Saturday, September 27, 2008

Our current economic crisis: Could part be a terror attack on U.S. financials?

From Northeast Intelligence Network:

On this year's anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, there was a sudden surge in the activity of U.S. hedge funds originating from overseas... like Dubai. There was a sharp rise in "short selling" of stocks, similar to the suspicious trades in the days preceding September 11, 2001. According to one well-known economist, the same institutions attacked on 9/11 are those suffering now. Coincidence?


26 September 2008: A week ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) took the unprecedented step of temporarily banning the fairly common practice of “short selling” securities in response to the widening economic crisis in the U.S. The essence of the ban is that the SEC has placed a hold on “short selling” in 799 financial institutions until October 2, 2008, in tandem with the FSA, which is the British counterpart of the SEC.

In a press release issued September 19, 2008, the SEC made the following announcement (excerpt):

The Securities and Exchange Commission, acting in concert with the U.K. Financial Services Authority, today took temporary emergency action to prohibit short selling in financial companies to protect the integrity and quality of the securities market and strengthen investor confidence. The U.K. FSA took similar action yesterday.

In its most basic definition, short selling (or selling short) is the act of a person or entity selling a security instrument, such as a stock, expecting, for whatever reason, that the price of the security will decline. For example, a person sells the stock today to a buyer at the current price, buying the stock back later at the anticipated reduced price, keeping the difference as profit. Because a person does not actually own the stock they are selling, such transactions are conducted through securities lenders, such as Goldman Sachs, for example.

The concept of short selling is rather simple: the greater the decline of the particular stock, the more money the seller stands to make in pure profit. The inverse is also true: should the value of the stock rise, the seller would then lose money on the transaction. Perhaps the biggest factor that one must keep in mind about selling short is this: the profit is limited but the loss is unlimited. Therefore, the short seller is taking an exceptional risk when engaging in such transactions -an important fact as you read on.

Short selling of stocks: Sound familiar?

At least in part, short selling transactions have been identified as contributing to the demise or imminent demise of a number of longstanding and historically revered investment firms, including but not limited to Lehman Brothers. According to analysts and experts in the financial markets, there has been a very sharp upsurge in market transactions of this type, ultimately causing a portion of the market woes that we are presently experiencing within our financial markets.

Many might recall one of the murkier aspects of 9/11 conspiracy theories involves the speculation of airline stocks in the weeks before the attacks. It has been proven that the options market for United and American Airlines, two of the airlines involved in the attacks, was unusually busy in the days before 9/11 with an extremely heavy volume of "put options," or selling the stocks “short.” The activity was unusual enough that both the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) initiated investigations into the unusual trading activity.


Source

10 comments:

Damien said...

Pastorius,

What makes you think this could be terror related? Why would Jihadist choose to attack us in this way? I'm not saying they wouldn't harm us anyway they could, but they tend to do things like blow things up or fly planes into buildings, or assignations of people who criticize their religion. This just doesn't seem like their style.

Pastorius said...

Damien,
IBA is, to some extent, a clearing house of information related to the Jihad and our effots to understand and defeat it.

I would suggest you read the whole article. Click on source to go to Northeast Intelligence Network and read more.

I'm not an economist. I wouldn't claim to know that the idea expressed here is true or not. However, I do think it is worth considering.

What do you think?

Damien said...

Pastorius,

I reread the article.
I'm not saying you shouldn't have posted this, but it just seems odd to me because this doesn't seem like something that would obviously be a terrorist a attack. It doesn't seem like something that would generate the type of mass panic that al-quada wants. That is why I'm somewhat skeptical, although I wouldn't put it beyond Al-Qaeda to try to wreck our economy.

SamenoKami said...

a-q wants to bring us down economically so that we will not be able to afford to fight. I think osama said/made statements about defeating us financially as 'they' did the Russians.

Damien said...

SamenoKami,

That's a good point!

Always On Watch said...

Didn't OBL speak of "economic jihad"?

Pastorius said...

AOW,
I've gotten an inordinate amount of criticism on this post, both here and at another blog.

It seems ridiculous to me, as what you say about Al Qaeda calling for economic Jihad is patently true.

I am not saying that the current crisis is solely the result of economic Jihad. Instead, I am posting this information because it might be the case that the Jihadis decided to add their attack into the mix.

Why our readers and readers of the other blog can not understand that, I do not know.

Whatever.

Here's their option; I'm stupid.

Damien said...

Pastorius,

You're not stupid. I've met a lot of people who aren't as smart as you.

SamenoKami said...

I cut and pasted this from American Thinker.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2005/04/triplepronged_jihad_military_e.html

Q. It seems that the U.S. government must be made aware that an economic jihad is also a means to wage war.

A. Yes, jihad takes different forms. The military jihad is waged through terrorism. The cultural jihad is done in the universities through the subversion of western values. It developed under the aegis of the Euro—Arab Dialogue. The economic jihad used the oil boycott. Arab countries rely heavily on oil exports. Their economy is very dependent on Western products. It is important to reduce our dependency on the Arab countries' oil, in order to free ourselves from the economic jihad.
-------

I think Bat Ye'or gives the answers in this article. It's at least worth a skim reading.
No one is saying this today is definitely economic jihad, just that it looks funny and could be. There were 364 other days for the stock market to take a dump, why start on 11 Sept? Could be a connection, maybe not. Why since muslims have used economic means to tweak us in the past would they stop now?
I'm not good w/the link. Maybe some smart person (I am stupid, it's what I do) can make the link look better.

Anonymous said...

«This just doesn´t seem like their style.»

It´s not about style. It´s about the Ummah.