Juggling Dynamite

High Frequency Trading (HFT) is one of the most reckless activities being tolerated in public markets today. We likely need to see another major crash or two before the practice is finally banned or more likely taxed into remission, but the end of HFT is coming. I believe we will be looking back on this practice years from now and marvel that a handful of firms were allowed to use and abuse the utility of publicly traded markets as their personal game of roulette for so long. For the real world, these rigged speculations are all our risk and no reward.

“European Central Bank policymaker Ewald Nowotny called on Thursday for a regulatory ban on high-frequency trading, saying the technique of using computer algorithms to generate multiple high-speed trades had no practical value.”

See: ECB’s Nowotny calls for High Frequency Trading Ban.

Lakshman Achuthan, chief operations officer of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, talks about the U.S. economy. Achuthan speaks with Tom Keene and Sara Eisen on Bloomberg Television’s “Surveillance.” Here is a direct link. The trouble with mainstream economic thinkers and strategists is that they never look for or “expect” recessions and so they are never able to see them coming. As a result they are no help to those trying to manage financial risk around the business cycle, and yet anticipating and managing the downside risk is the most important thing we can do in the real world.

The European Stability Fund (ESM) was due to take effect in July and proposed as a backstop to protect the debt crisis from spreading by providing loans to troubled euro zone members. It was designed to replace the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), which was a established as an emergency fund in May 2010. Euro zone countries (including those in dire financial shape like Italy and Spain) pledged 440 billion euros in loan guarantees, which the E.F.S.F. used to supply 192 billion euros in bailouts for Ireland, Portugal and Greece. The EFSF now has little of the initial funds left to deploy.

The (ESM) was designed as a longer term fund and was drafted as impenetrable to judicial scrutiny and normal legal and democratic process. It is a very dangerous structure and precedent that seeks to literally enslave the citizens of Europe to endless servitude in order to fund and maintain the financial complex with “unlimited” funds.

The wrinkle in all of this is the German constitutional court ruling today that the German government is free to back the ESM fund but with limits on that participation. The court said that the government has to get approval of the German parliament if Germany’s exposure to the ESM exceeds 190 billion euros. The government also has to keep both houses of parliament informed about the bailout fund, stating that the Bundestag “must individually approve every large-scale federal aid measure on the international or European Union level.” These two provisions appear prima facie in opposition to the iron clad provisions drafted in the ESM constitution itself as explained in this video.

Here is a direct link.

Thinking people have to care about how the ESM as proposed is designed to thwart and negate basic tenants of fairness, disclosure, democracy and the rule of law. This is a shockingly oppressive regime. Time to wake up. Read more here: Draghi reinvents the divine right of kings.