Stocks are up after gov't bans shorting of 799 financial stocks. Free markets?

[specimenfred1984]

Sure thing, you are free to destroy/short/attack any American company you'd like to as long as it's not 1 that the gov't says you can't.

Russia shut their markets down yesterday, we just shut down the financial portion of ours. Big difference huh? Nope.

[Skink]

1. Anticipating these Gov't bailouts is the Grandaddy of inside information.

Greenspan said, (bear with me), short sellers are a gage of what actual valuations in the market look like. Right know however there is hysteria in the market so barring a full suspension of trading this is a good stop gap measure.

[mrJJ]

2. IN GOLD WE TRUST

When was the last time The US had to put its Gold Reserve up for Hock???

Re: US Government to secure mortgage market with gold reserves

US Government to secure mortgage market with gold reserves
Lee Jones - 19-Sep-2008
The U.S. Treasury Department has promised “hundreds of billions” to save the US markets using its own gold reserves.

President Bush approved the use of existing authorities by Treasury secretary Hank Paulson to make available as necessary the assets of the Exchange Stabilisation Fund for up to $50 billion to buy more illiquid mortgage assets.
When the Government bailed out the the Government Sponsored Enterprises it promised to buy illiquid mortgage backed securities, but this announcement extends that pledge.

The ESF was created after the Great Depression and uses the US gold reserve as collateral for financial stability.



Read more: http://www.moneymarketing.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=173...

[Skink]

5. Starting to feel like 1907.

[Greyhound]

7. Just to make sure there is nothing left to build a new economy on.

We are just too stupid for words.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. There are no free markets.

Never have been. The difference now is that the utter fuckups and jerkoffs on Wall Street have ripped away the thin veneer that has shielded what they were really about, their real relationship with government, from the one-fodder-units.

What we have, and what we have had since Reagan, and from when the repukes accelerated the process in the 90's, is classic, pure, unadulterated Mussolini-Style Facism.

The government and the tax dollars we pay in exist to serve corporations. Not the people, not the common good, not civil society, but to make the wealthy few wealthier and indemnify their wealth. They exist to enable their every profligate scheme, many ripped from the annals of organized crime history.

And we, the one-fodder-units, get The War on Drugs and The War on Terror, DHS, ICE, The FBI, The IRS, Government Intrusion into our every financial transaction, taxes and fees and Government Spying for our trouble, to keep us in place and feeding this monster.

Oh yeah: and cable TV. Lots of channels of cable TV. With lots of 24-hour fundamentalist programming and shopping channels.

[specimenfred1984]

4. Very well said

I'll add that it's not just TV, it's a highly refined network of propaganda that covers the entire "full spectrum dominance" of all media. The propaganda has been taken to new heights only dreamed of by former fascist regimes.

[Union Thug]

8. Summed up PERFECTLY. Brilliant.

[Terry in Austin]

9. "Free" is the mother of all marketing catch-words

It sounds good, it's hard to knock, and it's utterly meaningless until you specify "free from what?"

"The Free Market" (tm) is just as much a pile of branding BS as "The Free World" (tm). The latter includes nations that are cheerfully dictatorial, while the former includes near-monopolies like Microsoft.

[Union Thug]

6. A trillion dollars doesn't sound very free to me. n/t