I have been saying for an age that Goldman serves no useful market function and has no reason to exist. The only social purpose it has is to make Lloyd Blankfein and his colleagues rich at the expense of everyone else.

I have often said that we will know government is serious about financial reform when we see Glass-Steagall re-imposed. But the real measure of success will be when companies like Goldman are legislated and regulated out of existence. I see the chances of either of these things happening as small, which is why I see the possibility of depression as high.

Wall Street is for Wall Street. The only economy they recognize is the one that is involved in moving money around, moving numbers on spreadsheets, etc. They are worthless to the rest of us who need industrial policy that supports the creation of industries and jobs.

And we’ll stay there if we wait for Wall Street to do something.

Examples abound.

The only reason we have a completive advantage in pharmaceuticals is that the government pays for research and gives the results away for far less than the cost of the grant, no attempt is made to cover the grants that lead to dead-ends that that is a good thing.

If the military simply bought the weapons that they didn’t pay to develop first they’d be driving around in topless CJ5 and shooting an M1.

As for Blankfein’s “We have a social purpose.” truer statements are hard to find. Restrooms have a social purpose as well. The trick would be if their social contribution exceeded that of a restroom.

“We have a social purpose.”

They certainly do. How else would places like this continue to exist?

Oh, and here’s the wine list .

Wall Street is for Wall Street. The only economy they recognize is the one that is involved in moving money around, moving numbers on spreadsheets, etc. They are worthless to the rest of us who need industrial policy that supports the creation of industries and jobs.

Tax aoney made by these TBTF Corporation at 90% because the money made does nothing for the bottom line of the country! Hey what do they produce that adds value to the GDP
?? Nothing Nada zilch fuckem they caused all our economic problems anyway and they should pay for their trangressions!!

Glass-Steagall isn’t coming back. Even the Volcker Rule runs afoul of Republican sensibilities, as was shown in the hearing Chris Dodd held with Paul Volcker as the chief witness. Republican Bob Corker tried to get Volcker to admit that proprietary trading didn’t contribute to the crash. Volcker patiently tries to explain how the money works, but Corker argued that if the money came out of the bank, it would be a charge to capital. Volcker tried to explain how that didn’t matter, but Corker didn’t listen. It was obvious that he was reading from a script.

Corker is really smart. If he isn’t on board, we can’t expect anything from the rest of them. The Republicans plan to kill financial reform. We get a continuance of the policies that caused the first crash.

They could start with battery tech that would help. Why is China the only source for good Lipo4.

Wall Street was designed to give the bored rich someplace to play with their money, like Monopoly. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. Matters not to the rest of the world at all. But don’t expect Dems or Rethugs to admit to that. Pretty fast at bailing these fatcats out, weren’t they? How fast at bailing out everyone else? OH ya, still waiting. Trillions for Wall Street, but Main Street gets a couple weeks extension of the Unemployment benefits and a “jobs agenda coming soon” sign.

I’ll try the tasting menu, and a bottle of the Comte Lafon Meursault Genevrieres, not too cold, please.

Good post. And every time I hear the word “growth,” as uttered by the president in this video, I wonder what that means. How do policy makers measure economic growth? Which objective is more heavily weighted in that measurement — sales of new homes, or increases in the median household income?

I suspect the private bean counters make sure that our public leaders look at beans in a way that serves their private interests.

suprise- that is the way the democratic/repub machine runs–it is immoral to vote for either warmongering,wall street sell-out parties- dems and repubs and their pea brain voters are the problem–keep voting dems it will change soon very very soon-they dont even try to do the right thing -they are the personification of evil

excellent post. this is a symptom of how our system of government no longer functions. China’s move to clean energy is a strategic move to prevent the US from regaining a manufacturing base. Whatever industry our government tries to develop, China will move ahead of us.

That is the core of the problem. Gangsters became Banksters. Money for nothing.Using OPM to the 3rd power, they knowingly bought and sold garbage Home Loans, wrapped them in gold foil, and tied them up with a AAA Blue Ribbons.Then they bet everything to win on the unavoidable failure of their own design. Gamble they did
with a vicious lust to make more for themselves and screw their clients.
They Insured all their losses with a non asset backed company. All that company had to pay claims with was air. Here comes Dudley DoRight with a sack full of taxpayer bucks to save the day. What does Wall Street do to thank the folks for saving their very existence? Nuttin’ Honey.

