A playbook for the trading/investing/economic ramifications that are coming from Occupy Wall Street
What’s the next catalyst for the markets? Is it more Greece, Italy, Euro crisis? Probably. Like I wrote last week when the markets were in celebratory mode, we’re going to be in endless crisis until we stop these games of new huge wealth transfers from the taxpayers around the world to the biggest banks around the world that we were going to be in endless crisis mode until the EU governments default and the banks are folded and sold off to new management and investors. And therein lies the real, biggest, most likely near-term (and perhaps long-term catalyst) for these markets — the Occupy movements around the world and specifically here in the US.
This week, let’s talk about what I saw first hand. Next week, I’ll outline how I expect these Occupy protests to start affecting the markets and how the playbook we should be looking to follow from there. And the next week, I’ll outline why these protests and the message and ramifications from them are actually so incredibly bullish for investors in the long term.
The most simple message is: enforce the laws equally against everybody, stop corporate sponsorship of the electoral system, and get every bank and corporation completely off of all forms of welfare.
Ironically or not so much, FINRA’s headquarters is just across and FINRA, a regulatory agency, has come under investigation recently for destroying documents instead of turning them over to investigators who were simply trying to enforce the laws that FINRA says it’s enforcing:
And they were truly anti-partisan. I only had one conversation with someone who was a “Democrat”, no “Republicans” and dozens of people who called themselves “Libertarians” or simply, I kid you not, “Capitalists” when I asked. Yes, a few self-proclaimed anarchists too, although without exception when I questioned several of them at length and they admitted to being capitalists at heart, not truly anarchists. And definitely anti-Fed, which is another way these days of saying anti-bailout/anti-bank-welfare.
Is this a liberal or a conservative sign?
But they were hopeful they could enact change:
Like I said, anti-partisan. Which is very important in both the near- and long-term implications for the impact this Occupy protest will have on our markets and economy:
The TV stations and newspapers that are owned by the same giant corporations that have benefited from huge wealth transfers and non-enforcement of the laws that you and I and all smaller businesses must follow which themselves are the very target of these protests are obviously not doing a very accurate job of the message being sent. It’s not a conspiracy, but obviously, the giant corporate media are not going to want to focus on that message, on that truth. It’s not all hippies out there at Zuccotti park — far from it, there were lots of men in suits joining in the protest against giant welfare programs for the banks they either use or work for:
And upright, healthy-looking kids wanting to change what they know is a problem in our system:
These protests are not about to go away and they’re likely to gain momentum and magnitude in coming weeks. The markets are not going to like that for the near-term. Much more on that next week. In the meantime, continue to tread and trade carefully.
