Winding Up Bear Stearns: Paulson’s Gift to His Bankster Buddies

[Crewleader]

by Mike Whitney / March 24th, 2008

One picture tells the whole story. It’s a photo of five grim looking men in gray suits staring ahead blankly like they were in the dock with Saddam awaiting sentencing. Every one of them looks downcast and dejected; shoulders rounded and jaws set. This is what desperation looks like, which is why the photo was kept off the front pages of the leading newspapers.

The group took no questions and, as far as the media was concerned, the meeting never happened. But it did happen; and it happened on Monday at the White House at 2 PM. That’s when President Bush convened the Working Group on Financial Markets, also known as the Plunge Protection Team, to explain their strategy for dealing with deteriorating conditions in the financial markets. The details of the meeting remain unknown, but judging by the sudden (and irrational) recovery in the stock market on Tuesday; their plan must have succeeded.

The Plunge Protection Team is a panel that includes Fed Chairman Ben Bernankee, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox, and acting Commodity Futures Trading Commission head Walter Lukken. According to John Crudele of the New York Post, the Plunge Protection Team’s (PPT) objective is to redirect the stock market by “buying market averages in the futures market, thus stabilizing the market as a whole.” In the event of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, the group’s activities could play an extremely positive role in saving the market from an unnecessary meltdown. However, direct intervention into supposedly “free markets” is less defensible when it is merely a matter of saving an over-leveraged banking system from its inevitable Day of Reckoning. And, yet, that appears to be the reason for the White House confab; to buy a little more time before the final explosion.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/03/winding-up-bear-stearns-paulsons-gift-to-his-bankster-buddies/

[Bozita]

1. "Bankster" ... What an absolutely spot on, dead center bullseye of a term!

[Skink]

2. what no Greenspan?

:bounce: