President Donald J. Trump

[Dr. MD MD]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDbi-Z9VAGs

[ACE of CLUBS]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR5iOxagYmQ

Our fuktard Prime Minister Turd-O could have shown some cool dance moves and costumes to your President.  Turd-O was a big hit in India . . .

[Dr. MD MD]

Our fuktard Prime Minister Turd-O could have shown some cool dance moves and costumes to your President.  Turd-O was a big hit in India . . .

Yeah, it seems that people who aren’t Koolaid drinking morons really love president Trump.

[MV/Liberace!]

costumes

[ACE of CLUBS]

Difficult for me to describe the depth of my contempt for that fuck-tard Prime Minister . . . if I could reach into the computer screen, I'd punch his fucking face in . . .

[Jackstar]

https://twitter.com/Tinman1295/status/1232351783994847232


Something for everyone on this. Behold the power of art.

[timebandit]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=aY8-N8-pn1I&feature=emb_logo

[Dr. MD MD]

President Trump is critiquing the fed again for our hight interest rates
compared to other countries. Keep it up, sir!

[Stupid Robbings]

President Trump is critiquing the fed again for our hight interest rates
compared to other countries. Keep it up, sir!

Remember when CDs paid 18%?  Get ready for 18% NEGATIVE rates.

[Dr. MD MD]

Remember when CDs paid 18%?  Get ready for 18% NEGATIVE rates.

Could be but my point is that his repeated criticisms of the fed amount to an ideological attack of the institution itself, which I think we can agree was designed to globalize America from the beginning.

[Stupid Robbings]

Could be but my point is that his repeated criticisms of the fed amount to an ideological attack of the institution itself, which I think we can agree was designed to globalize America from the beginning.

President Trump seems to include a wide range of opinionated assholes in his cabinet only to eventually let them go.  Perhaps he wants to know how they all really think, so that he might better defeat them?

https://theintercept.com/2017/09/17/goldman-sachs-gary-cohn-donald-trump-administration/

https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/07/investing/gary-cohn-trump-goldman-sachs/index.html

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/15/trump-financial-crisis-money-ross-mnuchin-825754

We Heard From Two Scum Bag Banks Today
Wall Street Underground
Radio Free Wall Street - April 26, 2018

https://youtu.be/nrJUf5Ap0eI

Wall Street Underground
VIDEOS
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6xt5xk_AW_Ss6opJa_gO2A/videos

[WOTR]

What a stiff.

Magic underwear was designed to arouse...

[Stupid Robbings]

Could be but my point is that his repeated criticisms of the fed amount to an ideological attack of the institution itself, which I think we can agree was designed to globalize America from the beginning.

https://youtu.be/E1xqSZy9_4I

THE BEAST
By Nick Guarino | July 7, 2010

https://web.archive.org/web/20100713021306/http://nickguarino.com/index.php/uncategorized/the-beast/


The most evil, fiendish machine of mass destruction ever created has been turned on. I call it The Beast.

It is not an atomic bomb. It isn’t a missile or a deadly submarine with enough nukes to end life as we know it.

It is a computer. The fastest, most powerful ever made. Goldman Sachs owns and runs it. It is stealing your wealth day and night.

The Beast is so secret only a handful of people have seen it. The picture above is an educated guess of what it looks like. I based it on talks I’ve had with people who know some of the components of this system from hell.

No one understands everything The Beast does. We do know it is connected, directly or indirectly, to every information system known to man. Every data base. It is so fast, it runs circles around every other computer in the world. It has the power to manipulate (for a time) every market in the world.

Soon this system, or one like it, could be used to control most every aspect of your life.

Right now it is most dangerous for you, me and every American investor: because it is tied directly to the New York Stock Exchange computers. In fact it is connected to every exchange computer in the world, be it stocks commodities or bonds. It lets Goldman Sachs learn every stock order and commodity order that is placed on the NYSE or any other exchange â€" BEFORE the exchange executes it â€" and then jump in front of the market. This is called FRONT RUNNING.

Every time you, your mutual fund or retirement plan buys a stock, bond or commodity, you pay more than you should have. Goldman gets there first. Thanks to the immense power of The Beast. They bid up the price you paid. They gouge you.

In some cases The Beast can freeze you out. Or worse, bust you out of your positions, a big loser. Many small investors learned this the hard way, in the May 6th “flash crash” bloodbath.

It’s legalized theft, on a mass scale. It is the reason Goldman made nearly $30 billion these past few years â€" while the U.S. economy trashed around in the worst depression since the 1930s.

The Beast is located in a steel, nuclear-proof vault. Ten stories below street level. In the same room as the NYSE’s own computers. Wired directly into them, in fact. Most of the time, it is a license for Goldman to print money.

But on Thursday, May 6, the scheme backfired. Goldman’s super-computer â€" the Beast â€" turned the regional Greek downturn into a global freefall. The Dow plunged 1000 points in two hours.

It forced an emergency bailout by the U.S. and members of the European Union: $1 trillion for Greece. Something they all said they would never do.

And now Portugal, Spain, Italy and England are waiting in the wings, panting for their own bailouts. These will be many, many times greater than Greece’s. The fallout will be many times worse, too…

Thursday, May 6, an event took place that struck fear and terror in the hearts of everyone who understood what they saw.

U.S. stocks had their biggest one-day meltdown in history. 1000 points in two hours. Never had stocks fallen so far, so fast. Not in the 1987 wipeout. Not even during the crash of 2008, which was the worst plunge since the Great Depression.

One Dow component, Procter & Gamble, fell from $40 a share to 38 cents â€" in less than 30 minutes. Unprecedented. But it will not be the last of these kinds of meltdowns. This is the first of many crises we will soon see.

As usual, the sold-out Wall Street press went into overdrive. They quickly pooh-pooh’ed the stark warning of what’s to come.

Don’t let them fool you.

The Greek crisis is a relatively minor event, compared to what’s in store. But even little ole Greece sent the stock market into a tailspin. We warned about this, months ahead of time, in our “Dead Meat/PIIGS” issue.

Now the market is starting to catch up to the fact that the depression is wiping out entire countries. Investors and traders saw the rioting in Greek streets. Panic struck the world’s markets.

Just days earlier, the S&P 500 was enjoying an 80% rally-back, from the lows last March. The Dow had soared from 6700 to 11,300. The biggest put-up, fixed market ever.

“Come on in, the water’s fine,” Wall Street promised the masses. “Happy days are here again.” So the suckers bought into another pre-planned, pre-packaged, computer-orchestrated disaster.

Flash Crash Thursday, every major exchange took catastrophic hits. Instantly, the media blamed it on a rookie trader’s typing mistake.

BULL. This was NOT a Fat-Fingers error. It was not an accident. It sure wasn’t a one-time event either.

You saw Wall Street’s mindless computer trading programs backfire â€" and turn a regional downswing into a full-blown global panic.

You saw Wall Street’s biggest “screw-you” scam ever blow up in its face. You saw The Beast rear its ugly head, turn on its makers, and nearly cause a total meltdown in U.S. stocks.

Most of all, you saw a sneak preview of what’s coming. Because next time it won’t just be tiny Greece that needs a bailout. Giants Spain and Italy will need bailouts. Portugal, England and Ireland will need bailouts.

Imagine the market chaos when Italy and Spain come begging for ten trillion dollars (not a mere trillion like Greece). When the IMF cuts the pay of every Italian and Spaniard by 25%… slashes their retirements funds in half… and reduces their beloved cradle-to-grave government handouts overnight.

I’ll tell you what will happen. The riots in Greece will look like two school girls fighting over a Barbie doll. And I promise you, those PIIGS wipe-outs are coming. Real soon now.

Markets around the world will plunge. At lightning computer speed. We are on the verge of the first computer-led stock market panic and sell-off.

The Beast: of Wall Street’s many crimes,
this one will enrage you the most
You’ve heard how brokers “churn” accounts, and push money-losing trades just for the commissions? Or get their customers to buy bad investments they are selling? Goldman takes that to a whole new level.

They call it “high-frequency trading.” (HFT for short.) The most outrageous “screw-the-masses” scam Wall Street ever came up with.

In the first quarter of 2010, Goldman did not have a single losing trading day. This is unprecedented. In fact it is impossible â€" if you are trading. But Goldman is not trading.

They are playing a rigged game. They are the house. They get to see everyone else’s cards, before they bet. There is no way they can lose â€" until D day comes.

All because of The Beast and HFT (high frequency trading). It should be illegal. Instead, the exchange has made special deals with Goldman Sachs and a few other mega-bankers, to give them the ultimate trading edge.

These deals are a license for Goldman to print money: by stealing from you and every other investor who trades/owns stocks, mutual funds, even futures and options.

You, your pension fund, your IRA â€" everyone who trades â€" has to go to the floor of the exchange to buy or sell stocks in the spreads. Not Goldman. They bypass all that. Their computer -â€" The Beast -â€" is connected direct to the NYSE computers. In fact, it is located in the same room with the NYSE’s tired, old, slow machine.

That means Goldman can make trades direct with the NYSE computer. They make the trades before everyone else. With zero delays. The computer can trade trillions of dollars and billions of positions. All at extreme discounts. Less than a penny a share.

Goldman pays hundreds of millions a year for this privilege. It allows them to make guaranteed untold billions, as they screw the market.

A few years ago, HFTs only accounted for one-third of trading. Now they make up 70%-to-80% of all trades on the exchanges. They are why the markets have soared these past two years.

Goldman and its billionaire hedge fund buddies say they are “giving liquidity to the market.” Bull!

The market had no liquidity problems back in the 1970s, when it traded 100 million shares a day. It sure doesn’t have liquidity problems now, when 1 to 3 billion shares a day are traded.

Can computers predict the future with 100% accuracy?
Goldman says yes. History says no
…and I believe history.

Reality is over two billion shares Day trade by the HFTs. Every day. They are executed with NO human supervision at all. None.

These super-computers use the same flawed economic models that have wiped out everyone who has used them. Black-Scholes. The problem is simple.

Humans make the mathematical models. People program the computers and let them run. They try to think of every economic/financial event under the sun. They try to plan for every possible contingency. They play God with your money.

But they are not God. They can’t conceive of all the variables that enter the global financial equations. It’s impossible. No one can.

They ALWAYS miss the “unknown unknowns.” The freak events that make up real life. Terrorist strikes. Hurricanes. Rioting Greeks. Market downturns. Bank wipeouts. North Korea attacking South Korea. The endless bubbles bursting like real estate.

