The place where you can buy and sell shares in companies.

Fortunes are made and lost here on a regular basis...

The biggest stock market in the world in terms of market capitalisation is the New York Stock Exchange, though the NASDAQ might have recently beaten this.

A place where you can also make a living buying and selling options. You can bet against the price of a stock, and also ride your life into financial utopia or ruin by riding a deep margin that gets called.

It can take some time to understand what's going on, but a more intelligent way to risk money than gambling at The Great canadian Casino. The stock market is the birthplace of paper millionaires and the stereotypical suicide impetus for those in financial ruin during stock market crashes.

There's a very simple mechanism by which the global stock market, or any individual market, is manipulated, and has been since its inception. Once you understand this mechanism and have seen it in action a couple of times, you will be amazed at how surprised everyone seems to be every time it happens. To put it very simply, it's the crash. Crashes are regarded by people who don't know much about economics as "bad" for everyone, when in fact they are not. They are bad for most people, and very very good indeed for a few. It's best explained at first by an example.

It's June 16, 1815. The armies of Wellington and Napoleon are fighting at Waterloo. A French victory will give Napoleon undisputed power on the continent. If Wellington wins, England would become the pre-eminent European power. On the outcome of this single battle depend many things, and one of them is the London Stock Exchange. If England wins at Waterloo, English consuls (government bonds, or the equivalent at the time, I think) will soar in value; if they lose, the consuls will be worth almost nothing. Everyone at the stock exchange, therefore, was waiting in a kind of fever to hear the latest news of the battle - which way it was going, who was gaining the advantage.

Enter Nathan Rothschild, the heir to the banking empire of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who has already himself been responsible for vast increases in the Rothschild fortune. One of the things upon which the Rothschilds depended upon in their business, particularly when it came to the stock exchange, was accurate and timely information. Their information and espionage network was renowned as the fastest and most sophisticated in Europe, making extensive use of codes and carrier pigeons, and by 1815 many traders had come to recognise and even rely on the efficiency of the Rothschild system. Anything that Nathan Rothschild did was watched very carefully by people hoping to catch some crumbs from the master's table.

A Rothschild courier had left the Waterloo battlefield on June 15th, and on the morning of June 16th, Nathan came out on to the Stock Exchange floor and took up his usual position, leaning against "his" pillar. Everyone watched him intensely, looking for the slightest sign or betrayal of information. If anyone knew how the battle was going, they knew, Rothschild would. Everyone on the floor stood to gain or lose enormous sums depending on whcih way they jumped. If the battle was being lost, they would all sell as fast as possible, trying to get rid of their soon-to-be-worthless consuls. If it was being won, they would all jump in immediately to buy. But a wrong decision could be incredibly costly. What was Nathan going to do? What did he know?

Nathan gave a signal, and immediately the Rothschild agents all over the floor began selling consuls. The more they sold, the lower the market value of consuls became, and yet Nathan continued to sell, unloading hundreds of thousands of consuls as quickly as he possibly could. As this continued, and the price continued to fall, the word began to spread that Rothschild knew the outcome of the battle. Wellington had lost, and soon consuls would be worth absolutely nothing. The word spread into a panic, and Rothschild kept selling, and the price kept falling. Traders, trying to get out with as few losses as possible, began selling their own consuls. The price that had been falling began plummeting as it became harder and harder to find buyers for the "worthless" consuls. After a few hours, consuls had fallen to a tiny fraction of their former value.

Nathan Rothschild then gave another signal, one which only his agents understood. They all approached the trading points at once and bought every consul available. There was confusion for a short while, and then the official news reached London: Wellington had won. England was the new master of Europe, and the value of British consuls went through the roof. The huge numbers of consuls that Rothschild had bought at rock-bottom prices were now worth far more than even their original high value. In one day, the Rothschild family fortune had been multiplied about twenty times.

