds of thousands of stockbrokers serving the mom-and-pop
market to advise their clients to sit still as the stock price flew to the moon
or else the broker would have his commissions taken away (penalty bid). While
the little folks' money served as a prop under prices, the wealthy elite on
Wall Street and corporate insiders were allowed to sell at the top of the
market (pump-and-dump wealth transfer).
Why did people buy into this mania for brand new, untested companies when there
is a basic caveat that most people in this country know, i.e., the majority of
all new businesses fail? Common sense failed and mania prevailed because of
massive hype pumped by big media, big public relations, and shielded from
regulation by big law firms, all eager to collect their share of Wall Street's
rigged cash cow.
The current housing bubble bust is just a freshly minted version of Wall
Street's real estate limited partnership frauds of the '80s, but on a grander
scale. In the 1980s version, the firms packaged real estate into limited
partnerships and peddled it as secure investments to moms and pops. The major
underpinning of this wealth transfer mechanism was that regulators turned a
blind eye to the fact that the investments were listed at the original face
amount on the clients' brokerage statements long after they had lost most of
their value.
Today's real estate related securities (CDOs and SIVs) that are blowing up
around the globe are simply the above scheme with more