That means their precious computer models go tragically, fatally wrong. They result in colossal wipeouts. They have proved this over and over.

One example: computer models brought on the huge U.S. real estate bubble. They said housing was the ideal long-term investment, that would keep making profits forever. WRONG.

They failed to take into account what happens when people can no longer pay their mortgages. Even with two incomes. This led to the housing crash. Trillions worth of derivatives went bust. Trillions more are still going bust.

All because they did not factor in a key fact of life. One I warned about for the last ten years.

They assumed real estate prices could never go down. Not for the entire real estate market. Remember the old cliché: “they aren’t making any more of the stuff.” So price ALWAYS goes up. Their back-dated models told them that.

Sure, they said, we have had real estate downturns. New York City in the 1970s. Texas in the 80s. Colorado and Florida in the 1990s.

But their models showed these wipeouts were regional only. They did not last long. I heard them call them “buying opportunities.” The national market, they said, still went up.

So their solution was simple. Spread the risk over all real estate markets. The rising markets would more than make up for the occasional, local down moves.

This is why institutions kept pouring money into real estate after 911. It’s why U.S. housing values soared, in the biggest bubble ever.

But God is God. People who think they are smarter than everyone are pompous pricks. God wins. Pompous pricks always lose big-time in the end.

The real estate wipeout â€" the financial collapse and depression we are still in â€" are based on three big mistakes.

One, the mathematical geniuses who think their computer programs perfectly model the future. They don’t.

Two, the greedy handlers who hired the mathematicians to justify their own crooked schemes. The masters of the universe who run Goldman and Wall Street. They play craps with the world’s money.

Three, the masses. Sadly, they are clueless. They trust Wall Street. They do anything the media and their brokers tell them. They risk everything, to chase slightly higher yields.

Well, what do you know? The one thing took place, that Wall Street’s super-computers could never see. Real estate doesn’t always go up. Bubbles ALWAYS burst. Real estate can go down everywhere, all at the same time, and stay down for decades. They take banks and sovereign states with them.

The models didn’t see any of that. They didn’t see that their trading made too many loans -â€" pumped too much money â€" into real estate. More money than the markets could efficiently use.

This created the bubble. People paid way, way too much for houses. They borrowed far more than the houses were really worth. Banks loaned themselves broke. All because the computer models said real estate values always go up.

The models also said derivatives debt was safe. It would “manage risk.” Keep the economy growing.

100% false. Derivatives collapsed. So did the real estate they financed. Bringing down the entire house of cards. Everyone who bought into this b.s. is screwed to the wall.

Something even uglier and more diabolical
is at work in today’s stock market bubble
Wall Street’s game is simple. Create off-exchange derivatives, that shift risk to the unknowing…hide losses…and show profits that are not really there. Institutionalized fraud at the highest level.

Derivatives are so complicated, few men alive understand them. Even fewer know how they work. This is not because people are stupid. It’s because by design derivatives are made to be too complicated to understand. They not only fool the masses. They fool sophisticated investors, as you have seen.

I am a simple dishwasher. So complicated things don’t befuddle me. I am befuddled already.

And because I have a simple mind, I reduce things to their simplest level. That’s where my fundamental analysis comes from. That has held me in good stead for 30 years.

Let me tell you what 99.9% of the players in the game don’t understand. And the 0.1% who do, will never tell you.

The Greek crisis is just one of many sovereign debt crises the world over. As our recent issues have shown, soon it will hit Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, China…and finally the U.S.

(In fact, as I write this the European debt markets once again are plunging. They finally are realizing Spain is the next dead-broke PIIGS to come begging for a bailout.)

This is not complicated. Governments the world over have been on a wild borrowing spree. For decades. They borrowed trillions, to pay for programs voters demanded. That is how they stayed in power.

Now there is no money left to borrow. Their credit cards have been maxed out. The bankers can’t scheme any more cash. The countries are broke. And the loan sharks are banging on their doors. It’s really as simple as that.

The US and Europe cannot inflate
their way out of this crisis
This is not an inflationary, print-money crisis, like you have seen in the past. These crises are deflationary. For a simple reason. In modern times, currencies float freely. Markets set their values.

Not so in the past. Back then, currencies were fixed. Governments set the value. And they saw to it their currencies did NOT lose value.

That let the governments print money and inflate their debts away. With no repercussions on their currency value.

Greece used to do that. Today is a different story. Greece is a member (for now) of the EU. It can’t prints its problems away. It is BORROWING money, not printing it. Greece is cutting pay, benefits, and retirements. It is DEFLATING.

In fact it’s far worse. Greece is in a depression. As is the rest of the world.

Remember, currencies now change value every day. Every minute. And markets are mightier than government’s pitiful interventions. The days when governments could pull their inflation fixes and print money are over.

News flash: the U.S. will not print money. It won’t inflate away its debt crisis. Neither will Europe or England.

They can’t. The minute they try that, their currencies get trashed. People won’t buy the mountain of debt these nations so desperately need. Worse, the world will dump their currencies. That will destroy their economies.

So how will America solve its debt crisis? Simple. It will get money the old-fashioned way: by borrowing and taxing the shit out of its citizens.

The U.S. will go even deeper into debt, making whatever devil’s bargains it has to, to stay afloat. Obama has already begun both of these: higher taxes…and soaring debt. And as he says, he’s “just getting started.”

The U.S. government will drastically cut public services. It will impoverish the American middle class. Taxes will devastate people.

Other developed nations are doing the same thing. They will keep doing so. They have no choice. They are just as trapped as we are.

Of course, cutting pay, service and benefits has a name. It’s called deflation. The opposite of inflation.

The masses do not yet understand deflation. They have never lived with it. All they know is inflation. That is what they think is coming.

They are dead wrong. Deflation is coming. A much deeper depression is coming.

Which brings me back to Goldman’s secret wealth-destroying weapon, The Beast…

On Thursday May 6, the markets caught a glimpse of the future.
They felt the cold chill of what lies ahead
Sooner than anyone thought possible, investors started throwing in the towel. They realized the rally in stocks is just about over. There’s no recovery. The sovereign debt wipeout is next.

Before Flash Crash Thursday, the market had dropped 100-to-200 points every day that week. Thursday started as more of the same. Then Goldman Sachs’ high-frequency trading system from hell â€" The Beast â€" kicked in.

High-frequency trading is just a polite term for front-running. It lets Wall Street insiders trade before their customers do. Almost no one understands this. Anyone who did would never set foot in the Wall Street casino again, except in very smart, sophisticated ways.

Here’s how it works.

As I told you, Wall Street computers are directly connected to the exchanges’ computers. So firms like Goldman learn all orders that come in, to the NYSE and NASDAQ â€" all the exchanges â€" before they get executed. All buy orders. All sell orders.

That lets them place their own orders, for the same stocks, (or options or commodities) ahead of their customers. They get there micro-seconds before everyone else. Which makes all the difference.

Say Goldman’s computer sees an order come in to the exchange, to sell a large block of IBM shares. Goldman rushes in a few micro-seconds ahead of time. Again, it can do this because it is connected to the exchange computers…and its computer is MUCH faster than anyone else’s.

Goldman sells that same stock first. Its selling takes the market lower. So the original seller gets a lower price. Goldman pockets the difference.

Same thing when Goldman sees buy orders come in. It buys ahead. That forces the market higher. Buyers must pay a higher price.

Each day, Goldman front-runs billions of shares. That is how they made nearly $30 billion in profits the past few years -â€" even though the U.S. economy is in a deep recession, and normal investment banking activities (IPOs, mergers & acquisitions) have fallen into the crapper.

It’s like playing poker, when you know the cards of all your opponents -â€" but they don’t know yours. Goldman knows the cards of every retirement fund…mutual fund…institution and individual who trades stocks.

Remember, everyone else is not connected to the exchange computers, with their own personal multi-billion dollar super computer. Their trading systems work more slowly. That puts them at a fatal disadvantage.

Goldman learns the trades they are going to make. It jumps ahead of them, and “scalps” them. That is Wall Street’s own term.

And this computerized front-running, this “scalping,” led to the chaos on Flash Crash Thursday…

How to turn a Greek riot into a global stock crash
The Greek riots were broadcast around the world. Investors were scared shitless. This is not what Wall Street told them would happen. Huge amounts of sell orders hit the exchanges, all at once.

Goldman Sachs’ brilliant computer models saw those sell orders. Its black box computers did their job, without human knowledge or intervention. In microseconds they jumped in ahead of the market, and put in more sell orders. Goldman was making a killing.

But two problems came up. First, sell orders kept coming in. From all around the world. They greatly outweighed the buys.

The NYSE’s slow-moving computer saw this huge imbalance of sell orders. It delayed the processing of all trades. By 90 seconds. That is, every order was held up for 90 seconds.

This was supposed to give the market makers time to check for errors. (In reality, to cover their asses.) But it only made things worse…

The Beast and the other HFT computers could not make trades on the NYSE. Remember, they make decisions every micro-second. For them, a minute and a half is an eternity.

But even more selling pressure was building up. The sell orders kept pouring in. Goldman’s computer knew about these orders before the NYSE did: it is both connected to the exchange computers and far faster than they are.

So the computer did what it is programed to do. It started selling on other stock exchanges. It sold on the futures markets as well.

These markets did not delay sales. They were deluged with sell orders. Prices fell even faster than on the NYSE. Creating a huge backlog of sell orders, that accelerated by the micro-second.

You literally saw stock market traders stampede for the burning exchange doors. The whole thing quickly got out of control. Because there were no buyers!

And the computer systems from hell did more of the unthinkable. Seeing prices falling, they kept selling more, bidding the market down. Down, down, down she goes. Where she stops, nobody knows.

Computers led the market meltdown. A meltdown like nothing seen before. It is only the first. Next time the collapses will be too big to stop. Even temporary, partial reversals will not last.

Please understand. Wall Street has bet all your money -â€" our entire financial system -â€" on their computer models. On the bizarre belief that they can correctly predict the future, day in and day out, without error. Do you see how crazy this is?

Stop-loss orders screwed the little guy even more
On Flash-Crash Thursday, things kept getting worse. Many people trade (foolishly) with stop-loss orders. Stops are supposed to limit losses. But in the new world of The Beast, they only make your losses bigger.

Stop-loss orders do not hold your broker to a set price in a fast market. All he has to do is get the “best possible” price.

