Anyone else thing the stock market is being manipulated?

[Ugnmoose]

Every savvy trader and investor knows that two thirds of our economy is dependent on what consumers spend. Today we get the shocking news that consumer confidence dropped off the cliff in August, much worse than economists had expected. And what does the market do? Absolutely nothing. This kind of news should have sent some minor shock wave through the investment community, yet it was treated almost as a non event. I don't get it. This is not the first time over the past year that the markets have reacted weirdly. I hate to sound conspiratorial, but I am beginning to think that Bushco and his cronies now control the markets along with everything else in our lives. I think the little investor is being played for a sucker and when the big boys are ready they are going to pull the plug and let us all flow down the drain.

[flowomo]

1. too stupid to run a hurricane relief effort....

but smart enuf to control the stock market? I don't think so. We give these guys way too much credit. They are fools who only know how to grab power, not how to use it. It's a mistake to keep feeding into this "Great And Powerful Oz" myth about them.

[StClone]

8. Priorities

They can be focused on what is best for them not us and so even though he is mental slug he can succeed at thuggery to some extent.

[flowomo]

11. "to some extent"? Not much of one. They are flat out morons!

DU is and long has been obsessed with the idea that they REALLY are in control. Many here actually FEAR Karl Rove and credit him with everything including the phases of the moon. It's insane. They are weak, foolish, incompetent. The sooner we realize that the better. We have inflated "them" into some huge, all-consuming monster. It's a joke. They're idiots.

[StClone]

18. If they are not in control why is Bush Prez?

How did Texas get gerrymandered, and how did we get to invade Iraq? I admit that some ARE consumed with the omnipotence of the Cowboy and the Turd, but they are fallible. Delay, Frist, Rove all being investigated and may fall, however they did succeed for a time at thuggery. They are in fact good at it but that means has and end.

[flowomo]

19. those things got done because they had power....

blame who you want for that. But as for the ability to devise and implement these grand schemes to rule to world -- no fucking way. They get lucky, they run into a weak and divided opposition -- it's all smoke and mirrors. As you say, they are falling apart at every seam. Bush is a dolt -- you KNOW that. He doesn't have to brain power to fix a Bingo game -- let alone be Master of the Universe.

[lcordero2]

9. The way that the relief effort went was intentional

and it should be treated as such. How do you explain how everything was in place and ready in Mississippi and how Louisiana became a disaster?
Mississippi's governor is Haley Barbour(R) and Louisiana's governor is Kathleen Blanco(D). It can't get anymore obvious than that.

[flowomo]

14. well, if you want to make mythical giants out of these idiots,

go ahead. People did this with respect to the Nixon White House too -- so big, so scary, so smart, so powerrful.... and then we find out they were jerks who couldn't run a decent small burglary. It is a mistake to believe you are in the grip of awesome forces -- you're not. A bunch of truly stupid people have a lot of power right now.... but they have no more clue about how to run the world than you do.

[DemInDistress]

2. Ever hear of the

Plunge Protection Team? Their mission is to prop up a failing stock
market,when I find the stroy again I'll post it,it was a telling tale
of stock market manipulators...

[reprehensor]

3. "Move Over, Adam Smith: The Visible Hand of Uncle Sam,"

Ok maybe.

Government Intervention in Stock Market is Detailed by New Report, GATA Says

MANCHESTER, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 6, 2005--A major Canadian financial management firm that a year ago published a compilation of evidence of central bank manipulation of the gold price has just done the same in regard to the U.S. stock market and has reached a similar conclusion.

The new report is titled "Move Over, Adam Smith: The Visible Hand of Uncle Sam," and has been published by Sprott Asset Management of Toronto. It was written by the firm's president, John P. Embry, and his assistant, Andrew Hepburn, and concludes that the U.S. government has intervened to support the stock market so many times that "what apparently started as a stopgap measure may have morphed into a serious moral hazard situation, with market manipulation an endemic feature of the U.S. stock market."

The new report relies largely on reports of news organizations and the essays and research papers of economics academics that, as might be expected, have not been well-publicized in the United States. But some of these reports have been circulated by the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee over the years.

The Sprott report does not maintain that the government should never intervene in the stock market; it recognizes that certain emergencies may argue strongly for temporary intervention, such as the 1987 stock market crash and the terrorist attacks of September 2001. But, the Sprott report notes, frequent surreptitious intervention, conducted through intermediaries, the government's favored financial houses in New York, gives those intermediaries enormous advantages over ordinary investors. Frequent intervention, the Sprott report adds also makes it impossible to distinguish between national emergencies and political expediency

more...

[Ugnmoose]

6. This is a bit of a smoking gun report

No wonder no one is reporting on it here in the States. What an indictment of the system. But it doesn't surprise me one bit.

[reprehensor]

13. Your intuition is correct.

It can't be totally controlled, but it can be guided, and it seems like the guiding is WAY out of hand.

