Back in the days when the Mafia allegedly ran Las Vegas, their casinos operated fair games. The Federal Reserve runs a rigged game, which puts it lower on the moral totem pole than the Mafia. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
The irony, of course, is that only those punters who sold on the way up will escape the devastation of the collapse into a bidless “market.”
All I want for Christmas is an unmanipulated market, because manipulated markets always crash big and crash hard. Virtually every market in America is heavily manipulated by the Federal Reserve, which creates currency out of thin air to either buy assets (outright market manipulation) or distribute to financiers, banks and corporations, which then manipulate the markets with their own profiteering (stock buybacks, leveraged buyouts, derivatives, etc.).
The Fed decided long ago that the housing and stock markets were too critical as signals that all is well to remain real markets, because real markets fluctuate and on occasion crash, especially if participants are playing fast and loose with debt, leverage and speculative bets placed with zero collateral (or fake collateral, which is the same thing).
To make sure no decline could ever collapse the happy-happy euphoria of ever-rising markets, the Fed turned markets into simulations of real markets, controlled “markets” masquerading as real markets in which price and value are set by participants, not central banks and proxies of central banks.
The key characteristics of markets are price discovery and the free flow of information about prices, supply, demand, quality, cost of credit, creditworthiness of buyers, etc.
