Return to the Pentagon

(Shutterstock)

 

In my 2011 book, Currency Wars, I gave a detailed description of the first-ever financial war game sponsored by the Department of Defense.

This financial war game took place in 2009 at the top-secret Applied Physics Laboratory located about twenty miles north of Washington, D.C. in the Maryland countryside.

Unlike typical war games, the “rules of engagement” for this financial exercise did not permit the use of any kinetic weapons such as bombs, missiles or drones.

The only weapons allowed were financial instrument including stocks, bonds, currencies, commodities and derivatives.

Are We Now Buying the Rope On Which We Will Hang?

 

The idea was that America was so corrupted and so greedy that we would eventually disregard our own national security in pursuit of a short-term profit. Ironically, it turned out that the Soviet system died under the weight of its own corruption. Communists, at least in practice rather than theory, tend to be just as greedy (if not more so) than capitalists. The Soviet Union is gone and America remains.

What Lenin may have missed is that America’s sin of greed is perhaps overshadowed by our gluttony. Yes, greed was at work in the last downturn but so was overconsumption. As a nation, we are at least as guilty in our buying habits as we are in our selling. One example is that the nation has about $19 trillion in Federal government debt, not to mention unfunded liabilities valued in the $100s of trillions, or private debt which is much greater than GDP already. From one view, this enormous quantity of debt could be the rope with which we hang. We buy goods and services from China and they claim the debt we incur to them is a weapon they can use against us. But that is just one example.

UBS: A Stock Market Crash Is Inevitable

The bull market is about to end, says UBS’ Julian Emanuel.

For months we’ve been warning of a stock market crash.

Money Morning Capital Wave Strategist Shah Gilani – a former CBOE trader, co-creator of the VIX (“fear index”), and hedge fund manager – has seen a bear market just over the horizon since March 2014.

NYSE invokes Rule 48 to curb early swings

Circuit breakers, a plunge protection team (that either doesn’t exist or is doing a very poor job)… and now Rule 48. One has to wonder how many more tricks are in the bag. Perhaps that was the last one, perhaps there’s many more. Even if there’s more, it won’t stop the ever-strengthening avalanche.

 

The New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday again invoked measures meant to promote an orderly opening as the US stock market endured heavy selling in early trading.

In contrast to the wild trading of Monday, August 24, when the exchange also invoked so called Rule 48, activity on Tuesday was mostly orderly in spite of declines, market participants said.

But some complained that it took too long for some stocks to open, which is likely to keep attention on the rule. The S&P 500 fell 3 per cent.

An Expert That Correctly Called The Last Two Stock Market Crashes Is Now Predicting Another One

 

What I am about to share with you is quite stunning.  A well-respected financial expert that correctly predicted the last two stock market crashes is now warning that we are right on the verge of the next one.  John Hussman is a former professor of economics and international finance at the University of Michigan, and the information in his latest weekly market comment is staggering.  Since 1970, there have only been a handful of times when a combination of market signals that Hussman uses have indicated that a major market peak has been reached.  In 1972, 2000 and 2007 each of those peaks was followed by a dramatic stock market crash.  Now, for the first time since the last financial crisis, all four of those signals appeared once again during the week of July 17th.  If Hussman’s analysis is correct, this could very well mean that the next great stock market crash in the United States is imminent.

It was an excellent article by Jim Quinn of the Burning Platform that first alerted me to Hussman’s latest warning.  If you don’t follow Quinn’s work already, you should, because it is excellent.

When someone is repeatedly correct about the financial markets, we should all start paying attention.  Back in late 2007, Hussman warned us about what was coming in 2008, but most people did not listen.

Anonymous takes down New York Stock Exchange; media pretends cyber attack was technical incompetence ‘glitch’

Although officially it’s been called a “glitch”, the NYSE on Wednesday (as this article mentions) was glitched out of service with a whole other host of businesses, which brings the suspicion up another notch. Another theory could be that it wasn’t a glitch or hacker, but a suddenly imminent crash in the markets and the NYSE staff had simply pulled the plug out of the socket to halt trading and stem the tide. Of course, none of this is official but we shouldn’t be surprised to hear any of this should the word get out. “Glitch” just doesn’t fit the description.