'Free Market' my ass.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

20. -snip-

But a policy enacted in secret and knowingly withheld from the body politic has created a huge disconnect between those knowledgeable about such activities and the majority of the public, who have no clue whatsoever.

[OrangeCountyDemocrat]

4. My Thoughts Exactly

Things are much worse than they seem....at least to those following the market reaction. I refuse to invest heavily in stocks right now for fear things are going to eventually get bad enough they won't be able to control the collapse.

[tridim]

5. I'd rather bet my money on 3 card monte

I pulled everything out of the market in 2000 and wont put it back until corporate crime is prosecuted fairly and speedily. Say, when's Ken Lay going to prison?

The market is both fixed and manipulated, and the only winners are those who steal millions by breaking the rules.

[Ugnmoose]

12. The market is a zero sum game

For every loser there is a winner. I think the big money will be made by the hedge funds (big Republican offshore accounts) who will short the crap out of the market and watch it go down the bowl while they roll in the dough. I think right now, they need to prop up the market for purely political reasons to help stablize The Chimp. But they are ready to nuke the market when the time is right.

[undergroundpanther]

7. I think

The entire market is a very elaborate ponzi scam.
http://www.jmooneyham.com/your-true-chances-of-getting-rich-reference.html
http://www.truthinmedia.org/truthinmedia/Columns/clip2.html
http://www.truthinmedia.org/truthinmedia/Columns/chronicles-oct-98.html

[obxhead]

10. The corporations are in control if

anybody is.
Bushco just creates the opportunity for the corporations to maintain control.

[pitohui]

15. random means random

a market that goes nowhere for 5 yrs ain't good for anybody, this ain't being manipulated in my humble opinion

the random walk does mean random, it's hard for our brains to accept true randomness but weird reactions including non-reactions are just part of it

[swag]

22. Nicely put.

Je suis d'accord.

[pitohui]

16. sorry stupid double post DELETED by poster EOM

am

[WearyOne]

17. when is it not being manipulated ?

[swag]

21. Crappy news was already priced into this market.

The US consumers started giving up in August, with retail sales down 2.1 percent reported pre-Katrina. Today's Conference Board Consumer Confidence number couldn't have meant more than that, because the correlation between "Consumer Confidence" and consumer spending has been quite weak in recent years, with consumers professing all sorts of distress while still going on to borrow and spend in months that follow.

What else happened today? Energy prices backed off a bit more, easing fears of the energy shock to consumers (investors are probably wrong in letting this false hope ease their fears), and US interest rates, though moving up (4.29% on the 10 year Treasury yield, and a 60% probability of 4.25% on the Fed Funds Rate by the end of January, according to the futures market), are still very low by historical standards. Rita wasn't as ferocious to the US oil infrastructure as had been feared. Housing bubble news is neutral, with yesterday's existing home sales balancing today's new home sales numbers. Further, the renewed strength of the dollar probably reinforced a lot of unjustified home-country bias on behalf of US equity investors. Finally, it's quarter-end, and there's a lot of "window-dressing" trading going on to goose fund and portfolio manager reports to clients.

And Greenspan gave a "Ra! Ra! Capitalism!" speech on CNBC that hit a lot of traders in the lowest part of their bowels.

Depending upon the earnings measure you use, the US stock market has a price-to-earnings ratio of about 17 (I use a very conservative 2005 consensus "as reported" earnings for this calculation, and not the more insane 12-month-forward "operating" earnings favored by more exuberant Wall Street pimps). This is right in line with the P/E ratio since 1960, though it's a bit above the average P/E ratio of 15.6 since 1935. Nevertheless, the P/E ratio is well below its average for the past 20 years.

About the impact of news of events, economic and otherwise, on the US stock market, Robert Shiller has a good dissection in both editions of Irrational Exuberance.

I look forward to reading the report on direct US Government intervention in the stock market. Thanks for the link. If such a thing is indeed happening, one would expect that savvy traders would have long ago been onto the scheme in order to capitalize on it to their own advantages, thereby neutralizing the scheme. Will read with open mind, but arched brow.

On edit: have read the report by the Canadian firm on US central bank intervention in the capital markets, and it's just a rehash of old news reports. Nothing that anyone paying attention wouldn't know already. The excess liquidity generated by the Fed during crisis periods, for example, has been public knowledge for quite some time, as has active brokerage intervention in the markets, which brokerage houses engage in for any number of reasons - always self-serving.

There's no need to fret about government intervention in the capital markets. Private firms make so much mischief in the markets that there's no way the feds could compete.

[mandyky]

23. It's been manipulated since Clinton and the dot com boom

so yes!

[tom_paine]

24. Google PPT "Plunge Protection Team"

Probably even worse, since 2001 and the Death of the Old Republic, the Imperial Treasury is in reality the Imperial Privy Purse...who is to even guess how much of our tax money has gone to PPT uses.

Hell, maybe some of those Iraqi billions found their way into PPT...we'd never know.

national security, don't you know.