An Aside

Tonight's post will be a completely non trading post after this short trade update......

Place a limit order of 25.49 to potentially sell SSO tomorrow on further market upside. That price corresponds with the fill of the gap down from Wednesday. Historical comparisons from similar gap downs suggest about a 66% chance of the gap being filled in the next couple days. While that would be only a little better than breakeven, from what I'm seeing in the charts, this may be a level that the short-term model would get overbought at, and I would want to be out if the market becomes overbought tomorrow below last week's highs.


Now the rest of the post will be unusual in that I basically never put anything non trading related on the blog, but I came across a post from another blog and thought I'd throw 2 cents in.

http://pensionpulse.blogspot.com/2009/05/will-bilderberg-sink-global-economy.html

The link above discusses and gives a little background on the "Bilderberg Group" which is meeting this weekend in Greece. For anyone completely unfamiliar with this group, it is a private elitist type group that meets yearly to discuss world affairs "off the record." There are no media allowed and attendees are not allowed to discuss anything from the meetings at any time.

Participants always include household names of past (and future) major politicians, media moguls, and business persons including presidents, big time CEOs, and prime ministers, etc. The collective influence and wealth of the couple hundred participants at any given meeting is almost unimaginable. Many independent journalists have throughout the years tried (and to a very limited extent occasionally succeeded via insider leaks, etc) to aquire detailed information about the meeting's agenda.

Now I am not going to go into much more detail here because you can read the article above and follow the links. I read Daniel Estulin's book last year and found it/him to be a good down-to-earth source for information about the group. He calls them "an aristocracy of purpose" which I think is a good title. They are modern aristocrats with huge influence; they are very well organized and have a very specific (though not always unanimous) direction in which they collectively decide to take the world by way of influencing public policy and and public perception through the media.

For a very brief look at how this works..........one common way is that certain past Bilderberg attendees are either heavily financed to campaign for public office, or they are undemocratically placed in government positions via cabinet appointment. Two current cabinet members who have been past attendees in the past year or two are Tim Geithner - Secretary of the Treasury and Lawrence Summers - Director of the National Economic Council. So the two highest cabinet positions regarding finance and economic policy (appointed by the Obama administration in this case) are (undemocratically) occupied by Bilderberg members. That is just one example among many, but given the current economic climate and unprecedented scale of government intervention, pseudo-goverment/Federal Reserve (largely Bilderberg influenced) intervention, you can pretty much bet that Tim and Larry are following the agenda.

The agenda apparently has been/is to reduce demand for energy on a world wide basis for the foreseeable future and to create a massive "problem-reaction-solution" response to "The Credit Crisis." The basic way this works is.......

1) set in motion conditions/legislature/government policy/public ignorance that will create a HUGE problem (and it is always better if you can feign ignorance when the problems surface)

2) the problem is so large and severe that it creates a public reaction that is primarily manifested in FEAR (when fearful we engage in whatever behavior we think will most immediately remove the fear-inducing stimulus, and we are also psychologically wired to look for a "leader" or strong man to protect us, even if that means giving up certain freedoms, etc.)

3) there is already a pre-determined "solution" that has been hammered out in advance (in Bilderberg meeting and the like) of the problem surfacing and that solution (end or partial end goal of those "in the know") is then fed into the legislative system to become gold stamped public policy


Ring any bells? That is Credit Crisis 101 free of charge (no pun intended).

So what is the end goal and motivation? I can't answer that. I think anybody who has been around the block would doubt that the motivation is one for the public good, though there are points of debate I'm sure. As far as the end goal, I think that is more clear, but again I have little to offer other than what is patent.

One patent goal is definitely what we call globalization and/or a "new world order" as the saying has been coined. This is a world with ever decreasing nationalism and national determination (individual countries being phased out so to speak) in favor of large scale geographical zoning, political consolidation, and increasing influence of international organizations like the UN, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, etc. As for specific and relatively near term goals of the Bilderberg group, et al, I gather that one is movement toward international agreement on a world currency. This has already been in the works for decades, obviously, with the creation of the Euro $. With the current "crisis" being a world-wide economic one, it seems obvious that a world-wide economic re-structuring (with a world currency probably as one end goal) is going to take place, probably largely without public awareness of what is really occurring.

As for whether these kinds of changes will in the end be good or bad, I don't really know and I have some mixed feeings. In any case, the article above basically says that insider sources from the Bilderberg group have indicated that the direction for the world is going to be severe recession/depression but without concensus on the duration and some other factors. Also it seems that the current illusion of recovery is an intentional pump and dump type scheme in some ways.

While I am no expert, the fact that bank stocks have risen 100+% in many cases and are only now being told by the Treasury/Geithner/Bildergberg/NWO that they need to raise capital makes a pump and dump seem obvious. Create a huge media blitz of optimism and public anticipation about recovery to pump up the bank shares. Then after the shares are up a huge amount, perform stress tests and kindly inform the banks they need to raise capital. Now the banks decide to issue new shares to the public while prices have been pumped up (this could have been done months ago when shares were much lower I'm sure) so they get more capital with less shares sold. Then things are bound to get worse, and lots of shareholders get screwed, at least for the time being.


So, that is the end of my 2 cents. While gloom and doom is part of markets bottoming and is often a contrary indicator, these are real people with real influence with a real collective agenda, and the indication seems to be that the worst is yet to come. I have no problem reconciling this from a market pattern standpoint, because I believe the pattern suggests we are on the brink of completing an upward correction before at least one more huge meltdown occurs pushing the market to significant new bear market lows later this year.


So why am I in SSO???? lol.


Pete