Institutions

Institutions

Institutions control the overwhelming majority of the power to sway the markets. Blue chip companies – check who hold their largest voting blocs – it’s the institutions: BlackRock, Vanguard, et al. Who controls the ETFs? The pension funds that the peasants store their measly savings in? The same old boys’ club. It is they who set the share prices, period.

Everyone talks about how it’s FOMO that’s driving prices up the wall. But because they aren’t allowed to, no one ever talks about the puppet masters behind the scenes. Yes, maybe the retail trade sector has some nominal influence to an extent but the real clout is held by the big guns. AND the exchanges that the populace punt on. That’s why, if you’ll notice, the markets move in almost perfect lockstep. They move these massive blocks at the precise time of their choosing. No one ever talks about how the institutions know exactly where the market is going at any given point in time not because they can predict the future but because they are the ones that manipulate it and set the prices.

Who came out and called the bottom after the smoke cleared and the dust settled? Larry Fink who advises Trump and heads BlackRock, a firm that has been tasked by the Fed to run several stimulus programmes, and strategists’ at Goldman Sachs, among others. Rick Rieder, also of BlackRock, sits on a committee of the New York Fed. The lion’s share of the newly printed stimulus trillions is flooding into their coffers and washing out all the bad debt. Voila, their books are squeaky clean all of a sudden. Where do they pour this fresh cash? Into the markets, inflating it and thereby locking out everyone else.

In this thinly-veiled vulgar display of crony capitalism, they have flaunted that they will never be held accountable and thus the same tired behaviour will continue ad infinitum, and the next decade/s-long bull market will no doubt be a repeat of the infantile card pyramid debt-stacking that we’ve all seen eventually fall over and over, time and time again, the mess promptly swept under the rug by Uncle Sam in a mammy apron.

Meanwhile, stimulus for main street and the working class quickly runs out, having been reduced to sloppy seconds by the ruling class who must always have their fill first, yields of anything other than equities, and maybe gold, are negative or at best infinitesimal, market valuations are at exorbitant and hardly-justifiable all-time highs, and the commonfolk are once again caught holding the bag with a quickly-sinking economy, ever-increasing and never-before-seen levels of unemployment and rapidly-rotting debt, and of course, the piece-de-resistance, the cherry on the creampie, a horrendously-manhandled health crisis, haphazardly steered by a drunk driver who’s only destination is reelection, passengers’ destination be damned.

Needless to say, with election season swiftly approaching, Trump, with a fire under his ass, has persisted to vigorously whip JPow’s already-red-raw booty, to get him to crank that printer ever faster in an explosion of meaningless paper.