Perhaps the recent US stock market rally is in expectation of the new free lunch Helicopter Ben is preparing. The derivatives market is now in the Quadrillions. Apparently that is worth $199,000 for every human being on the entire planet. Staggering.
Keeping up with the backroom moves are tricky, but this article by Mike Whitney at Information Clearing House delivers some sharp tongued warnings:
Fed chief Ben Bernanke’s new funding facility is a real doozy. In fact, if the Term Asset-Backed Loan Facility or TALF, which is set to launch on Thursday, doesn’t convince the American people that it’s time to take a wrecking ball to the Central Bank and start over, than nothing will. Bernanke and his co-conspirator at Treasury, Timothy Geithner, are planning to revive the shadow banking system by dumping $2 trillion into the same over-leveraged, derivatives-based garbage that blew up the financial system in the first place. All the blabbering about a “good bank-bad bank” remedy appears to have been a diversion.
