The Nine Who Rule:
The United States of America, and ultimately,
The World
Thomas J. Benison of JPMorgan Chase & Company
James J. Hill of Morgan Stanley
Athanassios Diplas of Deutsche Bank
Paul Hamill of UBS
Paul Mitrokostas of Barclays
Andy Hubbard of Credit Suisse
Oliver Frankel of Goldman Sachs
Ali Balali of Bank of America
Biswarup Chatterjee of Citigroup
From a NYTimes article by Louise Story:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
On the third Wednesday of every month, the nine members of an elite Wall Street society gather in Midtown Manhattan.
The men share a common goal: to protect the interests of big banks in the vast market for derivatives, one of the most profitable — and controversial — fields in finance. They also share a common secret: The details of their meetings, even their identities, have been strictly confidential.
Drawn from giants like JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the bankers form a powerful committee that helps oversee trading in derivatives, instruments which, like insurance, are used to hedge risk.
In theory, this group exists to safeguard the integrity of the multitrillion-dollar market. In practice, it also defends the dominance of the big banks.
Ostensibly, these corporate big boys meet to govern the world of derivatives but, paranoid conspiracy freak that I am, I am convinced they also meet to deliberate the fate of the entire world.
After all, derivatives are things that really don't exist. And yet these things, derivatives, that don't really exist are part of a packet of financial things that don't really exist that brought the entire world to its knees.
We are in an entirely new world, with an entirely new lexicon that includes terms such as "naked option writing," "underlying cash instruments," et al, according to one financial glossary:
http://www.finpipe.com/...
Reuters has its own financial glossary:
http://glossary.reuters.com/...
Quite frankly, I think all of these mysterious words are a bunch of meaningless glop, essentially the fast-talking sales pitch of a bunch of snake oil salesmen who want to shear everyone in the world of their dollars and other sorts of currency -- and gold and silver, including their dental fillings.
Even the world's currency verges on the airy and imaginary at the rate the Fed and other national banking agencies burbles it out to prop up the dear banks who secretly rule the world,
The problem is, that even though this is all a bunch of fantasy and unreality, it causes real people to starve, to lose their habitations, to fight wars in pure desperation, to go about in bleak despair because they are jobless and hopeless.
I would like to think that we real people who have real lives at stake, who need real food and real homes, we really, really need all these real things and more, I don't like to think that we are the pawns of these nine or so men who meet secretly and dispassionately move imaginary money around, bankrupting a new nation every other day or so, and care nothing for what is real and happening.
I would like to think that they know that we, the real, are watching them and their imaginary yet powerful world. I would like to think they feel the teensyest bit uncomfortable with so many real eyes watching them.