In the market chaos, the usual Wall Street victims could not get out at their stop-loss prices. The stocks crashed right through the stops. That meant the little guy got screwed. Even more than usual.

Many people were forced out at the lows. Yet the market closed WELL above the original stop price. This is why trading with stops is a suckers’ game. When you need them the most, they will screw you to the wall.

One stock was selling for $42 a share early Thursday. It plunged straight down to $.04. That’s what the average guy, with stops, got. Four cents a share. He lost 99% of his money.

Later that same day, this stock bounced back. It closed over $41. Who do you think bought these shares in the few seconds they were at the ridiculously cheap price of a few pennies a share? And then watched it shoot back up to over $41? None other than Goldman Sachs’ HFT computer trader, The BEAST.

In essence, Goldman & Co stole these people’s stock. No humans involved in any way.

Not surprisingly, the regulators are still scratching their ass, looking for someone to blame. Of course, they are careful not to piss off their future bosses…the people they will work for when they leave government service. Do you know that most key financial/economic positions in government are held by “former” Goldman partners?

By day’s end of the Flash Crash, the market manipulators were able to regroup. They brought the market back up some. The Dow still lost nearly 350 points on Thursday.

But here’s what you must understand. You just got a tiny, graphic, demonstration of what’s to come. In two ways.

First, tiny Greece broke the back of the insane stock market rally. That led to the biggest stock market meltdown ever. And it is just the start. The first run at what will be the biggest stock market crash ever.

As I told you, giants Spain and Italy owe hundreds of times more than Greece does. So do England and Portugal. They will be the next to wipe out. And they are far too big to bail out. We are talking massive default here.

They are tied to every economy the world over. Our major banks hold their bad paper. And they are as broke as GM, Chrysler, AIG, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were -â€" all put together. Their collapses will start a financial chain reaction, that cannot be stopped.

They have already started to collapse. Haven’t you heard the rumblings from Spain? From Portugal? How England just had emergency elections, that left no one clearly in charge?

And then there’s the biggest debtor of all. The U.S. We will need more money than anyone, by huge amounts. For years to come.

Printing our way out of this crisis is not an option. Not for us or for any major nation on the planet. We are talking a depression, worse than any of modern times.

People will lose their savings. Their retirements. Their homes, work, and bank deposits. Those who manage to hang onto their jobs will see their pay severely cut.

These are all deflationary phenomena. You are witnessing the start of it as we speak. God help the world.

Thursday’s mini-crash demonstrated a second thing. The one good thing to come from all this. The recommendations I made performed beautifully. Like clockwork, in fact.

They proved my trades work in a crash. Just like they were designed to do. They also showed our reco’s could make a shit pot of money. Even while everyone else is wiping out.

Virtually every trade around the globe fell hard. But ours went straight up, other than the few gold ETF’s. (And they went up a few days later.) We are positioned perfectly for the next phase of this wipeout. Which is happening right now.

The special ETF instruments I selected are relatively immune from The Beast and high-frequency trading. They track the markets nearly perfectly. Margin calls cannot blow them out: they do not trade like futures, because they are stocks.

Our ETF reco’s were completely liquid. Priced correctly. No one got busted out. No time limits. No stops. Just profits rolling in with every down tick. And it’s been a party most every day since flash-crash Thursday….

We are sitting there now, getting even more moves in our favor. As the global market wipeout continues. And the best is yet to come.

High-Frequency Trading:
How Wall Street Rigs the Stock Market Casino
I’ve said this for years, but no one ever believed me until recently.

The stock market is rigged. Crooked to the core. The big trading firms play with loaded dice. But that does not mean you can’t beat them at their own game. If fact it is moments like these â€" with panic in the street and Wall Street in desperation, screwing everyone in sight â€" that the serious money can be made.

The stock market has always been a rigged game. But now a new super-computer has turned a sleazy criminal enterprise into immense global fraud. This doomsday machine will end up destroying its own creators.

High-Frequency-Trading (HFT) super-computers, like the Beast, are able to find out the highest price traders will pay in a millisecond. They then extort that full amount millions of times over, to maximize profits. This has nothing to do with efficiency or innovation or market liquidity. It is about stealing as much of your money as they can.

The way they carry off this scam is beyond belief. The deep-pocket bank/brokerages actually pay the NYSE and the NASDAQ hundreds of millions of dollars each year. In return, the NYSE and NASDAQ connect them to their own computers ON THE FLOOR OF THE EXCHANGES. This lets them shave off critical milliseconds â€" after they’ve gotten a first peak at incoming trades.

It boils down to this. HFT lets Goldman see other people’s orders ahead of time. Before the NYSE or NASDAQ executes these trades. Goldman’s supercomputers are so fast, they can then trade in front of the rest of the market. It’s called front-running. It goes on every day right under the nose of SEC head Mary Schapiro. They know it and they let it happen! In fact they encourage it.

“Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed,” said the New York Times. “High-frequency trading is one answer. High-frequency trading systems are so fast they can outsmart or outrun other investors, humans and computers alike.”

“This kind of unfair access seriously compromises the integrity of our markets and creates a two-tiered system where a privileged group of insiders receives preferential treatment, depriving others of a fair price for their transactions,” wrote Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. to the SEC.

HFT computers learn every sell order that comes in. Every buy order. Because they are faster than all other computers, they front-run the market.

Goldman Sachs disclosed recently that it had 46 “$100 million trading days” in the second quarter of 2009. A record number. No one has done so well in the history of trading. How is this possible?

The U.S. economy is facing collapse. Banks and brokers are hiding more losses than ever on their derivatives books. Merger and acquisition volume is way down. So are IPO’s. So it seems bizarre that investment banks like Goldman had record quarters. They are making the money the old fashion way, by stealing it.

Now you know the secret. They are skimming the cream off of U.S. trading activity. Billions of times each day.

Ordinarily, a buyer and a seller show up on the floor. A specialist determines a price that satisfies buyer and seller. That’s the market price. If there are too many sellers and not enough buyers, the specialist lowers the price until buyers and sellers agree.

Goldman throws a fatal monkey wrench into that. Before the market price can be made, Goldman electronically floods the specialist with thousands and thousands of orders. In essence, they commandeer the trade. That lets them siphon off nickels and dimes for themselves.

Until a few years ago, Goldman was just an investment bank. But in 2008 Goldman magically transformed itself into a bank holding company. One of the benefits of having ex-Goldman executives fill nearly every key economic/financial position in government. They wired the game with their own people in key government jobs. Yet Goldman still remained an investment bank.

Now Goldman can borrow massive amounts of money at virtually 0% interest from the Fed. The lowest rates in the world. With The Beast, it uses this money to front-run every stock that trades. Simply because it pays the exchanges to let it see everyone’s trades, before they can make them.

So you understand: Goldman gets to speculate with your tax money, and pay nothing for that money. They get to rig the game against you and steal from you. If, or better put when they lose, government will bail them out. The fix is in.

Front running with HFT has become Wall Street’s principal business. The primary force driving most volume on exchanges. They are losing their asses on their derivatives. But The Beast lets Wall Street manipulate markets â€" both for financial and political gain.

How? Because HFTs operate on a massive scale. They account for over 70% of all trades. THEY set the overall market direction. Without any fundamental or even technical reason. And they sucker retail investors into a rising market. Even though it has nothing to do with “green shoots” recovery, or the so-called “Chinese miracle.”

High-frequency trading explains why activity on the nation’s stock exchanges has exploded. Average daily volume has nearly tripled since 2005, according to data from the NYSE. A handful of high-frequency traders (Goldman Sachs) now account for well more than half of all trades.

“This is where all the money is getting made,” said William H. Donaldson, former chairman and chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange and today an adviser to a big hedge fund. “If an individual investor doesn’t have the means to keep up, they’re at a huge disadvantage.”

My confession
Cards on the table time. I never wanted this job. It sucks. When I tell you about events no one else sees, how they will unfold, most people hate me. I’m the bearer of bad tidings.

I know that. I understand that. America is a nation of optimists. Of people who are used to triumphing over adversity.

And here I am, the asshole, warning about a looming real estate collapse when housing prices are going up. (Or stocks, or commodities, or gold, or derivatives, or the global economy.) It’s natural that everyone hates my guts.

That is, until the wipeout I predicted hits. Then I have to hold my nose, as the “experts” claim credit for my analysis. As they pretend they predicted it all along.

On top of that, exposing the crimes of America’s most powerful banks, politicians and financial institutions has made me powerful enemies in some very high places.

But it’s worth it all, if what I know can save my subscribers from their evil schemes. If we can stick it to Wall Street, and potentially make fortunes at their expense.

By now, I’m sure you have figured out we’re still in a depression. The banks are broker than ever. Real estate is still wiping out. We have the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression. Despite the desperate spin job in the media, things are worse. Far worse.

The administration says we’re in a recovery. “Jobs creation” is the reason they give. But they forget to tell you those jobs are short-term, low-paying census workers.

What happens when the census ends in a few months -â€" and all those census workers go to the back of the unemployment line?

How come they refuse to tell you that the real unemployment rate, including discouraged workers, rose to 17.1%. (According to their own calculation.) These are severe depression numbers.

Before long, you will see the Dow plunge to 1000. The huge sovereign debt wipeouts now taking place will trigger the crash. Mindless, computer-generated, high-frequency trading will make it much worse than it had to be.

High-frequency trading means the markets will fall faster and further than ever before. Think of it this way. The theater is on fire. Women and children are scrambling for the exit doors. But the exits are controlled by 6’2”, 270 pound goons. They only let their friends out. That is high-frequency trading by The Beast.

For us it doesn’t matter. We just got confirmation from computer crash Thursday…the warmup to the main event â€" that the HFT wipeout could turn out extremely well for us.

The markets are rigged â€" duhh!
So the markets are rigged! So the financial system is going to collapse!

What’s new? Why the shock? It’s not a new discovery.

Sooner or later, every financial system devised by man collapses. Usually a lot sooner than most people imagined.

Markets have been rigged since the beginning of time. Romans filled their “gold” coins with lead. They fooled people into believing they were solid gold.

The Dutch cheated the Indians out of Manhattan Island. For $24 worth of beads and cloth.

Then the English turned the tables, and conned the Dutch. They got Manhattan from Holland for some Caribbean sugar plantations -â€" right before the cane sugar market collapsed, because they started growing the sugar beat in Europe. Europeans didn’t need high-priced cane sugar from the distant islands any more.