The key to this sting, which has been repeated countless times since by those in a position to pull it off, was the Rothschild information network, and their established reputations. No one would have paid any attention if some no-name banker had started unloading consuls, but because Rothschild did it, everyone panicked and threw their own judgement out of the window. A good analogy is that of the poker game; after all, the Stock Market is basically a giant casino. Unknown players and established players must bluff according to different strategies in poker. An experienced player with a good reputation can run a bluff that, in essence, amounts to convincing the other players at the table that his knowledge of the current game exceeeds theirs. This can be done through words or actions or a combination of both, but the result is to convince others that unless they watch your actions carefully, and even follow your lead, they will lose money. In other words, you manipulate people according to the image you know they hold of you. Many people believe that poker is all about figuring out the personalities of the other players, whereas really it's about getting them to try to figure out your personality - or at least the one that you're projecting to them. You don't enter their minds; you get them to enter your mind. If they think you're stupid, they'll sometimes bet against you when they shouldn't. If they think you're smart, they'll sometimes fold when they shouldn't. I've been at the receiving end of this more than once from a player who I knew was "better" than me. In at least one case, he convinced me to fold simply by telling me that I was going to lose if I stayed in. I had no reason to listen to him except that I knew he was a good player, and I didn't want to lose money. Rothschild was doing the same thing on an enormously larger scale.

It has been put forward by economists that there is a natural "cycle" of boom and bust in the world economy, in which "bubbles" (exaggerated upswings of value) give way to "crashes" (panic situations in which everyone is trying to sell their stock, causing the value to plummet). This may or may not be true, but even if this cycle exists "naturally", it is also true that such bubbles and crashes can also be created artificially, and have been many, many times in the past. Information is one of the keys to understanding who might be responsible for this - who has the ability to predict world events and exploit their effect on the world markets? The other key is even more straightforward - who profits? In other words, before a crash, for example, were there companies or individuals who sold large amounts of shares or converted them into gold or silver, "coincidentally"?

In the Waterloo scenario above, the House of Rothschild ended up enormously richer, and almost everyone else lost out, especially smaller traders whose entire fortunes were wiped out, hoovered up by the Rothschild sting. In a more recent event, certain traders seem to have demonstrated a foreknowledge about the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks when they purchased large numbers of put options in United Airlines and American Airlines in the days before the attack. A put option is basically a bet that a company's stock will go down, and a call option is a bet that the stock will rise. If you buy put options and the stock does go down, you stand to make a lot of money. The level of put options bought on these airlines' stock in the days before September 11th was over six times the normal. Large numbers of put options were also bought in companies which had major offices in the World Trade Center, such as Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Merrill Lynch. Much of the money made in these options has gone unclaimed, a fact unexplainable unless you suppose that the buyers do not want to be known. Trading was suspended for four days after the disaster, which prevented the money from being collected quickly while no one was "looking", so to speak.

Charles Merrill (of Merrill Lynch fame) liquidated his firm's ENTIRE stock portfolio before the 1929 stock market crash, making him rich and famous at a time when everyone else was very, very poor indeed. He had been very open, before the crash, about his belief that it was bound to happen, which seemingly places him above suspicion, but could you also take the view that his actions helped to precipitate it? Crashes don't "have" to happen - markets can depreciate in value slowly without "crashing". Panic is what causes a crash, and what causes panic? Seeing someone "big" selling off all their stock? Who knows. Albert Wiggin of Chase Manhattan bank did something similar, selling off stock in his own companies at the same time as he was advising investors to buy in the lead-up to the 1929 crash. There is also some suspicion that the crash was directly triggered, if not engineered, by the Bank of England, as a move of economic warfare against the U.S. in which it slashed its base interest rate and later defaulted on gold payments.

Similar speculations can easily be made about the more recent Dot Com Bubble, in which a few people became very, very rich, and almost everyone else lost heavily. In almost all of these cases, there are factors at work which make it clear that there is something weird going on - the market is being manipulated somehow. In the Waterloo case, it was absolutely explicit. Everyone knew afterwards what Rothschild had done, and there was nothing illegal about it, whatever about its morality. After 1929 the Pecora Commission was set up to investigate wrongdoing which led both to the bubble and its collapse, and many people argue that the same should be done in relation to the Dot Com Bubble, in which many previously sound-minded economic theorists suddenly seemed to "forget" everything they knew about economics and history and hysterically advised people to invest, invest, invest in any company with a website.

