Lux Lucet

The PPT was hard at work today. “So what,” you may say. Or, “What on earth are you talking about?”

As for “what are you talking about,” I mean by the PPT The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets, better known as the Plunge Protection Team (PPT).. Regarding the “so what,” the PPT is the government’s market rigging machine. They’re so good at it that according to one former PPT insider, “there is no price discovery anymore by the market…governments impose prices on the market.”

Today’s action in the US stock market was a perfect example of this. As you can see from the chart below, at one point in the day the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was down about 140 points, a significant drop. And this on heels of several rounds of bad US economic news, the ongoing collapse of one of Canada’s largest mortgage lenders, major problems with China’s credit market, the weekends big election in France which has the potential to break up the European Union, and, oh yeah, the threat of war breaking out in North Korea, Syria, Iran, the South China Sea and Eastern Europe.

But a funny thing happened on the way to a market crash. Out of nowhere, someone started panic buying stocks. Up, up, up went the market until the DJIA closed the day just 6 points down from where it began.

There’s an old saying among stock traders, “Don’t try to catch a falling knife.” That’s a way of saying, don’t by a stock while it’s on the way down. Just let it drop until it finds a price floor.

The market was tanking today, and had very good reason to tank, but the powers that be wouldn’t let the Dow – or as Andy Hoffman likes to call it, the Dow Jones Propaganda Average – fall.

Yes Virginia, There Really is a PPT

In the wake of the October 1987 stock market crash, which saw the DJIA lose a heart stopping 22.6% in one day, then president Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12631 to establish the Working Group on Financial Markets.

Under the heading Purposes and Functions, the order states the goals of the PPT as enhancing the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of the Nation’s financial markets and maintaining investor confidence.”

Rigging Markets for Nearly Thirty Years

This blog has commented many time about the Deep State and its behind the scenes running of the country.

Former Congressional aid Mike Lofgren, who wrote a book on the subject of the Deep State, defined it as “a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”

With that definition, the PPT is surely a critical cog of the Deep State. It consists of the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

And while it’s as high-powered a group as you could find, it operates in the shadows. The mainstream financial press rarely every talks about it.

According to former Assistant Treasury Secretary Paul Craig Roberts, the Federal Reserve has a full trading desk. He has gone on record, asking, “Why does the New York Fed have a trading desk that allows it to intervene in any market? Currencies, commodities, stocks, bonds.”

Why, indeed. Why would the Federal Reserve, whose chairman is on the PPT, have a trading desk as if it were a hedge fund?

The most obvious answer is that the Fed uses its trading desk to manipulate financial markets.

The aim of the PPT seems to be goose stocks, bonds and oil higher, while smashing gold and silver.

As Gregory Mannarino, one of my favorite alternate media market commentators, likes to put it, “Nothing’s real!” By this he means that prices in financial markets do not reflect free market valuations, but rather government manipulated ones.

Mannarino also subscribes to the theory, as do I, that the market riggers are not omnipotent, and that one day financial markets once again will reflect fair market values.

And when that day comes, it will be one that none of us will forget.