Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Nothing's Changed Nothing's New

Even if you applaud what Elliot Spitzer did as Attorney General of New York, namely what no other governmental agency would, you still had to despise the grand standing, politically calculated manner in which he did it. It was interesting to see all those loyal Republican suits, suddenly soft on (white collar) crime crying on CNBC that Spitzer was a run away prosecutor motivated by political ambition. DUH! So was Ken Starr and that shrill bitch DA who prosecuted OJ. And now all those Democrats never once deceived by Bush just couldn’t believe Elliot was anything but pure. Maybe that’s the biggest problem, because that’s exactly what Street elite want, you fighting with me and looking the other way.

Elliot is actually quite an elitist himself and while it’s clear he went after his own kind only for the gubernatorial payoff at the end it is just as clear who he did not go after. It was in part the cabal at Goldman Sachs. In fact he could have started with Henry Paulson. Didn’t good ole Hank rustle up some subprime stew with spit and spittle and serve it up in SIVs world wide when CEO of the golden gangster? But no Hank is happy in Treasury now covering his tracks and bailin out his banker buds. And how about Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member and Goldman analyst Abby Joseph Cohen? She along with Gruntal & Co gangster Joe –Fat Joe--Battipaglia pumped the dot com bubble until it burst in your face, then kept pumping it. Instead of coming out on CNBC and CNN finical news and telling you to sell, they said buy, and those that did bought right into the second greatest stock market crash of all time -the one upcoming being the greatest. It was an in your face pump and dump and Abby & Fat Joe should be in jail, but it was good for Wall Street so Spitzer looked away.

And that’s how it always plays out, investigations are merely shows of investigations. They digg up just enough dirt and sling just enough mud to make it look like the system is correcting itself, but in the end dirt settles, the mud never sticks the system changes nothing, and nether did Spitzer.

The demise of Elliot Spitzer is the result of in-fighting among the elites. I can’t really figure out how he was allowed to get caught on a prostitution charge of all things. It is a charge no one goes to prison for and the well connected get caught in only if they forgot to kiss the ring on the way up. To have even begun his self centered crusade he must have had the blessing of someone on high and so someone up there must have given the OK to give him up.

It’s all salacious and entertaining enough, but to us as traders nothing about the stock market or the system it controls has changed in the past 24 hours. The Street elites don’t want to change the system they want to preserve it and so did Spitzer. He did preserve it and managed to take a little something for himself in the process. That process involved serving up some Martha Steward size mini treats to be publicly baked and maybe Elliot decided to bite into a little bigger piece of the pie against better advice. Maybe he was just unlucky. I don’t know or care. I do know Spitzer made no difference in or out. Sadly the stock market is still the greatest device known to man to transfer wealth from the 99% to the 1% and Elliot Spitzer had no intentions of changing it.

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