FATF Crashes Stock Market again!

Nothing to see here folks...

This happened during FATF week in Paris: an orgy of international asset-forfeiture plunder planning! (Source: S&P 500)

The market began wobbling February 16, then crashed violently on February 20, the day the Communist News Network began screeching and wailing about a not-really communist virus outbreak near a germ lab. So what else was happening on those days in places like… Paris? Here’s a taste: 

“FATF Week, 16-21 February 2020. On Sunday 16 February, more than 800 representatives from 205 countries and jurisdictions around the world, the IMF, UN, World Bank and other organisations, will arrive for FATF Week in Paris, France…”(link)

So what is FATF? It is the Harry Anslinger-Herbert Hoover-Richard Nixon-Bush-Bush asset-forfeiture Crash and Great Depression machine. Remember Milton Friedman in Free to Choose? In a fractional-reserve banking system, the money you deposit exists in several places as the clearing-houses compensate the instruments of money transfer. Finally it is loaned out at interest, so a lot of it is no longer at the bank.

So when federal agents with guns and blanket John Doe or Unnamed Asset warrants shove their way inside to grab cash and securities, other depositors can see the liquidity crunch coming and withdraw their assets. This reverses the leveraging of assets which–absent tax and prohibition raids–increases the money supply. The reversing result is mass bankruptcies and devaluation of assets.

Here’s what went on in Paris just before the crash: (link) Sound farfetched? Read their glossary: 

The term confiscation, which includes forfeiture where applicable, means the permanent deprivation of funds or other assets by order of a competent authority or a court. Confiscation or forfeiture takes place through a judicial or administrative procedure that transfers the ownership of specified funds or other assets to be transferred to the State. In this case, the person(s) or entity(ies) that held an interest in the specified funds or other assets at the time of the confiscation or forfeiture loses all rights, in principle, to the confiscated or forfeited funds or other assets. 

FATF was formed as soon as the Reagan-Bush-Biden prohibitionist asset-forfeiture crash deepened into a really bad recession with stock losses and unemployment. They admit this: 

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is an inter-governmental body established in 1989 by the Ministers of its Member jurisdictions. The mandate of the FATF is to set standards and to promote effective implementation of legal, regulatory and operational measures for combating money laundering, terrorist financing and the financing of proliferation, and other related threats to the integrity of the international financial system. In collaboration with other international stakeholders, the FATF also works to identify national-level vulnerabilities with the aim of protecting the international financial system from misuse.

Pretty shadowy and swampy, huh? And if this thing does wreck economies, who can be held accountable? Who would admit the obvious facts? How would you claim damages?

This sort of thing also happened in 1907, mainly due to new federal regulation of food & drugs and State bans on Beelzebubba’s Beer and The Demon Rum. It happened again in 1921, but was covered up by nullification, then returned with a vengeance in 1929, after Mabel Willebrandt explained, that August, what was going on on “The Inside of Prohibition,” in 20 national papers. Accelerating stock depreciation set in and investors dumped assets…

The banking panics of the Great Depression kept pace with federal indictments of yeast and glucose companies and confiscation of assets plus heavy fines measured in pounds of gold bullion–while the Coast Guard and Customs seized huge shipments of heroin that was steadily replacing beer. The federal government feigns bovine incomprehension of all this causality. 

Government spin-doctors also disavow any knowledge that the Reagan-Bush-Biden asset-forfeiture craze of 1987 had anything to do with that recession, and play dumb in sworn testimony and thick reports on the Flash Crashes. Here’s the latest one, with “market crash”, “financial collapse”, and “economic recession” nowhere to be seen.(link) Here’s a foretaste of Knife-Your-Customer snitching: 

A. CUSTOMER DUE DILIGENCE AND TIPPING-OFF.
1. If, during the establishment or course of the customer relationship, or when conducting occasional transactions, a financial institution suspects that transactions relate to money laundering or terrorist financing, then the institution should:
  (a) normally seek to identify and verify the identity of the customer and the beneficial owner, whether permanent or occasional, and irrespective of any exemption or any designated threshold that might otherwise apply; and
  (b) make a suspicious transaction report (STR) to the financial intelligence unit (FIU), in accordance with Recommendation 20.
2. Recommendation 21 prohibits financial institutions, their directors, officers and employees from disclosing the fact that an STR or related information is being reported to the FIU. A risk exists that customers could be unintentionally tipped off when the financial institution is seeking to perform its customer due diligence (CDD) obligations in these circumstances. The customer’s awareness of a possible STR or investigation could compromise future efforts to investigate the suspected money laundering or terrorist financing operation.
3. Therefore, if financial institutions form a suspicion that transactions relate to money laundering or terrorist financing, they should take into account the risk of tipping-off when performing the CDD process. If the institution reasonably believes that performing the CDD process will tip-off the customer or potential customer, it may choose not to pursue that process, and should file an STR. Institutions should ensure that their employees are aware of, and sensitive to, these issues when conducting CDD. 