I worked on Wall St. for 20 years, and trust me, they don’t give a damn about anybody but themselves.

The most pathetic, self-serving excuse they have for their obscene bonuses is that “we would lose all our best people if we didn’t pay them”. If all the highly trained engineers, chemists, mathematicians and various other PhDs that they have sucked into their money machine used their skills to actually produce value, the country would be a lot better off.

WORD! Well said, masaccio, that was a great read.

Where are the Lords of Wall Street now that their nation needs jobs in clean industries? Why they’re “manufacturing” credit default swaps, investing in their proprietary trading “industry”, and selling their “products” to each other and their clients in a sterile frenzy.

That’s pure poetry. I bow in your virtual direction.

financial markets allocate capital to its best use, and that any interference by the government is always disastrous.

What a F-n crock…

Really good read. Thanks.

Oh, and here’s the wine list .

What, no Sneaky Pete, vintage 02/10?

Damm I wanted to say all that :)

I agree. Nothing substantive will be done. We don’t have the cushions that led to Japanification. Our elites are far more crooked and incompetent than those in Japan. Depression looks like the only alternative.

Prop trading is bad because it encourages companies like Goldman to bet against their own clients. The Volcker rule doesn’t touch on the issue of shadow banking to fund such activities or how a lot of agent-client trading can be called something else and so evade prop trading restrictions. Securitization and fraud in the housing bubble had more to do with the meltdown than prop trading.

My understanding is that as much as Glass-Steagall needs to be brought back, and as you say the Rs worked far too hard to get rid of it to allow it to return, the unregulated derivatives market, the power of hedge funds and the dangers of the interconnectedness of the market makers who are primary dealers are new problems that make just bringing it back a stepping stone.

Wind power generating capacity increased by 27 percent in 2006 and could increase an additional 26 percent in 2007, according to a market report released today by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA

http://cleantech.com/news/node/647

A 27% increase and thats only expected to grow once we have Obama send in some money for green energy. But why don’t the banks go for growth industries like green power rather than gamboling?

I am currently giving a lecture series on Keynes’General Theory. In terms of this post, the money chapter is Chapter 12, where Keynes, who as a successful investor knew what he was about, plainly and repeatedly states that the vaunted ‘liquidity’ offered by low-cost trading in existing shares had been effectively captured by speculators. The proposal to tax transactions to make it costly to bet on the short rather than the long term, which is where investment decisions are really taken, comes from that chapter. There is hardly anything we see today that he didn’t set out then.

I’m actually somewhat optimistic that we will see some effective regulation. It might not be tomorow, but proprietary trading is a sitting duck for populist criticism. It’s gambling for rich people with other people’s money. Someone — no ldoubt Grayson — is going to seize that meme and run with it.

great post, masaccio.

US megabankers are not American, not patriotic, they have no country except their boardroom. They play Stratego with OP money and could care less about anyone outside the board room.

I disagree that Corker is smart. I could be wrong. But can he not be discredited for his fricking interference in the auto industry intervention? He was flat wrong. Plus I don’t think it takes ANY smarts to side with uber-rich people who will shower you with money to parrot their points. But that’s just me.

Also, I’m still waiting for one crisp definition of what “small business” means. When banks say “small business” they are not talking about my definition of “small business”. What does “small business” mean?

The proposal to tax transactions to make it costly to bet on the short rather than the long term, which is where investment decisions are really taken, comes from that chapter. There is hardly anything we see today that he didn’t set out then.

I like it:)

Absolutely right.

Comparisons to Japan are massively misplace. We don’t have housewife investors, we don’t have the manufacturing base (ah, the joys of NAFTA), we don’t have a parliament to use to change the deck chairs around, we don’t have CEOs that are too honorable to accept more than their peers, nor do we have politicians that off themselves when they fail (more’s the pity) and unlike 20 years ago we are just part to the ZIRP crowd. The only thing we have is the unique position of dollar and lots of big guns.

Any nation which allows its National Industrial Policy to be determined by Wall Street Casinos is a doomed to failure nation.

A nation which takes pride in such an illogical ordering of national priorities is especially repugnant.

