* This is from
http://solari.com.
2009: The Year of the Great Vampire Squid
January 7, 2010 at 3:01 pm
The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
- Matt Taibbi, “Inside the Great American Bubble Machine”
The Great Vampire Squid
For years, it was hard for many of us to fathom the psychopathic nature of our financial elites, or to expand the meaning of Matt Tabbi’s marvelous description of Goldman Sachs, the great vampire squid. Squid seems a fitting name for the financial cartel that drives what I have traditionally called the Tapeworm.
There were some who saw the danger immediately and tried to warn us, like Sir James Goldsmith. There were some, like myself, who tried to prevent the housing bubble and find alternatives to investing our life savings in it.
While those efforts did not stop the squid, they certainly made it clear that the squid take down of the planet was, indeed, part of a plan. That’s all documented now.
The Squid Shifts the Money
I often tell the story of my meeting with a group of pension fund leaders in 1997 in which the President of the CalPERs pension fund— the largest in the country—said, “You don’t understand. It’s too late. They have given up on the country. They are moving all the money out in the fall (of 1997). They are moving it to Asia.”
Sure enough, in the fall of 1997 trillions of dollars began to shift out of North America and into the emerging markets, including Asia and China. This included over $4 trillion that went missing from the US government, which I have referred to for years as “the missing money.”
My back-of-the-envelope estimate was that approximately $10 trillion was moved out legally and illegally between that fall of 1997 and 9-11. Given the implications to US pension funds and retirement savings, I have said for years that perhaps the most important question of our generation is where did the money go and how do we get it back?
To the squid’s credit, shifting investment from places with aging populations to places with younger, more dynamic populations makes sense. Problem is that oftentimes the money left by sneaky means, leaving many high and dry to the benefit of the few engineering the moves. Equity owned by the many disappeared out the back door, and turned up in Asia owned by the few.
It is likely that not all the money went to Asia. There are, of course, offshore accounts for all those involved indicated by the extraordinary growth of private banking and offshore havens. It would appear that significant funds went to the black budget, including the high tech weaponry capable of providing enforcement of investment terms and conditions in foreign lands without a friendly legal infrastructure. There are also questions about space investment and whether corporations are not just mining the natural resources around the globe but on other globes as well.
Squid Crime Pays
The criminality of this massive capital shift was extensive. If there was any doubt of the profound and growing influence of narco dollars, the European Union’s lawsuit against RJR (under the ownership and control of leveraged buyout firm KKR) for global money laundering in partnership with the Russian mafia, Latin American drug cartels and Saddam Hussein’s family told the tale. Economic warfare tactics were used to drain money from those we most feared, such as Russia. (See Financial Coup d’ Etat.)
The squid would justify its actions by saying that consensus in a democracy for forward thinking investment moves was not possible. The reality was that global “pumps and dumps” produced phenomenal returns. The “strong dollar policy,” made possible by the suppression of the gold price, lifted the value of the dollar while convenient “credit crisis” ensured that equity positions could be bought up cheap on the other side of the globe. The genetic reengineering of the seed supply and the industrialization of agriculture would permit central control of the most politically powerful market in the world - one that would support a global digital currency in the way that oil and gas have supported the U.S. dollar.
The US Housing and Derivatives Bubble
However, the most important source of capital was the theft of U.S. retirement savings through the engineering of the U.S. housing and debt bubbles. This involved issuing trillions of securities and derivatives, secured by shoddy or non-existent collateral, representing fraudulent inducement on a massive scale.
In the process, the great vampire squid sold trillions in fraudulently overvalued securities to US investors and pension funds as well as retail and institutional investors around the world.
The Squid Hits the Fan
In 2008, global investors finally realized that they had been stuck with fraudulently issued securities by the great vampire squid. The nature of the collateral fraud and questionable practices in the US mortgage and derivatives markets had been understood. However, millions of investors assumed the squid could be counted on to maintain the global ponzi scheme.
By early 2009, the squid was facing a global financial bloodbath that could potentially cook its members into little bits of calamari. Those stuck with bum paper were threatening to pull their money out of the squid and worse.
The squid panicked.