New Amsterdam was renamed New York by its new owners, the English. It became the world’s trading center. The former Caribbean sugar colonies became ever-loving shit holes. Their biggest deal of the week is when the cruise ships arrive. Talk about payback to the Dutch!

Rigging the stock and commodities markets is legendary. The little guy always trades at a huge disadvantage. That’s why most E-Trade wanna-be’s, along with the “secret commodities trading systems” people buy, never make money.

You got to change with the times. At one time, we traded futures almost exclusively. With no buy or sell stops. We had some luck.

Now the world is different. Wall Street has gotten into the futures market big time. They have billion-dollar trading accounts. If you don’t have a multi-million-dollar trading account, you cannot compete. They will kill you with margin calls.

But for every weapon made, someone comes up with a counter weapon. The Samurai spent a lifetime turning their bodies into lethal weapons. They were defeated by the black-powdered pistol, that an 80-year old woman could fire.

Suits of armor protected brave knights against swords and axes. The cross-bow bolt defeated them. It sliced through their armor like a hot knife through butter. They never knew what hit them.

Castle walls were hundreds of feet high. They took years to build. The cannon turned them into a pile of rubble in minutes.

The low-flying helicopter gunship, a devastating weapon in Vietnam, was defeated by the shoulder-fired rocket. And on and on it goes.

Goldman’s high-frequency trading super computer (The Beast) is a devastating weapon of mass wealth destruction. It decimates day traders and fund holders.

Play the market their way, and Goldman will find you. They will blow you out of the market â€" if you do not have the right counter weapon. They sink unsuspecting traders, like a passenger ship hit by a German U-boat torpedo.

You have to adjust your trading strategies to the new realities. You must intelligently use new weapons.

Our trading strategy is simple, but Beast/HFT-smart. We don’t play for pennies a share. Or dollars a move. We play for the home run, the big one. With the right instruments. That is one key to potential success.

We don’t care if we want to buy an ETF at $10, and Goldman floods the market so it costs $10.25. We are looking for that share to go to $100. So Goldman’s manipulations don’t affect us much. We play for the big moves and let them have their scalps. We do not day trade, like they do everything in their power to get you to do.

And when (if!) that big day comes… when The Beast is smoking, like on Beast Thursday… we are there to storm the castle walls and loot the Goldman treasury.

Suppose I think oil at $50 a barrel is too high, and a sell. Then I for sure think oil at $75 is a sell. If they drive oil up to $150, I’m dancing a jig. We make that much more, when the bubble breaks.

The secret is to hold your positions. To wait for the fundamentals to return. They always do. Ask the people who paid $400k for their $150k house â€" that they are now buried in â€" about market fundamentals. Ask them about bubbles bursting.

https://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/advchart/frames/frames.asp?show=&insttype=Index&symb=spx&x=35&y=15&time=3&startdate=1%2F4%2F1999&enddate=8%2F23%2F2011&freq=8&compidx=aaaaa%3A0&comptemptext=&comp=none&ma=0&maval=9&uf=0&lf=1&lf2=0&lf3=0&type=4&style=320&size=4&timeFrameToggle=false&compareToToggle=false&indicatorsToggle=false&chartStyleToggle=false&state=13

[MV/Liberace!]

THE BEAST
By Nick Guarino | July 7, 2010

https://web.archive.org/web/20100713021306/http://nickguarino.com/index.php/uncategorized/the-beast/


The most evil, fiendish machine of mass destruction ever created has been turned on. I call it The Beast.

It is not an atomic bomb. It isn’t a missile or a deadly submarine with enough nukes to end life as we know it.

It is a computer. The fastest, most powerful ever made. Goldman Sachs owns and runs it. It is stealing your wealth day and night.

The Beast is so secret only a handful of people have seen it. The picture above is an educated guess of what it looks like. I based it on talks I’ve had with people who know some of the components of this system from hell.

No one understands everything The Beast does. We do know it is connected, directly or indirectly, to every information system known to man. Every data base. It is so fast, it runs circles around every other computer in the world. It has the power to manipulate (for a time) every market in the world.

Soon this system, or one like it, could be used to control most every aspect of your life.

Right now it is most dangerous for you, me and every American investor: because it is tied directly to the New York Stock Exchange computers. In fact it is connected to every exchange computer in the world, be it stocks commodities or bonds. It lets Goldman Sachs learn every stock order and commodity order that is placed on the NYSE or any other exchange â€" BEFORE the exchange executes it â€" and then jump in front of the market. This is called FRONT RUNNING.

Every time you, your mutual fund or retirement plan buys a stock, bond or commodity, you pay more than you should have. Goldman gets there first. Thanks to the immense power of The Beast. They bid up the price you paid. They gouge you.

In some cases The Beast can freeze you out. Or worse, bust you out of your positions, a big loser. Many small investors learned this the hard way, in the May 6th “flash crash” bloodbath.

It’s legalized theft, on a mass scale. It is the reason Goldman made nearly $30 billion these past few years â€" while the U.S. economy trashed around in the worst depression since the 1930s.

The Beast is located in a steel, nuclear-proof vault. Ten stories below street level. In the same room as the NYSE’s own computers. Wired directly into them, in fact. Most of the time, it is a license for Goldman to print money.

But on Thursday, May 6, the scheme backfired. Goldman’s super-computer â€" the Beast â€" turned the regional Greek downturn into a global freefall. The Dow plunged 1000 points in two hours.

It forced an emergency bailout by the U.S. and members of the European Union: $1 trillion for Greece. Something they all said they would never do.

And now Portugal, Spain, Italy and England are waiting in the wings, panting for their own bailouts. These will be many, many times greater than Greece’s. The fallout will be many times worse, too…

Thursday, May 6, an event took place that struck fear and terror in the hearts of everyone who understood what they saw.

U.S. stocks had their biggest one-day meltdown in history. 1000 points in two hours. Never had stocks fallen so far, so fast. Not in the 1987 wipeout. Not even during the crash of 2008, which was the worst plunge since the Great Depression.

One Dow component, Procter & Gamble, fell from $40 a share to 38 cents â€" in less than 30 minutes. Unprecedented. But it will not be the last of these kinds of meltdowns. This is the first of many crises we will soon see.

As usual, the sold-out Wall Street press went into overdrive. They quickly pooh-pooh’ed the stark warning of what’s to come.

Don’t let them fool you.

The Greek crisis is a relatively minor event, compared to what’s in store. But even little ole Greece sent the stock market into a tailspin. We warned about this, months ahead of time, in our “Dead Meat/PIIGS” issue.

Now the market is starting to catch up to the fact that the depression is wiping out entire countries. Investors and traders saw the rioting in Greek streets. Panic struck the world’s markets.

Just days earlier, the S&P 500 was enjoying an 80% rally-back, from the lows last March. The Dow had soared from 6700 to 11,300. The biggest put-up, fixed market ever.

“Come on in, the water’s fine,” Wall Street promised the masses. “Happy days are here again.” So the suckers bought into another pre-planned, pre-packaged, computer-orchestrated disaster.

Flash Crash Thursday, every major exchange took catastrophic hits. Instantly, the media blamed it on a rookie trader’s typing mistake.

BULL. This was NOT a Fat-Fingers error. It was not an accident. It sure wasn’t a one-time event either.

You saw Wall Street’s mindless computer trading programs backfire â€" and turn a regional downswing into a full-blown global panic.

You saw Wall Street’s biggest “screw-you” scam ever blow up in its face. You saw The Beast rear its ugly head, turn on its makers, and nearly cause a total meltdown in U.S. stocks.

Most of all, you saw a sneak preview of what’s coming. Because next time it won’t just be tiny Greece that needs a bailout. Giants Spain and Italy will need bailouts. Portugal, England and Ireland will need bailouts.

Imagine the market chaos when Italy and Spain come begging for ten trillion dollars (not a mere trillion like Greece). When the IMF cuts the pay of every Italian and Spaniard by 25%… slashes their retirements funds in half… and reduces their beloved cradle-to-grave government handouts overnight.

I’ll tell you what will happen. The riots in Greece will look like two school girls fighting over a Barbie doll. And I promise you, those PIIGS wipe-outs are coming. Real soon now.

Markets around the world will plunge. At lightning computer speed. We are on the verge of the first computer-led stock market panic and sell-off.

The Beast: of Wall Street’s many crimes,
this one will enrage you the most
You’ve heard how brokers “churn” accounts, and push money-losing trades just for the commissions? Or get their customers to buy bad investments they are selling? Goldman takes that to a whole new level.

They call it “high-frequency trading.” (HFT for short.) The most outrageous “screw-the-masses” scam Wall Street ever came up with.

In the first quarter of 2010, Goldman did not have a single losing trading day. This is unprecedented. In fact it is impossible â€" if you are trading. But Goldman is not trading.

They are playing a rigged game. They are the house. They get to see everyone else’s cards, before they bet. There is no way they can lose â€" until D day comes.

All because of The Beast and HFT (high frequency trading). It should be illegal. Instead, the exchange has made special deals with Goldman Sachs and a few other mega-bankers, to give them the ultimate trading edge.

These deals are a license for Goldman to print money: by stealing from you and every other investor who trades/owns stocks, mutual funds, even futures and options.

You, your pension fund, your IRA â€" everyone who trades â€" has to go to the floor of the exchange to buy or sell stocks in the spreads. Not Goldman. They bypass all that. Their computer -â€" The Beast -â€" is connected direct to the NYSE computers. In fact, it is located in the same room with the NYSE’s tired, old, slow machine.

That means Goldman can make trades direct with the NYSE computer. They make the trades before everyone else. With zero delays. The computer can trade trillions of dollars and billions of positions. All at extreme discounts. Less than a penny a share.

Goldman pays hundreds of millions a year for this privilege. It allows them to make guaranteed untold billions, as they screw the market.

A few years ago, HFTs only accounted for one-third of trading. Now they make up 70%-to-80% of all trades on the exchanges. They are why the markets have soared these past two years.

Goldman and its billionaire hedge fund buddies say they are “giving liquidity to the market.” Bull!

The market had no liquidity problems back in the 1970s, when it traded 100 million shares a day. It sure doesn’t have liquidity problems now, when 1 to 3 billion shares a day are traded.

Can computers predict the future with 100% accuracy?
Goldman says yes. History says no
…and I believe history.

