“It is one of the serious evils of our present system of banking that it enables one class of society, and that by no means a numerous one, by its control over the currency to act injuriously upon the interests of all the others and to exercise more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs.”

Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address

Rational people keep struggling with the ‘why’ of all this. I think the struggle is because they start with some wrong assumptions about morally rational behaviour and motives. As Rick Santelli likes to say, traders are not moral when they are trading.

I keep coming back to William K. Black’s explanation for this enormous attraction to multi-trillion dollar bets at JPM

“Financial institutions such as JPMorgan love to buy derivatives because they are opaque, create fictional income that leads to real bonuses and when (not if) they suffer losses so large that they would cause the bank to fail, they will be bailed out.”

William K Black

The more I look into this and think about it, the more that Barack Obama’s ‘favorite banker’ looks like Enron in their heyday.

I wonder how far the US will go to prevent the failure of their ‘best bank’ from spoiling the grand illusion, and how many lives of the poor and the middle class will be sacrificed to the god of greed and power.

Film is by Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki. Their website is here.

An estimated 30,000 people are protesting tonight in NYC as part of worldwide May Day protests. Most mainstream sources, of course, are talking about “a few hundred protesters”. Ah-hem, NYT. It should be clear to anyone who sees the picture above that we’re not dealing with hundreds here.

However, the NYT post did hint at one interesting thing: at least one agent provocateur in the crowd.

Officers shouted for protesters to remain on the sidewalk, but several protesters holding the banner stepped into the middle of Avenue of the Americas, where several officers — including one in plain clothes who had appeared to be marching with the crowd — tackled and arrested them.

If you’re unfamiliar with the inexcusable yet all too common tactic of using agents provocateurs, check out the video below. In it, Quebec cops pose as protesters and attempt to incite violence by throwing rocks and egging on their colleagues. Thus creating an excuse for the cops to crack down and get violent.

It’s certainly not something I would put past the NYPD. Clearly, there are plainclothes officers prowling the street. And they do some sketchy stuff, as documented in this video by Luke Rudkowski.

One more. This one is a bit subjective, but seems pretty clear that it’s a mock fight designed to incite violence. Looks like one of those arguments before a pro-wrestling match.

Also be sure to check this video out, which compares the men’s opposing opinions on the housing bubble. Shows how Krugman advocated it, while Ron Paul warned against it, as early as 2001.

I’d add a Scumbag Steve hat, if I had the skills.

Live 60 day chart:

From Kitco.

Thanks to the job protections California affords to this class of public employees, the thorough, independent review available to the public and the press has no bearing on the fate of the man who inspired it; whereas whether or not he’ll continue to patrol among the very students he needlessly sprayed is determined by a secretive process wholly lacking in transparency, and accountable only to the administrative apparatus whose very failure helped cause the pepper spraying.