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Front & Center
By Bud Burrell
August 31, 2010
– From Front and Center, by Bud Burrell –
This week, an important online news service released an article that should send shockwaves into our public markets. In very curt form, the article chronicles the many abuses of U.S. public companies by short selling manipulators, particularly through naked short selling and regular and derivative based synthetic shorting. By implication, the article recites the sheer embarrassing ineffectiveness of our regulators, who are engaged in a pattern of systematic conflicts of interest with revolving doors that are a major disgrace to our own government.
Note the following August 23, 2010, article from Live Trading News International:
‘Naked Short Selling Dominates the Markets’
“Naked Short Selling now dominates the OTC markets, having been blamed by most for monument collapses during the financial crisis, the SEC attempted to, but failed to control the process.
“Naked Short Sellers focus in companies they feel are ‘destroyable’ normally this is a company that uses their market to raise capital, the case of many Pink Sheet and OTC businesses, so it is no surprise to see that naked shorting is at an all time high. [entire post]
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August 5, 2010
– From Front and Center, by Bud Burrell –
I have written extensively about the coming crises in clean water, adequate food, and scarce resources in general for several years now. I write this complimentary review of this documentary commending it to your attention as a must watch. This is a coherent story of an attempt by vested interests worldwide to treat fresh potable water as an asset to be controlled and manipulated to the economic benefit of the few. I am diametrically opposed to this idea, and to the abuses of the poor and hungry on such an enormous scale as reflected in this piece. [entire post]
Tags: benefitting the few, bolivia, criminality, price greater than gasoline, price greater than milk, resouce of life, revolt, take back, us, Water abuse, wisconsin
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July 31, 2010
– From Front and Center, by Bud Burrell –
The original Freedom of Information Act (known hereafter as “FOIA”) was passed in 1966 to be effective in 1967, over the strong objections of the President Lyndon Johnson. The intent of the legislation was to improve transparency of the public into the operations of the US Government. It has been amended many times, and with time, the bureaucracy of our Federal Government had made it more and more expensive and time consuming to get anything important out of such requests.
Last week, as part of the Financial Reform Act, the SEC was “exempted” from the requirements of the FOIA. I guess this is more of the vaunted promises of this Administration to give the public greater transparency into the actions of the US Government’s most powerful agencies. [entire post]
Tags: 1966, arrogance, barney frank, boa, christopher dodd, DTCC, embarrassing fines, federal district subpoenas, financial reform act, finra, fmc, fnm, FOIA, fraud, gs, lbj, malfeasance, mandarins, sec, sec exempted, transparency
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June 27, 2010
– From Front and Center, by Bud Burrell –
Since I got out of the Army, I have spent a good part of my career educating non-technical professionals about complex financial products and portfolio strategies. I found many things of interest about the process of doing this effectively, and in particular, it gave me early insights into the value of what I had learned in K through 12, and what this would mean ultimately to online education via computers.
I found early on that my first task had to be to break down the ideas into words that meant something to the audience. Like many technical spaces, the industry adopted the use of professional terms that had to be described meaningfully to potential end users. Indeed, my first great breakthrough occurred when I realized that my industry had lost sight of who the real end client was. [entire post]
Tags: online education, repetitive reinforcement, rosetta stone, teaching math, us as an analogy to modern learning, yourbabycanread
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June 25, 2010
– From Front and Center, by Bud Burrell –
This week, we saw the Federal Government jam a series of actions down the throats of the American people, the unintended consequences of which can be felt at a visceral level. This Administration seems determined to drive the American people into a series of decisions that they seem unready to make, but for which they are being forced to act whether they are ready or not.