 

(NaturalNews) Demonstrating America’s extreme vulnerability to activist-driven hackers who are trying to make a point, the New York Stock Exchange was shuttered for most of the day yesterday, stalling out hundreds of billions of dollars in trades.

The lying mainstream media, of course, has rolled out a pathetic (yet hilarious) cover story on all this, claiming there was no hack. Instead, the NYSE is just wholly incompetent and can’t run its own computer systems reliably, we’re told.

Prepare for more cyber attacks on US

The “patch and pray” system within the United States has killed cyber security. Nobody is willing to commit any funds to protecting the system until something has already happened. Unless this way of thinking is changed and experts begin to go on the offense with cyber defense, America’s IT infrastructure is as good as dead.

 

Another week, another wave of cyber alarm in America. On Wednesday both the New York Stock Exchange and United Airlines suspended activity for several hours due to mysterious computing problems, while the Wall Street Journal’s website briefly went down. All three insisted that the outages reflected technical hitches, not malicious attack. But many are anxious after past assaults on mighty American companies and agencies.

In February Anthem, an insurance company, revealed that cyber hackers had stolen information on 80m customers. The Washington-based Office of Personnel Management said cyber hackers had taken data on millions of federal employees. Companies ranging from retailers to banks have been attacked, too.

Why you should care that Robert Prechter is warning of a ‘sharp collapse’ in stocks

Who is Robert Prechter, and why should investors care that he is warning them to be on high alert for a potential collapse in the stock market?

The president of Elliott Wave International, Prechter may not be a household name on Main Street, but he’s widely known on Wall Street as the foremost authority on the Elliott Wave principle, a forecasting methodology used by generations of technical analysts that is based on the belief that financial markets trend in five waves, and retrace in three waves….

Prechter is also the executive director of the Socionomics Institute, founded to study how those same wave patterns define changes in social mood and govern social events.

How Financial Warfare Could Bring America to Its Knees

As was mentioned here over a week ago, businessmen carry on as if tomorrow will always be the same as today and that nothing bad can happen, yet it is not necessarily their fault because their of their chosen profession — one that is different from those that specialize in espionage or financial warfare. Either way, a complete lack of awareness is a huge national security issue.

One country, Russia or the United States, is de-linking itself from vulnerabilities and going into war prepared while the other is not and exposing its Achilles heel with a ‘kick me’ sign taped to its back. Can you guess which is which?

You only need to follow this site or other similar ones keeping atop of developments like this for a week to draw your own conclusions.

Please see the source link for the video.

 

Financial warfare is coming to the fore. It’s something that’s been talked about for some years, but now it’s actually being played out and practiced. Since 2012 the United States has been in a financial war with Iran. It’s not a shooting war, we’re not invading Iran, but because of their nuclear ambitions, the U.S. has tried to isolate Iran. We kicked them out of the dollar payment system so Iran could not transact in dollars. They said, well who cares, we’ll just transact in Euros or Yen or other currencies.

…

There’s another financial war brewing right now, which is with Russia around Crimea. Russia of course invaded Crimea. No one – left, right or center thinks the U.S. should use military force in Crimea. We’re not sending the 82nd Airborne into Sevastopol anytime soon, but the U.S. doesn’t want to be seen to be doing nothing, and so we’re engaging in economic sanctions, which is a form of financial warfare.

There’s a big difference, however, between confronting Russia and confronting Iran. Russia has a much greater ability to strike back — and just to show how this could escalate, so we put sanctions on, you know, some mid level bureaucrats, who cares, that’s no big deal.

‘Plunge protection’ behind market’s sudden recovery

Mysterious forces were trying their best, but they couldn’t keep the stock market from swooning Wednesday.

They failed in the morning, despite massive purchases of stock index futures contracts. Within minutes of the market’s opening, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 350 points. Later in the day — after a lot of shocking ebb and flow — the Dow bottomed out with a decline of 460 points.

It was only in the last hour of trading that the market saviors managed to trim the Dow loss to just 173 points. And they succeeded only after Janet Yellen’s private, upbeat remarks about the economy were leaked.

