By Jeff Nielson – May 10, 2016
Our markets and economies are marched up and down in “bubbles” and “crashes”, with the duration of these cycles of financial crime now seeming to be fixed at about once every eight years. As the dust settles after each of these eight-year operations, the Fat Cats at the very, very top are found to have gotten much, much wealthier, while almost everyone else ends up significantly poorer.
With this pattern of crime now being obvious, and the pattern of “winners” and “losers” being equally obvious, it doesn’t require a rocket scientist to suspect that the Winners have been orchestrating these bubbles and crashes. It is obviously considerably easier to be on the winning side of your (supposed) gambling, when you know in advance what will transpire in the Game.
Previous suspicion of guilt has focused upon “the Top-1%”, a small sub-set of the wealthy whose wealth has been soaring higher at a rate never before seen in the history of our societies. However, upon closer scrutiny, it has more recently been determined that even this small sliver of our population is too large a demographic upon which to focus our attention (and criminal prosecutions?). We need to look at the top 0.1%.
Top 0.1% worth as much as the bottom 90%
(That’s one tenth of one percent!) It is a headline which denotes an obvious economic crime against humanity. A mere 1/1000th of our population holds as much wealth as the bottom-90% combined, roughly half of all the wealth of our societies. Did this 1/1000 th micro-sliver earn half of all our societies’ wealth? Of course not. They stole it.
Previous commentaries have described and explained various means by which these ultra-wealthy oligarchs have stolen half of all wealth – and now hoard it in their vaults, while our economies literally starve from lack of capital (lack of capital = depression).
We’ve long suspected that the Ultra-Wealthy have been systematically stealing our wealth. What has previously been lacking is hard evidence of this. Until now. Recent research into the most-recent “crash” of our markets (the Crash of ’08) provides us with a key piece of evidence. The Top-1% were engaging in additional “excess” (excessive) selling, which exceeded $100 million per day.
By definition, the rich are less sensitive to any/all economic shocks, because their margin for survival is much greater than those with less wealth. Are the Top 0.1% greedier than all other people? Yes. Do they love their money more than all other people? Yes.
Are they “more sensitive” to financial shocks than the Little People? Of course not. What makes people really “sensitive”? Threatening their survival.
Take Warren Buffet for example. In 2014 he lost $2 billion in two days. No problem. In 2015 he lost $11 billion in a couple months. He was still smiling. What’s a billion or two to a multi-billionaire? When you can lose 11 billion and still be a billionaire, markets can be manipulated; governments can be purchased; booms and busts can be orchestrated without affecting your comfort and security level.
Investors who “earn less” have a common nickname in our markets: sheep. They acquired their nickname through their propensity to be herded, spooked, and then sheared. If anything, we would have expected the selling by this class of investors to exceed selling by other classes.w.
Selling by the Top 0.1% on the day of the collapse was actually slightly below their average volume of excessive selling during the first ten days after the Lehman event. Furthermore, as indicated earlier in the research, the excessive selling by the Top 0.1% persisted right through until the end of 2008. It is exactly what we would expect to see if some group was deliberately creating a crash: relentlessly pounding the markets with excessive selling day after day, week after week, month after month.
Then we have this additional, important information:
Other investor demographics, from gender to marital status to place of residence, showed no signs of being related to the volatility sensitivity of stock sales, the study showed.
This is definitive. No matter how one sub-divided investors demographically during the Crash of ’08, everybody behaved the same – except for one small-but-significant group: the Top 0.1%. One anomaly. One group of investors, who relentlessly pounded markets with excessive selling, for months. Think of a hammer. Think of a nail. That was the Crash of ’08. This research indicates who was holding the hammer .
Furthermore, this was a “psychological study”. It proceeded on the naïve assumption that no one caused the crash. The intent was purely to study the (supposed) “reactions” to the Crash. What this means is that the research only examined direct selling by the Top 0.1%.
In other words, the data only covers what the Top 0.1% sold out of their own holdings. It doesn’t examine, for example, how much additional short-trading was done by these Predators. Also, large corporations and institutions are significant shareholders in our markets. The Top 0.1% own/control many if not most of these large corporations and institutions. The data does not include how much additional indirect selling was engineered by these oligarchs. The relentless pattern of “excessive selling” that was indicated by the research, while significant, can only be regarded as the tip of the iceberg here.
The Top 0.1% create our “bubbles”, and they create our “crashes”, and they do so solely for their own, personal profit – heedless of the millions of lives which they damage and destroy with each of their cycles-of-crime.
We now have incontrovertible proof that the Top 0.1% also create the crashes. Means, motive, opportunity, and now evidence.
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