Some of you may be familiar of the story of Reagan taking the Russian Premier to an American grocery store. Shown the immense arrays of products and foods, he left there convinced that Russia could never defeat the United States. In the nineties, the US had a significant influx of Russian and Eastern Satellite country immigrants flow into this country at an unprecedented level. [entire post]
Tags: arizona laws illegal immigration, barred shallow water drilling, blagojevich, BP failed safety procedures, broken debt and entitlement programs, broken legal system, decision paralysis, decisions, economic black hole, fisheries, grocery store stories, illegal immigration, jindal, lies, loss of personal courtesy, louisiana, no alaska, no bakken, no border enforcement, oil and gas, senator kyl, tourism, worthless cap and trade science
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June 20, 2010
– From Front and Center, by Bud Burrell –
In a stunning move last week, the United Kingdom liquidated its Financial Services Authority (its analog to the US’ Securities and Exchange Commission) with little notice, and in the move, shifted all of their regulatory functions and authority to the UK Central Bank. The stated reasons for this move were several. First, the Government cited numerous regulatory oversight failures, not the least being their failure to pick up on the monstrous frauds in sub-prime mortgages and CDO’s. Other breaches of their fiduciary duties included failures to properly regulate UK hedge funds, along with the absence of proper oversight of off shore entities involved in manipulation while under Commonwealth legal authority. [entire post]
Tags: 1.5 Trillion gdp, 3rd largest employer in world, 400% debt to gdp, bank of england, different legal systems, fsa divergences with us sec, fsa shuttered, national health employs 1.4 million, sec functions to federal reserve, stutz bearcat short squeeze, uk central bank, uk unemployment 25%
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June 15, 2010
– From Front and Center, by Bud Burrell –
For those who have not been listening carefully, the left has taken the first steps to seize the public and private pension assets of US Citizens without their consent. Over the past several months, Nancy Pelosi and other Administration operatives have sent up several trial balloons preceding an outright attack on the control of individual retirement accounts, beginning with the proposal for a special excise tax on those who begin to draw down their IRA, 401K, ERISA, Roth and other types of retirement assets accumulated without tax consequence. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, as modified, created the modern financial asset base of the US, in creating the very first Government backed systematic savings plans in our national history. [entire post]
Tags: 2600 pages unread, debt deficit $121 t, epa cap and trade rules avoid legislation, erisa, europe, failed socialism, nationalization, obama care, pension
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June 5, 2010
– From “Front and Center”, by Bud Burrell –
At the major IT industry conference held this week, the long term debate over the future of computing was nearly settled by two events. The first event was the announcement by Google that it would no longer use Windows products. The second event was the practical equivalent of a concession speech by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer that they were in a position to be prepared for any “changing technology” paradigm. So what was the future envisioned by these two organizations?
The answer of course are the shifts of computing models to the long discussed “cloud computing”, in some ways a shift back to parallels to the original mainframe technology, updated for the many new technologies that have emerged in the last 30 years. [entire post]
Tags: changing technology, cloud computing, darts blindfolded, google drops windows systems, impact on business models, job change, job creation, living in the moment, mainframes, mini-computers, moore's law, need to recognize problems, non-linear chess, pc revolution, planet killing asteroid, shift happens
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May 30, 2010
– From “Front and Center”, by Bud Burrell –
Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s commentators Clark and Dawes did a great comedic explanation of the current debt crisis in Europe, incorporating factual debt numbers for some critical nations in the European Union. Their numbers pertaining to the actual debts were rather shocking, particularly when viewed through the prism of the United States Government. [entire post]
Tags: borrowers, cut usg spending 50%, debts, etc, fed res monetize debt, fiat currency, france, germany, great britain, greece, ireland, lenders, medicaid, medicare, portugal, spain, ss trust fund, total debt 121 trillion, unfunded liabilities, us $14 trillion gdp, vs italy
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May 23, 2010
– From “Front and Center”, by Bud Burrell –
I had to take a break involving several pressing matters involving long term professional investments I have made of my time in some spaces ranging from 15 to 18 years, all of which have seem to have hit critical mass at the same time. I had guests come to my city at the same time on several matters, while I explored getting involved in a potential black swan in an unexpected space with people I like personally. At the same time, I began to support a reunion of some military friends from many years ago in a first ever association convention in my City of this group. [entire post]
Tags: 450000 illegals, 90000 crimes in az, ag holder, anti-capitalism, anti-republican democracy, az law, black swan, border patrol, ca cutoff boycott and backlash, eu bailout $1 trillion eud, goldman 385 count indictment nss, greek debt, krenker murder, missing indictments, naked short selling, ship out, sovereign debt
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