Welcome to a new kind of stock market — one that the average investor should refuse to be invested in.

Spectre of 1929 crash looms over FTSE 100 as traders take on record debts

 

The spectre of the 1929 stock market crash looms large for UK investors as traders borrow record amounts to invest in rising stock markets

Nothing has been learnt from the madness of the 1929 stock market crash as once again traders reach for record amounts of debt to pile into rising share prices.

The level of margin debt that traders are using to buy shares in the stock market reached the highest levels on record, according the latest data from the New York stock exchange.

How Russian Hackers Stole the Nasdaq

In October 2010, a Federal Bureau of Investigation system monitoring U.S. Internet traffic picked up an alert. The signal was coming from Nasdaq (NDAQ). It looked like malware had snuck into the company’s central servers. There were indications that the intruder was not a kid somewhere, but the intelligence agency of another country. More troubling still: When the U.S. experts got a better look at the malware, they realized it was attack code, designed to cause damage.

As much as hacking has become a daily irritant, much more of it crosses watch-center monitors out of sight from the public. The Chinese, the French, the Israelis—and many less well known or understood players—all hack in one way or another. They steal missile plans, chemical formulas, power-plant pipeline schematics, and economic data. That’s espionage; attack code is a military strike. There are only a few recorded deployments, the most famous being the Stuxnet worm. Widely believed to be a joint project of the U.S. and Israel, Stuxnet temporarily disabled Iran’s uranium-processing facility at Natanz in 2010. It switched off safety mechanisms, causing the centrifuges at the heart of a refinery to spin out of control. Two years later, Iran destroyed two-thirds of Saudi Aramco’s computer network with a relatively unsophisticated but fast-spreading “wiper” virus. One veteran U.S. official says that when it came to a digital weapon planted in a critical system inside the U.S., he’s seen it only once—in Nasdaq.

The October alert prompted the involvement of the National Security Agency, and just into 2011, the NSA concluded there was a significant danger. A crisis action team convened via secure videoconference in a briefing room in an 11-story office building in the Washington suburbs. Besides a fondue restaurant and a CrossFit gym, the building is home to the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), whose mission is to spot and coordinate the government’s response to digital attacks on the U.S. They reviewed the FBI data and additional information from the NSA, and quickly concluded they needed to escalate.

Stolen uranium compounds not only dirty bomb ingredients within ISIS’ grasp, say experts

As also mentioned here last week.

Plenty of materials for a potential dirty bomb are likely scattered throughout the area of Iraq controlled by ISIS, and pulling off an attack that spreads even a minor amount of radiation could be a huge PR coup for the terror group, experts told FoxNews.com.

Last week, the Iraqi government in Baghdad warned the UN that ISIS operatives had stolen 88 pounds of uranium compounds from Mosul University. Even though many experts said the research materials were not enough to cause widespread harm, spreading fear is even more important to terrorists than a big body count, one terrorism expert said. And with ISIS in control of a huge swath of northern Iraq and parts of Syria that includes research labs, hospitals and industrial sites, ingredients for radiation-spreading bombs are within its grasp.

“Obtaining radiological material from places like universities or hospitals is relatively easy if you have the firepower, a chaotic situation and jihadists willing to sacrifice their health handling it,” said Ryan Mauro, national security analyst for The Clarion Project, a think tank that studies Islamic extremism. “We aren’t talking about producing a nuclear bomb; just combining an explosive with radioactive material.”

NYSE Euronext merger with Deutsche Boerse blocked by EU

Not only would it have controlled over 90% of the European derivatives market, it would’ve also have made Frankfurt the finance capital of the world.

NYSE Euronext’s proposed merger with Deutsche Boerse has been blocked by the EU on competition grounds.

The proposed deal would have created the world’s largest stock exchange operator.

However, the European Commission blocked the deal because it said it would have created a “near monopoly” in European financial derivatives.

…

The European Commission said the planned tie-up would have controlled more than 90% of global trade in European financial derivatives.

Full article: NYSE Euronext merger with Deutsche Boerse blocked by EU (BBC News)