Reality is over two billion shares Day trade by the HFTs. Every day. They are executed with NO human supervision at all. None.

These super-computers use the same flawed economic models that have wiped out everyone who has used them. Black-Scholes. The problem is simple.

Humans make the mathematical models. People program the computers and let them run. They try to think of every economic/financial event under the sun. They try to plan for every possible contingency. They play God with your money.

But they are not God. They can’t conceive of all the variables that enter the global financial equations. It’s impossible. No one can.

They ALWAYS miss the “unknown unknowns.” The freak events that make up real life. Terrorist strikes. Hurricanes. Rioting Greeks. Market downturns. Bank wipeouts. North Korea attacking South Korea. The endless bubbles bursting like real estate.

That means their precious computer models go tragically, fatally wrong. They result in colossal wipeouts. They have proved this over and over.

One example: computer models brought on the huge U.S. real estate bubble. They said housing was the ideal long-term investment, that would keep making profits forever. WRONG.

They failed to take into account what happens when people can no longer pay their mortgages. Even with two incomes. This led to the housing crash. Trillions worth of derivatives went bust. Trillions more are still going bust.

All because they did not factor in a key fact of life. One I warned about for the last ten years.

They assumed real estate prices could never go down. Not for the entire real estate market. Remember the old cliché: “they aren’t making any more of the stuff.” So price ALWAYS goes up. Their back-dated models told them that.

Sure, they said, we have had real estate downturns. New York City in the 1970s. Texas in the 80s. Colorado and Florida in the 1990s.

But their models showed these wipeouts were regional only. They did not last long. I heard them call them “buying opportunities.” The national market, they said, still went up.

So their solution was simple. Spread the risk over all real estate markets. The rising markets would more than make up for the occasional, local down moves.

This is why institutions kept pouring money into real estate after 911. It’s why U.S. housing values soared, in the biggest bubble ever.

But God is God. People who think they are smarter than everyone are pompous pricks. God wins. Pompous pricks always lose big-time in the end.

The real estate wipeout â€" the financial collapse and depression we are still in â€" are based on three big mistakes.

One, the mathematical geniuses who think their computer programs perfectly model the future. They don’t.

Two, the greedy handlers who hired the mathematicians to justify their own crooked schemes. The masters of the universe who run Goldman and Wall Street. They play craps with the world’s money.

Three, the masses. Sadly, they are clueless. They trust Wall Street. They do anything the media and their brokers tell them. They risk everything, to chase slightly higher yields.

Well, what do you know? The one thing took place, that Wall Street’s super-computers could never see. Real estate doesn’t always go up. Bubbles ALWAYS burst. Real estate can go down everywhere, all at the same time, and stay down for decades. They take banks and sovereign states with them.

The models didn’t see any of that. They didn’t see that their trading made too many loans -â€" pumped too much money â€" into real estate. More money than the markets could efficiently use.

This created the bubble. People paid way, way too much for houses. They borrowed far more than the houses were really worth. Banks loaned themselves broke. All because the computer models said real estate values always go up.

The models also said derivatives debt was safe. It would “manage risk.” Keep the economy growing.

100% false. Derivatives collapsed. So did the real estate they financed. Bringing down the entire house of cards. Everyone who bought into this b.s. is screwed to the wall.

Something even uglier and more diabolical
is at work in today’s stock market bubble
Wall Street’s game is simple. Create off-exchange derivatives, that shift risk to the unknowing…hide losses…and show profits that are not really there. Institutionalized fraud at the highest level.

Derivatives are so complicated, few men alive understand them. Even fewer know how they work. This is not because people are stupid. It’s because by design derivatives are made to be too complicated to understand. They not only fool the masses. They fool sophisticated investors, as you have seen.

I am a simple dishwasher. So complicated things don’t befuddle me. I am befuddled already.

And because I have a simple mind, I reduce things to their simplest level. That’s where my fundamental analysis comes from. That has held me in good stead for 30 years.

Let me tell you what 99.9% of the players in the game don’t understand. And the 0.1% who do, will never tell you.

The Greek crisis is just one of many sovereign debt crises the world over. As our recent issues have shown, soon it will hit Italy, Spain, Portugal, England, China…and finally the U.S.

(In fact, as I write this the European debt markets once again are plunging. They finally are realizing Spain is the next dead-broke PIIGS to come begging for a bailout.)

This is not complicated. Governments the world over have been on a wild borrowing spree. For decades. They borrowed trillions, to pay for programs voters demanded. That is how they stayed in power.

Now there is no money left to borrow. Their credit cards have been maxed out. The bankers can’t scheme any more cash. The countries are broke. And the loan sharks are banging on their doors. It’s really as simple as that.

The US and Europe cannot inflate
their way out of this crisis
This is not an inflationary, print-money crisis, like you have seen in the past. These crises are deflationary. For a simple reason. In modern times, currencies float freely. Markets set their values.

Not so in the past. Back then, currencies were fixed. Governments set the value. And they saw to it their currencies did NOT lose value.

That let the governments print money and inflate their debts away. With no repercussions on their currency value.

Greece used to do that. Today is a different story. Greece is a member (for now) of the EU. It can’t prints its problems away. It is BORROWING money, not printing it. Greece is cutting pay, benefits, and retirements. It is DEFLATING.

In fact it’s far worse. Greece is in a depression. As is the rest of the world.

Remember, currencies now change value every day. Every minute. And markets are mightier than government’s pitiful interventions. The days when governments could pull their inflation fixes and print money are over.

News flash: the U.S. will not print money. It won’t inflate away its debt crisis. Neither will Europe or England.

They can’t. The minute they try that, their currencies get trashed. People won’t buy the mountain of debt these nations so desperately need. Worse, the world will dump their currencies. That will destroy their economies.

So how will America solve its debt crisis? Simple. It will get money the old-fashioned way: by borrowing and taxing the shit out of its citizens.

The U.S. will go even deeper into debt, making whatever devil’s bargains it has to, to stay afloat. Obama has already begun both of these: higher taxes…and soaring debt. And as he says, he’s “just getting started.”

The U.S. government will drastically cut public services. It will impoverish the American middle class. Taxes will devastate people.

Other developed nations are doing the same thing. They will keep doing so. They have no choice. They are just as trapped as we are.

Of course, cutting pay, service and benefits has a name. It’s called deflation. The opposite of inflation.

The masses do not yet understand deflation. They have never lived with it. All they know is inflation. That is what they think is coming.

They are dead wrong. Deflation is coming. A much deeper depression is coming.

Which brings me back to Goldman’s secret wealth-destroying weapon, The Beast…

On Thursday May 6, the markets caught a glimpse of the future.
They felt the cold chill of what lies ahead
Sooner than anyone thought possible, investors started throwing in the towel. They realized the rally in stocks is just about over. There’s no recovery. The sovereign debt wipeout is next.

Before Flash Crash Thursday, the market had dropped 100-to-200 points every day that week. Thursday started as more of the same. Then Goldman Sachs’ high-frequency trading system from hell â€" The Beast â€" kicked in.

High-frequency trading is just a polite term for front-running. It lets Wall Street insiders trade before their customers do. Almost no one understands this. Anyone who did would never set foot in the Wall Street casino again, except in very smart, sophisticated ways.

Here’s how it works.

As I told you, Wall Street computers are directly connected to the exchanges’ computers. So firms like Goldman learn all orders that come in, to the NYSE and NASDAQ â€" all the exchanges â€" before they get executed. All buy orders. All sell orders.

That lets them place their own orders, for the same stocks, (or options or commodities) ahead of their customers. They get there micro-seconds before everyone else. Which makes all the difference.

Say Goldman’s computer sees an order come in to the exchange, to sell a large block of IBM shares. Goldman rushes in a few micro-seconds ahead of time. Again, it can do this because it is connected to the exchange computers…and its computer is MUCH faster than anyone else’s.

Goldman sells that same stock first. Its selling takes the market lower. So the original seller gets a lower price. Goldman pockets the difference.

Same thing when Goldman sees buy orders come in. It buys ahead. That forces the market higher. Buyers must pay a higher price.

Each day, Goldman front-runs billions of shares. That is how they made nearly $30 billion in profits the past few years -â€" even though the U.S. economy is in a deep recession, and normal investment banking activities (IPOs, mergers & acquisitions) have fallen into the crapper.

It’s like playing poker, when you know the cards of all your opponents -â€" but they don’t know yours. Goldman knows the cards of every retirement fund…mutual fund…institution and individual who trades stocks.

Remember, everyone else is not connected to the exchange computers, with their own personal multi-billion dollar super computer. Their trading systems work more slowly. That puts them at a fatal disadvantage.

Goldman learns the trades they are going to make. It jumps ahead of them, and “scalps” them. That is Wall Street’s own term.

And this computerized front-running, this “scalping,” led to the chaos on Flash Crash Thursday…

How to turn a Greek riot into a global stock crash
The Greek riots were broadcast around the world. Investors were scared shitless. This is not what Wall Street told them would happen. Huge amounts of sell orders hit the exchanges, all at once.

Goldman Sachs’ brilliant computer models saw those sell orders. Its black box computers did their job, without human knowledge or intervention. In microseconds they jumped in ahead of the market, and put in more sell orders. Goldman was making a killing.

But two problems came up. First, sell orders kept coming in. From all around the world. They greatly outweighed the buys.

The NYSE’s slow-moving computer saw this huge imbalance of sell orders. It delayed the processing of all trades. By 90 seconds. That is, every order was held up for 90 seconds.

This was supposed to give the market makers time to check for errors. (In reality, to cover their asses.) But it only made things worse…

The Beast and the other HFT computers could not make trades on the NYSE. Remember, they make decisions every micro-second. For them, a minute and a half is an eternity.

But even more selling pressure was building up. The sell orders kept pouring in. Goldman’s computer knew about these orders before the NYSE did: it is both connected to the exchange computers and far faster than they are.

So the computer did what it is programed to do. It started selling on other stock exchanges. It sold on the futures markets as well.

These markets did not delay sales. They were deluged with sell orders. Prices fell even faster than on the NYSE. Creating a huge backlog of sell orders, that accelerated by the micro-second.

You literally saw stock market traders stampede for the burning exchange doors. The whole thing quickly got out of control. Because there were no buyers!

And the computer systems from hell did more of the unthinkable. Seeing prices falling, they kept selling more, bidding the market down. Down, down, down she goes. Where she stops, nobody knows.

