Tuesday, October 20, 2009
About Dark Pools, Extraordinary Rendition,Collateral Damage,etc.
High Finance to War Against Terror, the Same Old Pattern
"Dark Pools". Something ominous about the term. To those of us who are not familiar with the workings of the world of high finance, it sounds as though the same masterminds who created "collateral damage" and "extra-ordinary rendition" are responsible for it. One can imagine our ex vice-president drooling over dark pools although his 'dark pools' might be unrelated to high finance.
The fact remains that they exist, and are not going to disappear anytime soon. Very little is being done to curb abusive practices by the giants of Wall Street. The changes are mostly cosmetic.
From Bloomberg.com:Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will propose toughening its limits on the amount of anonymous trading carried out on stock platforms called dark pools, according to two people familiar with the deliberations. The commission will propose lowering the amount of daily volume in a company’s shares that can be executed on the networks before prices must be made public to 0.25 percent from 5 percent tomorrow, said the people, who declined to be identified because the discussions weren’t public. John Nester, an SEC spokesman, declined to comment. The rule change may curtail the number of transactions on dark pools, off-exchange platforms run by firms such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Getco LLC that have drawn scrutiny from Democratic Senators Ted Kaufman of Delaware and Charles Schumer of New York. The systems usually shut down trading in a security when they approach the current 5 percent limit. |
In our war against terror,too, not much has changed from the way things were done during the G.W. Bush presidency. President Obama, despite his criticism of Bush Administration policies during the campaign of 2008,has not stopped 'extraordinary rendition'.
Los Angeles Times
"Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States."
As our military activities in Iraq dwindle down, 'collateral damage' continues unabated in Afghanistan.
And so it goes.
"We're all mad here"
--Cheshire Cat , Alice in Wonderland