There is one thing that all of these economic events have in common - small investors, pensions and insurance policies, houses and life savings, get wiped out. Some banks and companies gain on paper, others lose on paper, but in every crash, an enormous amount of REAL wealth is sucked up from ordinary people who lose everything. What happens to a bank and to an ordinary person during a crash? The bank might lose 80% of its stock value, a "disaster" amounting to billions of dollars maybe, while the small investor might only lose $20,000. However, for the bank, the value of its stocks is (mostly) unrelated to its actual wealth and power. The small investor may be unable to pay his mortgage and therefore lose his house as a result of the crash, having gotten himself in huge debt in the overconfidence of the boom that always precedes the crash. During the boom the bank has been throwing credit at him, encouraging him to take out loan after loan, and after the crash these are all called in. The investor defaults on his payments and his collateral is taken by the bank. The investor has lost $20,000 worth of figures on a screen (virtual wealth), and a house (real wealth). The bank has lost billions of dollars worth of figures on a screen (virtual wealth) and GAINED a house (real wealth). After a crash, this happens to hundreds of thousands of people. So who has gained and who has lost? This may be why banks are so keen to lend money to people and why they seem to "lose their heads" during a boom, encouraging people to go further and further into debt. The bankers do NOT lose their heads. They didn't get to be bankers by forgetting about history and basic economics. They know that when and if a crash happens, they will probably get richer in real terms, even if their virtual value seems to fall. On an almost unimaginably vast scale, it's Nathan Rothschild's sting again, pulled on every small investor, every owner of a credit card, everyone who takes out a mortgage. People LISTEN to banks, because after all, banks know more than they do about money, right? Right? They're rich, so they must know, right? If they're offering me credit, that must mean that the market is good, because they wouldn't give out money for nothing, right?

Oh dear. Now I'm living in a box on the street, and the bank is still there. What happened?

You would think that governments would do something to make people more aware of the dangers of being in debt, because after all, they want to protect the people they represent. Right? Except of course that any such advice, especially from countries such as the U.S. and the U.K., could only seem like gross hypocrisy. The U.S. government is up to its eyeballs in debt and currently shows no signs of reducing its spending. It's in debt mostly to the Federal Reserve, which probably seems kosher because it's the "Federal" Reserve, so it must have something to do with the federal government, right? Well, actually the Federal Reserve is not even a bank - it's a cartel of banks, not all of them even American, run as a private company. It has never published a single set of audited accounts. It is "governed" by a board of bankers and government officials, and every year, vast amounts of federal income tax, paid by U.S. citizens, flows into it, not even to pay off the Government's debt, but to pay the INTEREST on the debt. Forget Third World Debt - the First World is in the same situation. It's not the First World exploiting the Third World, it's the banking system exploiting everyone. It's just even more morally reprehensible when it happens to Third World countries because they had so little to begin with.

A couple of questions. Where is all that money going? Who let the debt get so big, and who benefits from it? And an eerie fact: U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were both assassinated when they were on the verge of introducing interest-free currency. Their successors immediately reversed the decision.


A little note: I have received several msgs regarding the end of this writeup including "conspiracy theories". To my way of thinking, a set of facts is just that: a set of facts. It only becomes a conspiracy theory when you offer an explanation involving a conspiracy, which I have not done. The Federal Reserve particularly is a controversial topic but I don't believe I have written anything false or proposed a "conspiracy"; I am just asking questions and stating confirmable facts.

I do acknowledge, however, that I have chosen to include or stress certain facts, and that that in itself can take the place of a "theory" in peoples' imaginations. I am trying to make the point that the world banking system is good for no-one except bankers, but I know that this is a controversial topic which ties into various well-known conspiracy theories. I can't think of anything to do about this other than to suggest that anyone interested or annoyed by the end of this writeup should do some research of their own through Google or any search engine, and who knows? Maybe this writeup will spawn others, agreeing or disagreeing.

People have also objected to my sources as "biased". However, I regard all sources as inherently biased, and tend not to discriminate between sources if all I am interested in are the facts, which I have confirmed elsewhere. If you don't like the source, find me a contradictory one and I promise I will include that in my writeup! So far everything has checked out.

Rothschild Sting: http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/slavery.htm
September 11th Put Options: http://www.ict.org.il/spotlight/det.cfm?id=675
The 1929 crash: http://www.tarpley.net/29crash.htm

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