I hope you're not comparing Obama to Saad ala-Bazzaz, Jon. He's an avid defender of the hedge fund managers, standing with them against us; he plays golf with them. He doesn't help them because he's afraid of them, he helps them because, like all good Americans, he doesn't begrudge anybody making lots and lots of money.

Well, I left out the part of the article where it talked about how much Saad al-Bazzaz had admired Saddam.

i don't get this post- are you saying that the hedge managers can have obama taken away and shot?? (...cue the Oliver Stone music)

No frankenduf, he's not saying they could have Obama shot, but he is saying that they could end his political career as easily as they started it. And I'm sure that causes Obama's heartrate to quicken.

1) Hedge fund guys : Saddam Hussein :: Obama : Saad al-Bazzazz

2) ???

3) Profit!

I think they could have Obama taken away and shot.

saurabh: AGREED, after all it is America and he is black. (Article I sec.2 US Constitution)

As the few people doing actual investigative work on the GFC have shown quite thoroughly, the true source of much of Wall Street's success over the last two decades has not been "innovation" or good management, but mundane, b-flat fraud. The people at the top -the Hedge Fund managers, the Bank CEOs- were perfectly aware of this. I suspect that more than a little bit of the defensiveness comes from that. They know that what they were doing was criminal, they spent 20 years laughing not only about how they were getting away with it but how they were being praised for getting away with it, and now that the music has stopped and the whole rotten edifice has collapsed the last thing they want to see is people calling them what they deep down know themselves to be.

Interesting letter that is apropos of the hedge fund situation:

Dear Clients, Industry Colleagues and Friends of Barnhardt Capital Management,

It is with regret and unflinching moral certainty that I announce that Barnhardt Capital Management has ceased operations. After six years of operating as an independent introducing brokerage, and eight years of employment as a broker before that, I found myself, this morning, for the first time since I was 20 years old, watching the futures and options markets open not as a participant, but as a mere spectator.

The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not. And this goes not just for my clients, but for every futures and options account in the United States. The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse. Given this sad reality, I could not in good conscience take one more step as a commodity broker, soliciting trades that I knew were unsafe or holding funds that I knew to be in jeopardy.

The futures markets are very highly-leveraged and thus require an exceptionally firm base upon which to function. That base was the sacrosanct segregation of customer funds from clearing firm capital, with additional emergency financial backing provided by the exchanges themselves. Up until a few weeks ago, that base existed, and had worked flawlessly. Firms came and went, with some imploding in spectacular fashion. Whenever a firm failure happened, the customer funds were intact and the exchanges would step in to backstop everything and keep customers 100% liquid – even as their clearing firm collapsed and was quickly replaced by another firm within the system.

Everything changed just a few short weeks ago. A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let’s not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem “complex” and “abstract” by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. Knowing Jon Corzine, and knowing the abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime and its cronies, this is not really a surprise. What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate. This is unfathomable. The risk exposure precedent that has been set is completely intolerable and has destroyed the entire industry paradigm. No informed person can continue to engage these markets, and no moral person can continue to broker or facilitate customer engagement in what is now a massive game of Russian Roulette.

I have learned over the last week that MF Global is almost certainly the mere tip of the iceberg. There is massive industry-wide exposure to European sovereign junk debt. While other firms may not be as heavily leveraged as Corzine had MFG leveraged, and it is now thought that MFG’s leverage may have been in excess of 100:1, they are still suicidally leveraged and will likely stand massive, unmeetable collateral calls in the coming days and weeks as Europe inevitably collapses. I now suspect that the reason the Chicago Mercantile Exchange did not immediately step in to backstop the MFG implosion was because they knew and know that if they backstopped MFG, they would then be expected to backstop all of the other firms in the system when the failures began to cascade – and there simply isn’t that much money in the entire system. In short, the problem is a SYSTEMIC problem, not merely isolated to one firm...

...And so, to the very unpleasant crux of the matter. The futures and options markets are no longer viable. It is my recommendation that ALL customers withdraw from all of the markets as soon as possible so that they have the best chance of protecting themselves and their equity. The system is no longer functioning with integrity and is suicidally risk-laden. The rule of law is non-existent, instead replaced with godless, criminal political cronyism...

With Best Regards-
Ann Barnhardt

I forgot to mention the time line of the letter I posted above - it was posted to clients about a year ago, May 2011.

Marxist Obama regime---Love it. No doubt Obama is 100% for the proletariat workers and hates the rich capitalist. Its why he keeps feeding Goldman-Sachs and AIG EVERY red cent he can drag out of the Treasury AND backs the ideology of the catfood commission. Its why Justice isn't prosecuting Joe Corzine, Jimmy Dimon, etc., etc. Its ALL for the workers good. (and world revolution, of course)

IMHO Ann B. should have gone ahead and fucked the investors just like Joe. FREE MONEY---NO CONSEQUENCES. Could have saved on sending out THAT embarassing letter.(and Obama would STILL love her)

Marxist Obama regime---Love it. No doubt Obama is 100% for the proletariat workers and hates the rich capitalist. Its why he keeps feeding Goldman-Sachs and AIG EVERY red cent he can drag out of the Treasury AND backs the ideology of the catfood commission. Its why Justice isn't prosecuting Joe Corzine, Jimmy Dimon, etc., etc. Its ALL for the workers good. (and world revolution, of course)

IMHO Ann B. should have gone ahead and fucked the investors just like Joe. FREE MONEY---NO CONSEQUENCES. Could have saved on sending out THAT embarassing letter.(and Obama would STILL love her)

I'm struck by how upset the banksters still are about the lone negative comment Obama made about them three years ago for which he almost immediately apologized.

When the "Way More Rich Than YOU" rob ya blind "an ya can't do nuthin' about it" then BLAME the 1) poor, 2) communists, 3) socialists, 4) marxists, OR 5) somebody working for YOU.

It's notable that its the anniversary of stories on Jon Corzine. It's probably the worst way to look at things (think about the failure of Thanksgiving to prevent genocide). I suspect that delusions are especially tempting around anniversaries, when our previous experiences -- in their entirety -- are replayed subconsciously.

So easy on Ms. Barnhardt. Nobody can escape cryptomnesiatic delusions without a lot of personal insight. Freud believed in cursed numbers against his better judgement because of emotions surrounding the time he got a new phone number. The last two numbers of those digits were his predicted death year, and confirmation bias complimented this. He kind of overcompensated by expelling Carl Jung from the psychological society.