Nice friendly stuff, eh? But hey, what’s another global economic crash compared with a convenient flu outbreak generating fewer fatalities than U.S. auto accidents for the same timeframe? This coming recession could easily eliminate the memory loss that sets in after each new crash and depression is explained away. Libertarian candidates could explain to voters what happens time after time, and I’ll lay odds someone will listen

Ignore it and it'll go away...

FATF Bush Crash, Obama Dems win 8 years. FATF Trump-Biden Crash?? (link)

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian blog

1929 Stock Market Crash One

Chapter 46

The First Stock Market Crash

looters-by-law

Chicago Tribune 27MAR1929

On March 26, 1929, Al Capone was still sequestered for the federal grand jury as ordered by Judge Wilkerson, and the U.S. Attorney had sent a federal raiding party to the Lexington and Metropole hotels to seize Capone’s records. Although ostensibly over fallout from the Chicago Heights raids, Assistant United States District Attorney Daniel Anderson nonetheless asked the famous entrepreneur point-blank: “What is your business?”

“I must stand on my constitutional rights and refuse to answer anything particular about that,” was Capone’s answer. Al was charged with contempt and a warrant issued the following day. Health problems as a pretext for avoiding the courtroom had been successfully invoked by Jew-baiting magnate Henry Ford just two years earlier, but the court extended no such privilege to young Al Capone.[1] The market crashed with a record turnover of over 8 million shares on March 26, 1929.[2] Wall Street sources reported that Chicago banks withdrew substantial sums from Wall Street to meet credit exigencies in the “Middle West.” This announcement would be repeated in even stranger circumstances by Herbert Hoover before the year was out.[3]

Wall Street Journal headlines on March 27 glumly described severe declines on the “largest volume of dealings ever known.” Time Magazine chimed right in, announcing “the biggest stock market crash in Coolidge-Hoover history.” Some of the cash movement had to do with income tax payments—which back then were due March 1—and some with quarterly government financing. Indeed, call money bounced back up to 14% at the close of March. News came in of increased opium trade in China precisely coinciding with a new wave of suppression there.[4]

Judge Winslow’s impeachment was gathering steam, with attorney Isidore Kresel scheduled to conduct an investigation beginning Monday. City Trust, Lancia motors and the late F.M. Ferrari were also back in the news over a disputed note, and George McManus—Rothstein murder “suspect”—was released on bail for want of a speedy trial.[5]

Again the Journal reported that there had been a “drastic movement of funds to Chicago to replace funds called in that City by local banks.”[6] This pattern would repeat itself time and time again before 1933, yet remain a mystery to economists and financiers for the next seventy years. Just how much of the March panic was due the various forms of prohibition we may never know. We do know, however, that this record-volume stock market crash occurred well before the tariff debate had even begun and after no interest rate increases by the Fed.

Yet as the crash occurred, vigilantes closed in on Chicago racketeers, Al Capone fidgeted before Judge Wilkerson in a Federal courtroom interested in his income tax records, banks were caught financing bootleggers, League of Nations narcotics statistics reports were falling due, corporate magnates were tried without publicity or fanfare in a Buffalo star chamber and the Chicago-bound trunkful of drugs case slowly expanded into a conspiracy involving failed banks and other corporations. A pattern was taking shape.

The New York World scrupulously ignored the Illinois Alcohol trial, 73 subpoenas and all—yet covered the news of the following day’s “brief but violent tumble in stock prices.”

how credit contracts

Same day Chicago Tribune cartoon

Walter Strong, Publisher of the Chicago Daily News had visited President Hoover on March 19. Strong—together with Judge Frank Loesch of the Chicago Crime Commission—had given “chapter and verse for their statement that Chicago was in the hands of gangsters, that the police and magistrates were completely under their control, that the governor of the state was futile, that the Federal government was the only force by which the city’s ability to govern itself could be restored.” Thus spoke President Hoover, who at once gave orders that “all the Federal agencies at once concentrate upon Mr. Capone and his allies.” This was to be accomplished at once, without publicity and regardless of expense. Having thus ordered such Treasury agents as Eliot Ness and Elmer Irey unleashed upon Chicago’s shadow government, the President again turned his attention to the special session he’d been planning for Congress.[7]

If you had never heard of the March 1929 stock market crash, perhaps you have also never heard of court or financial interpreters for the Portuguese language.

[1] (Bergreen 1994 326) (Pasley 1930 73) (Lacey 1986 216-217)

[2] (Time Capsule 4/1/29 212)

[3] (WSJ 2/26/29; 3/27/29 1; 5/18/29 7)

[4] (NYT 3/31/29 III-6:2; 7/21/29 III-8:8)

[5] (NYT 2/26/29 24; 14) (NY World Almanac 1930 103)

[6] (WSJ 5/18/29 7)

[7] (Hoover Memoirs Vol. 2 277) (Myers & Newton 1936 376)

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