by Tom Valentine
Whatever they are, derivatives are built upon a foundation of quicksand because it is ultimately a creature of the Federal Reserve, which was never “federal” anything, and certainly never “reserved.”
Words mean things, my ass!
Frustrated—I wrote a thousand words on this only to delete it because it appeared to be gibberish. And it wasn’t my fault it’s the nature of this financial scamming and political conniving that is gibberish, which makes us all pay.
Trying to learn about these costly “financial instruments, I read a dull book by one of the financial sectors top journalists, one Gillian Tett, titled ‘Fool’s Gold—how the bold dream of a small tribe at J.P.Morgan was corrupted by Wall Street Greed and unleashed a catastrophe.”
Anyone who ever had a mortgage or another loan upon which interest was paid knows full well that lenders make a profit. It turns out that the old-fashioned usury was too small and too slowfor both broker fees and profits, So ingenious ways to “bundle” debts of many people into “instruments” for rapid, big-time trading was conceived. Not to help humanity, but to speed up the gravy train, so the next time you are stuck watching one of those gooey bank commercials keep this in mind.
According to Google, there are a ton of websites about derivatives, turns out that math, calculus and science got into the financial games, thereby stretching old fashioned lender-borrower contract law beyond recognition.
The nut of the issue is that fat cat investment banksters and their fat cat customers hate three things. They hate “risk” and perpetually hedge against it; they hate taxes as well, and they hate curbs by regulation like the Diaspora hated Rome, so they must corrupt government.
I found the following on the Net, for all the good it does:
In finance, a structured product, also known as a market linked investment, is generally a prepackaged investment strategy based on derivatives, such as a single security, a basket of securities, options, indices, commodities, debt issuance and/or foreign currencies, and to a lesser extent, swaps. The variety of products just described is demonstrative of the fact that there is no single, uniform definition of a structured product. A feature of some structured products is a “principal guarantee” function, which offers protection of principal if held to maturity. For example, an investor invests 100 dollars, the issuer simply invests in a risk free bond that has sufficient interest to grow to 100 after the five-year period. This bond might cost 80 dollars today and after five years it will grow to 100 dollars. With the leftover funds the issuer purchases the options and swaps needed to perform whatever the investment strategy is. Theoretically an investor can just do this themselves, but the costs and transaction volume requirements of many options and swaps are beyond many individual investors.
You got that? There’s more alleged explanation:
As such, structured products were created to meet specific needs that cannot be met from the standardized financial instruments available in the markets. Structured products can be used as an alternative to a direct investment, as part of the asset allocation process to reduce risk exposure of a portfolio, or to utilize the current market trend.
Did that help? Hardly, but here’s more: in classic bureaucratese:
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Rule 434[2] (regarding certain prospectus deliveries) defines structured securities as “securities whose cash flow characteristics depend upon one or more indices or that have embedded forwards or options or securities where an investor’s investment return and the issuer’s payment obligations are contingent on, or highly sensitive to, changes in the value of underlying assets, indices, interest rates or cash flows.”
So much for “words mean things!” Really!
The latest ploy is that Bank of America has prepared another poison-dipped arrow to shoot into the fascist mix landing ultimately on the backs of surviving taxpayers. This important story has been missing from main stream media news, but Jonathan Turley covers the scam here: Bank of America the great derivatives transfer
Additionally this off the net:
In simple terms, they took their $1 trillion+ in deposits, American’s savings accounts, and combined them with their $75 trillion toxic derivatives portfolio. This now makes their derivatives portfolio stronger by backstopping future losses with the capital of American savings, and it allows them to continue making even larger bets. They are paid per transaction, like a real estate agent, so the larger the derivatives portfolio, the larger the annual bonuses.
Some of these $75 trillion in derivatives are Credit Default Swaps ( definition needed), insurance that they have issued against any losses inEuropean sovereign debt.
If anything goes wrong, the FDIC (which also has no money) guarantees the deposits of Americans. Who backstops the FDIC? The US government, also known as the US tax payer.
The FDIC is outraged over the move, but it had the blessing of the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke.
Who “deposited” that loot? Words mean things, my ass!— again and again.
And, to ad meaning to the word fascism, our representatives, who now have a fiction called a super committee, has turned a deaf ear to the bookkeeping scam.
Forget the media whores, again. No news is propaganda.
Deposit Insurance is beyond the last straw.
source: VeteransToday
