Come for the Occupation. Stay for the consumption.

Indeed. Perhaps when the fate of the $60 trillion bond market rest on one Facebook status update, it is time to officially call it a day?

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!
Sept.28th, 2008;

Nov.6, 2011;

Intelligence provided to U.N. nuclear officials shows that Iran’s government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon, receiving assistance from foreign scientists to overcome key technical hurdles, according to Western diplomats and nuclear experts briefed on the findings.

Greece: Military heads “replaced”.

Via email;

The servers are buried right now, but the FT is reporting that the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) has closed it’s commodity exchanges “until further notice” due to the large number of contracts held by MF Global’s clients.
The firm apparently tapped customer funds to try and save itself. Every open account’s current balance, held by that firm, is now open to question. The collateral call by counterparties, last Thursday, since we now can see that that was what was going on, a massive liquidation of positions to satisfy collateral needs, has frozen every account and position across the globe.
Here’s the link to the FT story, and here’s the customer theft story:

What began as nearly $1 billion missing had dropped to less than $700 million by late Monday. It is unclear where the money went, and some money is expected to trickle in over the coming days as the firm sorts through the bankruptcy process, the people said.
But regulators are examining whether MF Global diverted some customer money to support its own trades as the firm teetered on the brink of collapse. If that was the case, it could violate a fundamental tenet of Wall Street regulation: Customers’ money must be kept separate from company money.

This is going to get very, very big.
Only real press, not behind a firewall, that I can get to, so far…

More here: Regulators Investigating MF Global for Missing Money. MF Global was run by former New Jersey Governor, Jon Corzine.
Flashback!

A similar benefit was held in April at the home of the wife of Jon Corzine, the ex-governor of New Jersey and former chief executive of Goldman Sachs. Both events are part of a concerted effort to lure deep-pocketed donors back to Mr. Obama’s corner for his 2012 re-election campaign.

And check out all the ways Corzine is connected to Democrats and Obama.

You should have learned in Grade 6 math class.

Uh oh.

More – Holder lied, people died.

Langmann, C. “Canadian Firearms Legislation and Effects on Homicide 1974 to
2008.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence, In Press, Accepted Sept 30, 2011.

ABSTRACT
Canada has implemented legislation covering all firearms since 1977 and
presents a model to examine incremental firearms control. The effect of
legislation on homicide by firearm and the subcategory, spousal homicide is
controversial and has not been well studied to date. Legislative effects on
homicide and spousal homicide were analyzed using data obtained from
Statistics Canada from 1974 to 2008. Three statistical methods were applied
to search for any associated effects of firearms legislation. Interrupted
time series regression, ARIMA, and Joinpoint analysis were performed. No
significant beneficial associations between firearms legislation and
homicide or spousal homicide rates were found after the passage of three
Acts by the Canadian Parliament: Bill C-51 (1977), C-17 (1991), and C-68
(1995). Nor were effects found after the implementation of licensing in
2001, and the registration of rifles and shotguns in 2003. After the passage
of C-68, a decrease in the rate of the decline of homicide by firearm was
found by interrupted regression. Joinpoint analysis also found an increasing
trend in homicide by firearm rate post the enactment of the licensing
portion of C-68. Other factors found to be associated with homicide rates
were median age, unemployment, immigration rates, percent of population in
low income bracket, Gini index of income equality, population per police
officer, and incarceration rate. This study failed to demonstrate a
beneficial association between legislation and firearm homicide rates between 1974 and 2008.

Emphasis mine.

Panic?

On September 15, 2011, beginning at 12:48:54.600, there was a time warp in the trading of Yahoo! (YHOO) stock. HFT has reached speeds faster than time itself. Up to 190 milliseconds into the future, or 0.19 fantaseconds is the record so far. It all happened in just over one second of trading, the evidence buried under an avalanche of about 19,000 quotations and 3,000 individual trade executions. The facts of the matter are indisputable. Based on official exchange timestamps, there is unmistakable proof that YHOO trades were executed on quotes that didn’t exist until 190 milliseconds later!

h/t Adrian

“In recent weeks, the distrust of the financial markets has spread to the banks because they are now suffering from the debt crisis in Europe and have a lot of exposure to, for example, Greek bonds.”
“Since the financial crisis, some European banks have lost a third or more of their market capitalization,” he said, according to Google Translate.
“Most institutions have a rating of “below the book value or at best.”

h/t Dick Slater

Rise of the Fourth Reich, how Germany is using the financial crisis to conquer Europe. (Related)

Ace of Spades;

Let’s see if I have this straight:
The smartest administration in the history of the world conceived of this plan.
The plan was to just let thousands of weapons flow to murderous drug cartels.
And then take those cartels down.
But they didn’t take the cartels down, because they didn’t track the guns.
They instead were to follow the money, but they also didn’t do that.
A US border agent was killed due to the illegal arms sent to a neighboring sovereign country in this massive covert operation.
In addition, so was the brother of a Mexican attorney general.
So were a number of other Mexican citizens murdered with these weapons — we don’t know the number yet.
In conducting this massive covert action, we lied to officials in this neighboring sovereign country, even though their people (and cops, and officials) were getting killed with our weapons.
As far as I know, we haven’t taken any action beyond arresting a few straw buyers… who could have easily been arrested, with the weapons, when they attempted to smuggled them or sell them.
We have not taken down any cartels at all.
In fact, we’ve not done anything except murdered people by indirect, but perfectly foreseeable, US covert action.
And the only outlet that is following this is FoxNews, so you can tell Fox is biased.

