occult investment
Monday, March 30th, 2009This amazing story serves to illustrate both the profound secrecy in which our government operates – it also illustrates some astonishing circumstantial evidence that would indicate the government acting well in advance of the current financial crash (indicating it knew long before, that it would eventually crash) and used public money (pension funds) in order to shore up the Wall St. ponzi scheme.
Just months before the start of last year’s stock market collapse, the federal agency that insures the retirement funds of 44 million Americans departed from its conservative investment strategy and decided to put much of its $64 billion insurance fund into stocks.Switching from a heavy reliance on bonds, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation decided to pour billions of dollars into speculative investments such as stocks in emerging foreign markets, real estate, and private equity funds. …
No statistics on the fund’s subsequent performance were released.
Nonetheless, analysts expressed concern that large portions of the trust fund might have been lost at a time when many private pension plans are suffering major losses. The guarantee fund would be the only way to cover the plans if their companies go into bankruptcy.
[…]
Charles E.F. Millard, the former agency director who implemented the strategy until the Bush administration departed on Jan. 20, dismissed such concerns. Millard, a former managing director of Lehman Brothers, said flatly that “the new investment policy is not riskier than the old one.” …Asked whether the strategy was a mistake, given the subsequent declines in stocks and real estate, Millard said, “Ask me in 20 years. The question is whether policymakers will have the fortitude to stick with it.”
I’ll try and ignore the arrogant “ask me in 20 years” quip, and move on to the larger question of how this could be possible. How can the government director of pension funds take the very risky initiative of changing the investment portfolio of God knows how many American pensions (all 64 billion of it) from the predictable bond market and smack them down on the Wall St casino tables – without any acknowledgment, let alone even a whisper of protest. Remember, this happened as long ago as last spring, and yet this is the first we’ve heard about it.
In order to see this travesty in proper context, we need only look back to the other attempt to pour massive amounts of public cash onto Wall St; the ill-fated Bush administrations attempt to privatize part of the Social Security system. Which if had it been successful, would have dumped multi-billions on to the Street in roughly the same time frame. Which of course begs both a question and an implication. If this was an attempt to shore up Wall St with copious amounts of fresh cash, which it seems to be, this implies that it was well understood – clear back to that S.S.debate time – that the financial health of the nation was already in dire straights. That the financial health of the nation had in fact become starved for cash in an addictive vicious circle dependent on unregulated malignant growth in a charade to appear “normal”. So instead of using the S.S. reforms, our wonderful government, threw into the insatiable maw of Wall St the only other alternative – the retirement pensions of millions of working Americans. And they did it in secret, without oversight.