Is the Fed Behind Market Jump? Many Voices Say ‘Yes’
The Dow Jones “miraculously” soared to a 600-point spike on Wednesday, after losses of nearly 2,000 points over the previous three trading days. This has once again raised the obvious question of whether the Fed intervened to prevent the continuing meltdown. Whether or not the Fed is drifting back towards an under-the-table QE, the reality is that Wall Street and London are finished and such one-day reversals are merely further signs of the absolute instability, derived from the fact that the trans-Atlantic gambling bubble is crashing and nothing can be done to alter that reality—save a full international Glass-Steagall bankruptcy reorganization.
Some leading voices are openly saying that the Fed has pumped liquidity into the gaping hole in the Wall Street dam. Paul Craig Roberts, former Treasury official under President Ronald Reagan and a leading Wall Street adversary, penned a column this week, charging that the Swiss National Bank is one of the concealed conduits for Fed intervention into global markets. Roberts wrote:
“If central banks cannot properly conduct monetary policy, how can they conduct an equity policy? Some astute observers believe that the Swiss National Bank is acting as an agent for the Federal Reserve and purchases large blocs of US equities at critical times to arrest stock market declines that would puncture the propagandized belief that all is fine here in the US economy.
“We know that the US government has a plunge protection team consisting of the US Treasury and Federal Reserve. The purpose of this team is to prevent unwanted stock market crashes.”
Back in July 2010, then-TARP Inspector General Neil Barofsky testified before the Senate Banking Committee and informed an astonished group of legislators that the size of the bailout was not the $700 billion Congressionally-approved TARP, but was closer to $23.7 trillion. He provided the Senators with a list of all of the Fed and Treasury special discount windows that had been created to feed the bailout monster. Even before Dodd-Frank passage, the Fed had devised mechanisms for pumping money into the market through delegated broker dealers. This would tend to lend credibility to Roberts’ charges about the Swiss National Bank.
In the meantime, as Lyndon LaRouche asserted on Aug. 25 in discussions with colleagues, the patently absurd claim that China’s falling economy and currency devaluation was the cause of the market fall, has been discredited publicly. On Aug. 26, Nicholas Lardy penned a New York Times op-ed titled “False Alarm on a Crisis in China,” in which he tore apart the propaganda barrage claiming that China—as opposed to the trans-Atlantic region—was in a financial and economic free-fall.
Lardy wrote that “the popular narrative is not well supported by the facts. There is little evidence that China’s economy is slowing significantly from the 7-percent pace reported by the government for the first part of the year. Wage growth is running at about 10 percent annually; the pace of creation of nonagricultural jobs is stronger than in any recent year; both real disposable income and consumption expenditures of Chinese households are growing strongly. It is not the picture of an economy heading for a hard landing.”
Neither Lardy nor any other sane economist could say the same for the trans-Atlantic region.
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