Computers led the market meltdown. A meltdown like nothing seen before. It is only the first. Next time the collapses will be too big to stop. Even temporary, partial reversals will not last.

Please understand. Wall Street has bet all your money -â€" our entire financial system -â€" on their computer models. On the bizarre belief that they can correctly predict the future, day in and day out, without error. Do you see how crazy this is?

Stop-loss orders screwed the little guy even more
On Flash-Crash Thursday, things kept getting worse. Many people trade (foolishly) with stop-loss orders. Stops are supposed to limit losses. But in the new world of The Beast, they only make your losses bigger.

Stop-loss orders do not hold your broker to a set price in a fast market. All he has to do is get the “best possible” price.

In the market chaos, the usual Wall Street victims could not get out at their stop-loss prices. The stocks crashed right through the stops. That meant the little guy got screwed. Even more than usual.

Many people were forced out at the lows. Yet the market closed WELL above the original stop price. This is why trading with stops is a suckers’ game. When you need them the most, they will screw you to the wall.

One stock was selling for $42 a share early Thursday. It plunged straight down to $.04. That’s what the average guy, with stops, got. Four cents a share. He lost 99% of his money.

Later that same day, this stock bounced back. It closed over $41. Who do you think bought these shares in the few seconds they were at the ridiculously cheap price of a few pennies a share? And then watched it shoot back up to over $41? None other than Goldman Sachs’ HFT computer trader, The BEAST.

In essence, Goldman & Co stole these people’s stock. No humans involved in any way.

Not surprisingly, the regulators are still scratching their ass, looking for someone to blame. Of course, they are careful not to piss off their future bosses…the people they will work for when they leave government service. Do you know that most key financial/economic positions in government are held by “former” Goldman partners?

By day’s end of the Flash Crash, the market manipulators were able to regroup. They brought the market back up some. The Dow still lost nearly 350 points on Thursday.

But here’s what you must understand. You just got a tiny, graphic, demonstration of what’s to come. In two ways.

First, tiny Greece broke the back of the insane stock market rally. That led to the biggest stock market meltdown ever. And it is just the start. The first run at what will be the biggest stock market crash ever.

As I told you, giants Spain and Italy owe hundreds of times more than Greece does. So do England and Portugal. They will be the next to wipe out. And they are far too big to bail out. We are talking massive default here.

They are tied to every economy the world over. Our major banks hold their bad paper. And they are as broke as GM, Chrysler, AIG, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were -â€" all put together. Their collapses will start a financial chain reaction, that cannot be stopped.

They have already started to collapse. Haven’t you heard the rumblings from Spain? From Portugal? How England just had emergency elections, that left no one clearly in charge?

And then there’s the biggest debtor of all. The U.S. We will need more money than anyone, by huge amounts. For years to come.

Printing our way out of this crisis is not an option. Not for us or for any major nation on the planet. We are talking a depression, worse than any of modern times.

People will lose their savings. Their retirements. Their homes, work, and bank deposits. Those who manage to hang onto their jobs will see their pay severely cut.

These are all deflationary phenomena. You are witnessing the start of it as we speak. God help the world.

Thursday’s mini-crash demonstrated a second thing. The one good thing to come from all this. The recommendations I made performed beautifully. Like clockwork, in fact.

They proved my trades work in a crash. Just like they were designed to do. They also showed our reco’s could make a shit pot of money. Even while everyone else is wiping out.

Virtually every trade around the globe fell hard. But ours went straight up, other than the few gold ETF’s. (And they went up a few days later.) We are positioned perfectly for the next phase of this wipeout. Which is happening right now.

The special ETF instruments I selected are relatively immune from The Beast and high-frequency trading. They track the markets nearly perfectly. Margin calls cannot blow them out: they do not trade like futures, because they are stocks.

Our ETF reco’s were completely liquid. Priced correctly. No one got busted out. No time limits. No stops. Just profits rolling in with every down tick. And it’s been a party most every day since flash-crash Thursday….

We are sitting there now, getting even more moves in our favor. As the global market wipeout continues. And the best is yet to come.

High-Frequency Trading:
How Wall Street Rigs the Stock Market Casino
I’ve said this for years, but no one ever believed me until recently.

The stock market is rigged. Crooked to the core. The big trading firms play with loaded dice. But that does not mean you can’t beat them at their own game. If fact it is moments like these â€" with panic in the street and Wall Street in desperation, screwing everyone in sight â€" that the serious money can be made.

The stock market has always been a rigged game. But now a new super-computer has turned a sleazy criminal enterprise into immense global fraud. This doomsday machine will end up destroying its own creators.

High-Frequency-Trading (HFT) super-computers, like the Beast, are able to find out the highest price traders will pay in a millisecond. They then extort that full amount millions of times over, to maximize profits. This has nothing to do with efficiency or innovation or market liquidity. It is about stealing as much of your money as they can.

The way they carry off this scam is beyond belief. The deep-pocket bank/brokerages actually pay the NYSE and the NASDAQ hundreds of millions of dollars each year. In return, the NYSE and NASDAQ connect them to their own computers ON THE FLOOR OF THE EXCHANGES. This lets them shave off critical milliseconds â€" after they’ve gotten a first peak at incoming trades.

It boils down to this. HFT lets Goldman see other people’s orders ahead of time. Before the NYSE or NASDAQ executes these trades. Goldman’s supercomputers are so fast, they can then trade in front of the rest of the market. It’s called front-running. It goes on every day right under the nose of SEC head Mary Schapiro. They know it and they let it happen! In fact they encourage it.

“Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed,” said the New York Times. “High-frequency trading is one answer. High-frequency trading systems are so fast they can outsmart or outrun other investors, humans and computers alike.”

“This kind of unfair access seriously compromises the integrity of our markets and creates a two-tiered system where a privileged group of insiders receives preferential treatment, depriving others of a fair price for their transactions,” wrote Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. to the SEC.

HFT computers learn every sell order that comes in. Every buy order. Because they are faster than all other computers, they front-run the market.

Goldman Sachs disclosed recently that it had 46 “$100 million trading days” in the second quarter of 2009. A record number. No one has done so well in the history of trading. How is this possible?

The U.S. economy is facing collapse. Banks and brokers are hiding more losses than ever on their derivatives books. Merger and acquisition volume is way down. So are IPO’s. So it seems bizarre that investment banks like Goldman had record quarters. They are making the money the old fashion way, by stealing it.

Now you know the secret. They are skimming the cream off of U.S. trading activity. Billions of times each day.

Ordinarily, a buyer and a seller show up on the floor. A specialist determines a price that satisfies buyer and seller. That’s the market price. If there are too many sellers and not enough buyers, the specialist lowers the price until buyers and sellers agree.

Goldman throws a fatal monkey wrench into that. Before the market price can be made, Goldman electronically floods the specialist with thousands and thousands of orders. In essence, they commandeer the trade. That lets them siphon off nickels and dimes for themselves.

Until a few years ago, Goldman was just an investment bank. But in 2008 Goldman magically transformed itself into a bank holding company. One of the benefits of having ex-Goldman executives fill nearly every key economic/financial position in government. They wired the game with their own people in key government jobs. Yet Goldman still remained an investment bank.

Now Goldman can borrow massive amounts of money at virtually 0% interest from the Fed. The lowest rates in the world. With The Beast, it uses this money to front-run every stock that trades. Simply because it pays the exchanges to let it see everyone’s trades, before they can make them.

So you understand: Goldman gets to speculate with your tax money, and pay nothing for that money. They get to rig the game against you and steal from you. If, or better put when they lose, government will bail them out. The fix is in.

Front running with HFT has become Wall Street’s principal business. The primary force driving most volume on exchanges. They are losing their asses on their derivatives. But The Beast lets Wall Street manipulate markets â€" both for financial and political gain.

How? Because HFTs operate on a massive scale. They account for over 70% of all trades. THEY set the overall market direction. Without any fundamental or even technical reason. And they sucker retail investors into a rising market. Even though it has nothing to do with “green shoots” recovery, or the so-called “Chinese miracle.”

High-frequency trading explains why activity on the nation’s stock exchanges has exploded. Average daily volume has nearly tripled since 2005, according to data from the NYSE. A handful of high-frequency traders (Goldman Sachs) now account for well more than half of all trades.

“This is where all the money is getting made,” said William H. Donaldson, former chairman and chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange and today an adviser to a big hedge fund. “If an individual investor doesn’t have the means to keep up, they’re at a huge disadvantage.”

My confession
Cards on the table time. I never wanted this job. It sucks. When I tell you about events no one else sees, how they will unfold, most people hate me. I’m the bearer of bad tidings.

I know that. I understand that. America is a nation of optimists. Of people who are used to triumphing over adversity.

And here I am, the asshole, warning about a looming real estate collapse when housing prices are going up. (Or stocks, or commodities, or gold, or derivatives, or the global economy.) It’s natural that everyone hates my guts.

That is, until the wipeout I predicted hits. Then I have to hold my nose, as the “experts” claim credit for my analysis. As they pretend they predicted it all along.

On top of that, exposing the crimes of America’s most powerful banks, politicians and financial institutions has made me powerful enemies in some very high places.

But it’s worth it all, if what I know can save my subscribers from their evil schemes. If we can stick it to Wall Street, and potentially make fortunes at their expense.

By now, I’m sure you have figured out we’re still in a depression. The banks are broker than ever. Real estate is still wiping out. We have the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression. Despite the desperate spin job in the media, things are worse. Far worse.

The administration says we’re in a recovery. “Jobs creation” is the reason they give. But they forget to tell you those jobs are short-term, low-paying census workers.

What happens when the census ends in a few months -â€" and all those census workers go to the back of the unemployment line?

How come they refuse to tell you that the real unemployment rate, including discouraged workers, rose to 17.1%. (According to their own calculation.) These are severe depression numbers.

Before long, you will see the Dow plunge to 1000. The huge sovereign debt wipeouts now taking place will trigger the crash. Mindless, computer-generated, high-frequency trading will make it much worse than it had to be.

High-frequency trading means the markets will fall faster and further than ever before. Think of it this way. The theater is on fire. Women and children are scrambling for the exit doors. But the exits are controlled by 6’2”, 270 pound goons. They only let their friends out. That is high-frequency trading by The Beast.

For us it doesn’t matter. We just got confirmation from computer crash Thursday…the warmup to the main event â€" that the HFT wipeout could turn out extremely well for us.

