All Is Well in Stepfordville: More on the Pre-election Chicanery of the Plunge Protection Team

It was another surreal week on Wall Street, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising a thousand points while the economy continued to sink into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. More evidence of the Plunge Protection Team at work? The election was only days away . . .

Read more — http://www.webofdebt.com/articles/stepfordville.php

8 Responses

  1. Ellen, you wrote — “It was another surreal week on Wall Street, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising a thousand points while the economy continued to sink into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. . . .”

    I must note that this startling development is just an accelerated version of the same trend I’ve been watching since the early nineties: whenever something happens that’s bad for working people, it turns out to be good for Wall Street. While the real economy was years going into the tank, every time a company laid off 5,000 people its stock went up. Every time a company closed a stateside plant, its stock went up. Etc.

    I hate to say so but in fact the Plunge Protection Team is no secret. Its creation was news back in 1987, when it was created. I thought then that concerned citizens — most especially including academic economists — would raise hell about it, but none of them (so far as I’m aware) let out so much as a peep. What’s happening now with the PPT is what I knew then WOULD happen and what I think HAS BEEN happening all along.

    The PPT did not kill capitalism. Capitalism died in 1929. Roosevelt created a perverse form of capitalism with his New Deal program. It was close enough to the real thing to gain the trust of the working public. Real capitalists — money men like Pete DuPont and others I could name — always saw the New Deal for what it was and fought it tooth and nail. Reagan was their man. He initiated wreckage of the New Deal and the Great Society (wreckage completed by Bill Clinton) and, with the establishment of the PPT, he drove a stake through the heart of Wall Street as it was shaped by Rooseveltian regulators.

    In a few months (or years), when the smoke of the current fire begins to clear, visionaries of one sort or another (we hope for the best of them) will shape a new economy (we will be disappointed). Whatever happens will surely be fun to watch, and I hope my health permits me to remain a spectator for a few years yet.

    Your columns are a delight. Keep up the good work.

    Jimmy Montague

  2. Very interesting overview of the PPT, especially the practical insight into how it actually manipulates the DOW.

    Dave
    http://daveeriqat.wordpress.com/

  3. A wonderful, insightful and educational site. But equal parts scary! Here’s a panel cartoon I did on the financial sci-fi going on. You might enjoy:
    http://cartoonshmartoon.blogspot.com/2008/09/economics.html

  4. And all in plain view. My oh my!

    It’s obvious from the lack of public reaction to this embezzlement that the trickle-down Reagan promised has yet to reach the public schools.

    Maybe tomorrow . . .

  5. Scary times ahead but there are ways out using the same legislation that got us here in the first place.

  6. The embezzelment has little to do with the person or the party holding the office of President or with trickle down economics. The embezzlement has to do with the Unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act and the banking cartel.

    Trickle down economics has worked amazingly well in the past 20 years. It started with job training funds to corporations, I helped spend some of that money training under skilled people in on the job training programs. When the under skilled became more confident and more skilled, they were able to take the new jobs the expanding economy had to offer.

    Reaganomics produced 20 million jobs from the grass roots. Obamanomics wants to copy that momentum with 2.5 million jobs in 2 years using FDR public works mentality. I hope it works.

    It is unfortunate that the arm extended palm up mind set can not get a grip on trickle down economic reality.

    That economic reality follows the path of business idea, business plan, funding, construction, hiring, production, sales, collections and banking. Then, if, the business plan is effective and the employees ( who have benefited from trickle down ) are effective there will be profits to be reinvested in the business and shared by the investors/stockholders ( risk takers ).

    The belief, that, the employees deserve an equal share of the profits along side the risk takers is illogical at best. The jobs created and the pay for the work completed is the proper employee share.

  7. Hm, I’m not sure what you’re referring to now; but on the matter of taking risk, banks make their money for taking risk. That’s all they make it for. They don’t advance their own money or their depositors’ money but just intermediate and take the risk that the money won’t get paid back. So now they’re in trouble and we’re bailing them out. I say forget that; they took the risk and should bear the loss.

  8. My apologies. I was responding to trickle down comment instead of the PPT article.

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