If I were a conspiracy theorist…

In all the carnage and madness, it has just dawned on me that if I believed in black helicopters and overcoats I would think that this crash was concieved and executed by our friends in Washington DC.

The wonderful world of finance has run roughshod on our political system for years. They control the wealth and get whatever they want. They will not be reigned in–even with the threat of criminal prosecution.

Today market action will cause a groundswell, a grass-roots call for major market and financial reform. Big time.

If the administration brought force to bear by bringing suit against the suits, then why not go all the way? The FED already controls the capital markets, so why not? The market was already weak and ripe–like a rotten tomato.

I know it is far fetched and politico’s are seldom smart enought to conceptualize let alone carry out such a plan…

and then to blame it on an error at Citi! My gosh!

Just thinkin, ya know?

This day will do more to destroy the confidence of the individual investor than even the 1987 crash. To the outside viewer, the markets are out of control and governed by criminals running supercomputers…

What happened today is criminal. If the word “error” is used then trades will be broken. It’ll be the biggest fuck up in the history of markets. And if it is Citi’s error, the taxpayer will eat it.

Whatever happend, HFT is clearly out of control.

My first instinct is to call Bullshit on the “market error”. But real or not, this day will wipe people out of the markets.

We bought a few of our holdings as they were plunging and stopped a few too. But the vast majority of my portfolio is way above my stop points and I want to buy–not sell–at the right price.

If this “error” is real then there must be new rules governiing HFT. If not, this will happen frequently…

buying Paragon Shipping Inc. [[prgn]] and Alcoa Inc. [[aa]]

Todays action shows just how fragile the house of cards really is. The engineered rally, the royal scam, is only as good as the market manipulators are in the defense of their handiwork.

Today is history boys and girls. The great reflation experiment came completely unwould in half and hour. They’ll try to pick up the pieces, but today is the mini-crash heard round the world…

We had ignored Europe throughout their melting. We even ignored China’s raising of rates and bank capital requirements. I think this is about something else.

We warned about how the government giveth and taketh away, remember? Today there are serious rumblings about auditing the FED. No matter how much we say we want it, we really don’t. Market participant are scared shitless of being found out. It will hurt confidence and could cause a run on the banks.

This is less about over there and more about over here. We can complain about the engineered rally and benign government and free money because it seems unfair. But this is the alternative.