The markets are rigged â€" duhh!
So the markets are rigged! So the financial system is going to collapse!

What’s new? Why the shock? It’s not a new discovery.

Sooner or later, every financial system devised by man collapses. Usually a lot sooner than most people imagined.

Markets have been rigged since the beginning of time. Romans filled their “gold” coins with lead. They fooled people into believing they were solid gold.

The Dutch cheated the Indians out of Manhattan Island. For $24 worth of beads and cloth.

Then the English turned the tables, and conned the Dutch. They got Manhattan from Holland for some Caribbean sugar plantations -â€" right before the cane sugar market collapsed, because they started growing the sugar beat in Europe. Europeans didn’t need high-priced cane sugar from the distant islands any more.

New Amsterdam was renamed New York by its new owners, the English. It became the world’s trading center. The former Caribbean sugar colonies became ever-loving shit holes. Their biggest deal of the week is when the cruise ships arrive. Talk about payback to the Dutch!

Rigging the stock and commodities markets is legendary. The little guy always trades at a huge disadvantage. That’s why most E-Trade wanna-be’s, along with the “secret commodities trading systems” people buy, never make money.

You got to change with the times. At one time, we traded futures almost exclusively. With no buy or sell stops. We had some luck.

Now the world is different. Wall Street has gotten into the futures market big time. They have billion-dollar trading accounts. If you don’t have a multi-million-dollar trading account, you cannot compete. They will kill you with margin calls.

But for every weapon made, someone comes up with a counter weapon. The Samurai spent a lifetime turning their bodies into lethal weapons. They were defeated by the black-powdered pistol, that an 80-year old woman could fire.

Suits of armor protected brave knights against swords and axes. The cross-bow bolt defeated them. It sliced through their armor like a hot knife through butter. They never knew what hit them.

Castle walls were hundreds of feet high. They took years to build. The cannon turned them into a pile of rubble in minutes.

The low-flying helicopter gunship, a devastating weapon in Vietnam, was defeated by the shoulder-fired rocket. And on and on it goes.

Goldman’s high-frequency trading super computer (The Beast) is a devastating weapon of mass wealth destruction. It decimates day traders and fund holders.

Play the market their way, and Goldman will find you. They will blow you out of the market â€" if you do not have the right counter weapon. They sink unsuspecting traders, like a passenger ship hit by a German U-boat torpedo.

You have to adjust your trading strategies to the new realities. You must intelligently use new weapons.

Our trading strategy is simple, but Beast/HFT-smart. We don’t play for pennies a share. Or dollars a move. We play for the home run, the big one. With the right instruments. That is one key to potential success.

We don’t care if we want to buy an ETF at $10, and Goldman floods the market so it costs $10.25. We are looking for that share to go to $100. So Goldman’s manipulations don’t affect us much. We play for the big moves and let them have their scalps. We do not day trade, like they do everything in their power to get you to do.

And when (if!) that big day comes… when The Beast is smoking, like on Beast Thursday… we are there to storm the castle walls and loot the Goldman treasury.

Suppose I think oil at $50 a barrel is too high, and a sell. Then I for sure think oil at $75 is a sell. If they drive oil up to $150, I’m dancing a jig. We make that much more, when the bubble breaks.

The secret is to hold your positions. To wait for the fundamentals to return. They always do. Ask the people who paid $400k for their $150k house â€" that they are now buried in â€" about market fundamentals. Ask them about bubbles bursting.

Please do not post entire articles. A link and a quote from the article are fine, but anything more is a problem with copyright and Google ranking.

[Stupid Robbings]

Please do not post entire articles. A link and a quote from the article are fine, but anything more is a problem with copyright and Google ranking.

Fair use.  No charge.  Fuck Google.  Besides, it's not the entire article, and linked articles have a funny way of vanishing from the Web.  However, if I were the estate, I'd be pissed about your ripping off the image and name of that, flaming gay pianist.  Furthermore, your quoting of the entire comment is hypocritical, you poser.



Shelly Winters was arguably the prettier of the two room mates; her and Marilyn Monroe.

https://youtu.be/cEKgljQl6n0


https://youtu.be/24C6vASJWaU?t=1065

[ItsOver]

Please do not post entire articles. A link and a quote from the article are fine, but anything more is a problem with copyright and Google ranking.

Not to mention hard on the eyes.  I thought someone had decided to post the encyclopedia Brittanica.

[Stupid Robbings]

Not to mention hard on the eyes.  I thought someone had decided to post the encyclopedia Brittanica.

Do you think I won't do it?  Take off the shades.  The type is the same font as yours.

https://www.britannica.com


https://youtu.be/1o4s1KVJaVA?t=1

[Dr. MD MD]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mMbGYKAmsA

[ItsOver]

Do you think I won't do it?  Take off the shades.  The type is the same font as yours.

https://www.britannica.com


https://youtu.be/1o4s1KVJaVA?t=1

Now, now, just because Lee put you in the corner and sent you to your room without dinner for your Great Wall of Text. 

[MV/Liberace!]

Fair use.  No charge.  Fuck Google.  Besides, it's not the entire article, and linked articles have a funny way of vanishing from the Web.

Sorry you disagree. That's the way I want it.

[Dr. MD MD]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uEgR0RdCyI

[Stupid Robbings]

Sorry you disagree. That's the way I want it.

Since that's the way you want it, I'm reporting your infringing ass to the Liberace Estate.

Liberace’s Last Agony : Ugly Battle Over Entertainer’s Estate Strips His Life of Any of Its Final Secrets
By PETER H. KING
AUG. 19, 198812 AM
TIMES STAFF WRITER
LAS VEGAS â€"  Question: Are you stating now that he left the party before it was over?
Answer: When Liberace leaves . . . the party is over. That is what I am saying.

--Dorothy McMahon, Liberace’s maid, testifying about pianist’s last Christmas.

Celebrity is to Las Vegas what steel is to Pittsburgh. Here in the kingdom of Wayne and Frank, a city of excessive light and hyperbole, entertainers are fed to the strip’s neon maw and made over as celebrities, as living legends. Immortals.


Vegas immortality is of course relative and not necessarily forfeited upon death. On the 11th anniversary of his demise, Elvis still headlines at the Hilton, his act enlivened by a stable of impersonators of varying girth.

Liberace presents another case.

The man heralded here as Mr. Showmanship is gone, claimed Feb. 4, 1987, at age 67 by the complications of AIDS. But his celebrity lingers, along with about $18 million in assets. Certain portions of this legacy came to be the subject of a strange and bitter dispute this summer in Department 8, Circuit Court, Clark County, Nev.

Evolved Into Morbid Theater

Technically, the matter concerned a petition to remove Liberace’s lawyer as trustee of his estate. What it evolved into, however, was morbid theater, an overwrought attempt to reevaluate after the fact, just what Liberace had intended for the fortune and fame he left behind. If ever a courtroom proceeding needed a channeler, this exercise in tabloid jurisprudence was it.

There was, in fact, testimony that Liberace was directing the court action from the grave. There also was exhaustive testimony about his last days, sketching him alternately as a man unable to speak in sentences or control bodily functions, and as a coherent if worn patient with wits enough to weigh complicated legal options.

There were allegations about missing jewels and gunplay, about promiscuity and plotting among the hired help. Tears flowed freely on the witness stand as everybody remembered “Lee.”

And when it was all over, after 21 days of testimony spread out from May to mid-August, and countless more hours of wrangling among lawyers, the one who seemed to have lost the most was Liberace himself.

He had died vainly struggling to keep secret the nature of his illness, and by extension his sexual preference; by the time the last witness left the stand Monday, his privacy had been thoroughly ransacked.

The petition had been brought by Liberace’s 74-year-old sister, Angie Liberace; his companion of seven years, Cary James; his longtime maid, Dorothy McMahon; his personal manager of nearly 38 years, Seymour Heller, and the elderly cook Liberace called “my black mother,” Gladys Luckie. Their membership in the entourage that Liberace termed his family could hardly be questioned.

Motivation was another matter.

“This is my last fight for Liberace,” said McMahon, who sometimes served as the entertainer’s “date” at public occasions. “For what he wanted. For what I know he wanted.”

An attorney for the defendant, Joel Strote, a Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer who had been Liberace’s principal counsel for 17 years, offered another motive in closing arguments Tuesday:

“The plaintiffs lived a dream,” Strote’s attorney argued, “but now they cannot face reality. The want the court to change reality for them. . . . They want control. Control they never, ever, ever had in Mr. Liberace’s lifetime, control he never chose to vest in them, control they now demand.”

The plaintiffs presented Judge Michael J. Wendell with a rather pat narrative--too pat, he would rule in the end. In the final days of Liberace’s life, their narrative went, the attorney Strote foisted upon the enfeebled entertainer a new estate plan.

The new plan did not alter to any surprising degree the benefactors or size of bequests designated in previous wills: For example, Liberace still left his sister more than $500,000. He still left the dogs he always called “my children” $50,000.

He left his companion, Cary James, $250,000 and two automobiles. He left his manager $60,000; his cook a house and a car, his maid $5,000.

And he left the bulk of his legacy, as he had in previous wills, to the Liberace Foundation, which awards musical scholarships and maintains the Liberace Museum in the Liberace Shopping Center here.

A Disneyland of Glitz

It had been Liberace’s dream that his museum, shopping center and Tivoli Gardens restaurant would form the nucleus of a piano-shaped Liberace Park, a sort of Disneyland of glitz where visitors would admire his collection of antique cars and pianos, his furs, his sequined costumes and his rhinestone, said to be the largest in the world.

What bothered the plaintiffs most about the new estate plan was that it provided Strote with full control of Liberace’s legacy.

Under the new plan--approved by Liberace 13 days before he died--Strote was named sole executor and trustee of the Liberace will and trusts, with power of attorney and authority over the use of Liberace’s name and likeness.

Previous wills had named Seymour Heller, Liberace’s manager, as executor, but did give Strote the power to dismiss him.

The plaintiffs maintained that Liberace wanted Heller as his executor, along with an accountant he had befriended named Frank Di Bella. They testified about moments when Liberace, dying, would command with uncommon lucidity, “Get Frank Di Bella, he’s my executor!”

The plaintiffs complained further that Strote had gouged the estate and wielded his power against Liberace’s wishes, depriving them of gifts he had given them long before he died--houses, cars, jewels, pensions.