Yesterday…

Nanex caught arguably the most berserk HFT algorithm yet captured on film, or jpeg as the case may be, in the trading of Earthlink stock shortly after hours. What happened next is one for the ages… Because it certainly will not make it to the regulators. In essence, we had our first spotted appearance of the Whack-A-Mole algorithm, which allowed one, if one is fast enough, and incidentally one isn’t, as all the bids would be cancelled at the same time as they were sent out, to make free money on a 10% trading spread between the bid and ask. Gone is any pretense of an NBBO, gone is any pretense of an orderly market…

h/t Melinda Romanoff

A tale of two scandals;

This revelation means that three of the biggest enforcement agencies within the Department of Justice knew about a program that one DOJ spokesman described to me as “illegal” and “isolated.” The one person who supposedly did not know is Holder.

Uh oh…

“The president has directed us to take action to fight these cartels,” Ogden begins, “and Attorney General Holder and I are taking several new and aggressive steps as part of the Administration’s comprehensive plan.”

Another Zero Hedge warning about High Frequency Trading;

Over the past 2 years, and culminating with the Flash Crash it became all too clear that HFT is nothing but a parasitic phenomenon which churns volume in stocks providing the best liquidity rebates, while pretending to be adding liquidity. Recently the best we can do is to provide glaring examples of HFT algos gone wrong in hopes that some regulator somewhere will finally take the long overdue step to establish a minimum bid/ask time delay and thus put virtually the entire HFT frontrunning math Ph.D. crew out of business. The latest development in the ongoing saga against these parasites comes from none other than the Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane who prepared a speech to the International Economic Association Sixteenth World Congress in Beijing China, titled “The race to zero”(pdf) which essentially recaps the hundreds if not thousands of posts we have written on the matter of risks posed by High Frequency Trading, and blasts the concept, as well as the toothless captured regulators who continue to exist in their zombie, porn-addicted state, and refuse to move one finger to finally end this next Flash Crash-in-waiting.

Read the whole thing. Via Melinda Romanoff, who clarifies;

Re: “churns volume in stocks”. There are very few trades, just orders, which 99.999999% don’t get filled. Entered and cancelled, entered and cancelled, as fast as the algo can go. Also, they do this not at say, $37.00 bid at $37.02 offered, where you and I can do business, but at $37.00001 bid, offered at $37.02. Mathematically, that’s a lot of room. At millions of orders a second, going from $37.00001 to $37.00002 and so on, right up to $37.01 and back to $37.00001, you can then visualize how it might look like a pyramid signal. Any real order disturbs that signal, and the algo steps in front of the order to steal the penny first.
The actual volume traded on the exchanges is stupendously low, given the rise of stock prices. If these were actual trades, the volume would be in the trillions, every day. These bots ARE the market now, by and large.

More…

On June 30th, Chicago Purchasing Managers’ Index, now owned by the NYSE, was flashed to select customers before the public release. It showed up in the HFT flows before the release. There are now more tiers to trading clarity, and they are basically charging firms to steal, with sanction. Here’s that story.
Then there’s the current administration’s fee for business model showing up in the IEA/SPR crude release of last week, the release will purportedly not go to refiners but to commodity trading operations, say, like some large banks, who will arb it to best use. Story: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/iea-replaces-one-crude-supply-limiting-cartel-opec-another-tbtf-banks
I am fully aware these are probably biased pieces, but this display of raw theft rips the mask off any interest in “the customer”.
And there’s nobody to do anything about it.

Fast and Furious;

The evidence suggests that Agent Terry’s death was financed by the president’s stimulus package with the full knowledge and support of Attorney General Holder.

He must go to bed every night and thank God he didn’t run as a Republican, or this could have been a scandal.

… the Arizona-based operation was supposed to be a sting, under which the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which is part of the Justice Department, allowed “straw purchasers” to transfer weapons from gun shops in Arizona to Mexican drug cartels to trace and halt crossborder arms-trafficking.
That’s the official version, anyway — but it’s crumbling, fast.
The ATF’s acting director, Kenneth Melson, has been singing like a canary to congressional investigators as he pushes back against administration pressure for him to resign and take the fall for something that, at the very least, had to include the US Attorney’s Office, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and possibly the Homeland Security Department.
[…]
So if the identities of the Mexican criminals were known to the feds, what was the point of Project Gunrunner — and why is Holder so desperately trying to stonewall by withholding hundreds of documents from Congress?
Law-abiding gun owners and dealers think they already know. With the Obama administration wedded to the fiction that 90 percent of the guns Mexican cartels use originate here — they don’t — many suspect that “Fast and Furious” was a backdoor attempt to smear domestic gun aficionados as part of its stealth efforts on gun control by executive fiat.

Via Instapundit – read more here.

“According to a report by UN Watch we were the only country in the entire damn world to say hey, this is friggin’ stupid.“