He shut down the Tivoli Gardens Restaurant. He auctioned off thousands of the entertainer’s collectibles. He moved James out of the main house in Palm Springs and into the servants’ quarters--"the dungeon,” Liberace’s companion called it.

A Different Tale

Strote came to court with a far different tale.

Throughout the hearing, he sat directly behind the defense counsel table. A slight, dapper man, he was a portrait of nervous energy, jabbing his pencil into the backs of his lawyers, whispering urgent directions in their ears.

“I think this will affect me for the rest of my life,” he said in an interview as the case was concluding. “I think it has been a very distressing experience, because I always believed that I have been a very moral, ethical, conscientious, honest person. . . . To me it is a Kafkaesque nightmare.”

Strote’s version was that Liberace had called him in early January and asked him to upgrade his last will. When he presented it 10 days later, he was surprised to hear Liberace inform him that Heller was not to become executor.

“He said, ‘Would you do it?’ ” Strote testified.

Complications Mounted

“It” became a more complicated assignment after Strote conferred with experts in estate planning, who recommended that Liberace implement living trusts rather than a will, a not-uncommon strategy that would keep any contests out of probate court and provide a tax advantage, saving the estate tens of thousands of dollars.

Strote testified that he discussed this approach with Liberace by telephone and received his approval.

The next day, Jan. 22, he went through the documents with Liberace at his Palm Springs residence and then, before witnesses that included a physician, a notary public and two neighbors who were close friends of Liberace, the documents were signed.

Strote said Liberace had his wits about him at the Jan. 22 signing, offering as proof the entertainer’s refusal to sign a document that would have instructed doctors not to keep him alive on artificial life support systems.

Worked ‘Night and Day’

Further, Strote maintained that he had earned the $450,000 in fees he has charged the estate since Liberace’s death.

He had toiled “day and night.” He had located and sold several Liberace properties, scattered from Malibu to Manhattan. He had negotiated a deal for a television movie of Liberace’s life and gathered about 22,000 items for auction.

“I felt I had to strike while the iron was hot because Mr. Liberace’s name had been before the public just recently,” he testified.

”. . . In order for the Foundation to be a viable institution for as long as possible,” he testified, “it is important or was important or is important that a positive image of Mr. Liberace be projected to the world and that image be kept in the public eye.”

He had dealt with the media and with legal problems and with the demands of an entourage that refused--in the Strote view--to accept that the meal ticket had been cashed, that Liberace was gone, that the party was over.

The plaintiffs began to put on their version way back in May, and from the start it was clear that this would not be a common court matter.

There was an uncommon amount of weeping on the stand, an uncommon number of male witnesses who arrived with shirts unbuttoned far down their chest, an uncommon seasoning of invective.

Gossip and Tantrums

Pointed questions were asked--but not always answered--about the whereabouts of certain jewels Liberace was known to carry, and about the contents of safety deposit boxes opened after his death.

Gossipy nicknames were recalled, some of them startingly nasty, and at times the hearing seemed a tantrum over whom Liberace liked best.

The plaintiffs testified at length about how Liberace lived, as well as how he died. They described a boyish man who loved to stage gourmet “cook-offs” with his neighbors, to play practical jokes and to scan the supermarket tabloids for gossip about his peers.

There was testimony about how he loved his dogs and forgave their lack of house training. There was lengthy testimony that he loved Christmas, and his mother.

Shunned Tabloid Publicity

The testimony made clear that, though a fan of the gossip sheets, Liberace preferred not to become one of their targets.

He was said to have been angry when a settlement in a palimony suit brought by a previous companion became public. He had summoned Strote shortly before his death to threaten legal action against a newspaper preparing to report that he was afflicted with acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

And so then, would Liberace have approved of his entourage, his “family,” pressing the case in public court, given that it required such an intimate telling of his last days?

“I can’t say,” James said in an interview. ". . . We have to. It breaks our heart.”

Some Details Overlapped

There were certain points where the plaintiffs’ narratives intersected: A comment Liberace made backstage in the fall of 1986 at New York’s Radio City Music Hall that Strote would not be his attorney much longer; a Christmas party in Malibu where Strote was invited as a prop for a practical joke; Liberace’s calls for “my executor” Di Bella.

The entertainer’s last month was described in tortuous detail. The plaintiffs explained how they had fed Liberace, bathed Liberace, how they had bent his knees so that he could shuffle, how they had laid atop him to stop his convulsing in bed.

Conversation, they said, was out of the question that January, along with reading and dialing the telephone.

Strangely, for all the graphic intimacies they volunteered, the plaintiffs always balked when the subject was AIDS.

Denial, Over and Over

Liberace, they said outside court, had known he had the disease for more than a year, but never came fully to terms with pending death. Denial was a practice in the house of Liberace, and it continued into the court.

If Liberace was not prepared for his final exit, neither was his entourage.

Angie Liberace especially expressed the vacuum his absence created for “the family.” She wrote in a letter that she was bothered by the sense that her brother’s spirit lingered in the house he had given her.

She tried to help run his restaurant, only to see Strote close it because it was losing about $50,000 a month. She learned of the closing, she said, when a security guard “stuck a gun in my ribs” as she attempted to enter the establishment.

Her Brother’s Dream

“It was my brother’s wish” to keep it open, Angie Liberace said. “It was his dream.”

It was also Liberace’s dream, the sister testified, for her “to live the good life” after he was gone. She spent tens of thousands of dollars attending memorials for her late brother, buying clothes especially for the occasions and jewelry she said he had designed for her.

She was asked if it was true that she believed her brother had directed her to be in court, that she talked with Liberace every day.

“I do, yes,” she testified.

“Because of his direction are you pressing this lawsuit?”

“Yes,” she responded evenly.

The defense presentation was comparatively staid. It began last week after a long summer recess and moved quickly, a succession of men in gray suits, ties and white shirts buttoned all the way to the collar.

They testified about estates and trusts, real estate transactions, the standard rates of fees charged by attorneys in such cases. The general theme was that Strote had done an extraordinary job in a difficult situation.

Documents Backed Story

The defense presented bills indicating telephone calls between Liberace’s residences and Strote’s office on dates consistent with the attorney’s account. A deposition of a notary public was read into the transcript, indicating that Liberace was more together at the will-signing than the plaintiffs’ witnesses had claimed.

The instruments themselves were powerful witnesses, each signed by Liberace in his looping signature, and also by Strote.

“Logic, logic, logic,” Strote said at the closing of testimony Monday.

If his intent had been to trick Liberace, why had the original draft of the new will initially listed Seymour Heller as trustee? If Liberace was so addled, why had he been able to comprehend and reject the provision for doctors to resist any heroic measures to preserve his life?

If Liberace had wanted to fire him, why had he not done so? And where was Frank Di Bella, the accountant Liberace allegedly had wanted to serve as executor? Why had he not been called to testify? Why wasn’t he a plaintiff in the case?

“I think what Liberace wanted,” Strote said in an interview, “is what he did.”

Though Liberace’s health was clearly failing, Strote said, “he was very cogent, knew exactly what he wanted to do, and gave me very specific instructions.”

A Lively Note

One defense witness did liven up the defense case.

Georges Llinares, a former Liberace house manager who spoke in a thick French accent and wore cowboy boots, had been manager of Liberace’s Palm Spring residence in the 1970s and early 1980s. Llinares admitted under cross-examination that when he was fired, he had warned Liberace that God would get him and, worse, that he would tell all to the National Enquirer.

From the witness stand, Llinares unleashed a barrage of invective at the plaintiffs, one by one, sparing only Gladys Luckie.

With each grenade Llinares lobbed, one of his targets would leave the room sobbing, until eventually the gallery was all but depleted.

It got so sordid that eventually even Strote stalked out. Finally, Judge Wendell put a stop to it.

“I’m here for one thing,” he said, wearily “Should Mr. Strote be removed or not?

“I’m not interested in personalities and I am not interested in morals.”

The closing arguments were made late Wednesday, and as often happens the opposing lawyers appeared to have been locked in different courtrooms for the duration of the case, so contradictory were their appeals.

Each side bemoaned the other’s paucity of evidence and misreading of the law.

Harold Gewerter, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, railed on and on about how Strote had raped and robbed Liberace’s estate. He shouted about “fraud on face” and about “a web of deceit.”

The defense argument was more measured, if equally biting.

John O’Reilly, one of several lawyers engaged in Strote’s defense, spoke of Liberace’s “dream” for the foundation and the “Shangri-La” that the generous entertainer had provided his entourage before he passed away.

“It’s often said that in life you have to pay the fiddler,” the attorney said. “In Liberace’s case, as a result of his life style, he chose to subsidize the whole symphony orchestra.”

These people, he said, indicating the plaintiffs who were seated in the front row of a now packed courtroom, “lived a dream.” And now it was finished.

The judge was quick and precise in his ruling, which he issued immediately from the bench.

One by one he went through the plaintiffs’ assertions, and one by one he found them lacking.

“There is no evidence that I see,” he said, “that Liberace’s mind was deteriorating. He knew what was going on.”

Strote, he said, had done “an excellent job” as trustee.

“In sum and substance,” Wendell concluded, “I am going to deny the motion to remove Mr. Strote.”

Strote had started to sob softly as the judge’s intentions became clear. Now he wailed out loud, the last to cry.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-08-19-vw-762-story.html


https://youtu.be/DUAK7t3Lf8s

[Dr. MD MD]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-63ATaiV644

[analog kid]

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/525472979443273728

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/522394479429689344

[Hog]

Please do not post entire articles. A link and a quote from the article are fine, but anything more is a problem with copyright and Google ranking.

Thank you.

peace
Hog

[Juan]

That racist, sexist, homophobe Trump put women and POCs on the stage with praying man Pence at the coronavirus presser this afternoon.

[albrecht]

That racist, sexist, homophobe Trump put women and POCs on the stage with praying man Pence at the coronavirus presser this afternoon.

That evil Orangeman was only trying to infect the women and POCs because he knows Pence doesn't wash his hands and touches his face and eyes.

Orangeman is so evil that he even helped make high employment levels for POCs and women specifically so that they would be near more people, have more disposable income to spend, and so spread the disease to formerly marginalized communities, minorities, women, and LBTQIS. He is so evil.

[Dr. MD MD]

I am Trump, the destroyer of worlds.

[Dr. MD MD]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVcbmisaTUo

[Dr. MD MD]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkosbgYIOWM

OooeyOooeyOooh...Waa! Waa! Waa!