This is the big lie about wall street, they DON’T capitalize and invest in industry. That is the ILLUSION they have us believe. They are all about trading securities and financial instruments, creating bubbles and making money from money.

While this is a legitimate “game”, we need a banking system which funds industry, innovation and creates main street jobs, lends money to people to buy home, cars and other purchases.

Agreed this post points out the banks are gamboling and are not investing as the claim in America’s future even though there is plenty of money to be made.
Capitalism is not efficiently allocating capital. Banks not Government got a bailout but the banks and GOP seem to think that they are all financial Geniuses.

The proposal to tax transactions to make it costly to bet on the short rather than the long term

I’ve read, mostly among the bearish crowd, that shorts by normal investors protect against free fall when the stock market goes down. That is the short has a buy price that puts a floor under it. Is that argument incorrect or simply misguided?

Personally I’d like to see a time graduated tax on micro transactions, the so-called HFT front running scheme, in order to slow down exchanges that follow or seek to change trends but the SEC doesn’t seem to like that idea much.

heyall those wines are all local wines to us in the Bay Area and you sure wouldn’t get me to pay those prices when I can get the same thing for pennies on the Dollar at the winery….

Money for nothing.

Women for FREE???

. That is the short has a buy price the put a floor under it. Is that argument incorrect or simply misguided?

When times are real bad there is no floor.

Corker was the Tennessee Commissioner of Finance and Administration in the less than stellar administration of Governor Sundquist. He did a good job, and left the state reasonably secure. The job isn’t partisan, it required him to work with the admittedly fairly conservatives Democrats who controlled the legislature, so he has sense and ability.

The true Republican agenda is to destroy government as we know it. That is why the laws and policies they make deliberately bankrupt and cripple the peoples government. They want to privatize EVERYTHING, courts, police, fire departments, you name it. They want to eliminate government and taxes that fund it so that we the people are forced to pay so-called ‘free market’ prices for everything.

In their world vision, if your house catches on fire and you don’t have a fire protection policy in place, don’t expect the fire department to come to your rescue unless it affects a neighbors house that has said policy. Of course you will have a policy because if you refues one, either an ‘accident’ will happen to your house or they will make it illegal to not have a ‘policy’, where they will get the money anyway becuase they will run the courts and police that prosecute you! Can you imagine how expensive ‘free-market’ court costs would be?

It’s a mafioso style of government they would like to foster. Just look at what they do and tell me if it doesn’t ring true?

I am trying to be hopeful, but the involvement of Frank Luntz and his word cannons is a real problem.

BofA, CEO & CFO just charged with fraud in NY by Andrew Cumo because of the Merril Lynch merger where BofA lied to US and Investors so they could pay out bonuses!!!! Jail Time I hope!!!
PER CNN

Thanks for that first-hand view. Another word for their excuse is mythos, their view of the world with which they make sense of events and their own actions. Blankfein’s mythos, that the MOTU serve a primarily social function, shapes the cosmos that grows the psychos with the “money is the measure of all things” ethos that sucks people into the Wall Street money machine. The power of this post, IMO, comes from massacio’s busting of that myth.

massacio shows us how the world looks through Blankfein’s myth; contrasts that with the facts; then returns to a clarified view of Blankfein’s world, hoisting the despotic Lords of Wall Street, in metaphorical terms of their own mythos, on their own rhetorical petards.

What exactly is the myth of the Wall Street machine? Here’s how it looks to me.

There’s a world of wisdom in our myths, I’m always saying, but the one “true” religion these days, our de facto state religion, is an outdated, Newtonian version the myth of Western science (of the cosmos as a construct of fully-automatic mechanical forces among atomized particles between which there is no middle ground, no Commons, no intrinsic identity with all there is; you know, Cheney’s world). Tom Engelhardt calls it “a religion of force.”

Strange thing is, and this comes from a total science geek: if we assume the cosmos, our very own source, to be nothing but god-forsaken dirt; one big mechanism governed by Newton’s laws–of which, of course, our science, economy and military are the supreme examples; then we end up making Newtonian voodoo dolls of our natural-born selves.

This is my answer to the question many have asked, regarding the conflation of money with speech.

If the cosmos is a mechanism, and if the economy is a cosmic justice-dispensing machine (either God’s own or no one’s own), then the unit of energy analogous to the erg is the dollar. Recall that we shipped the largest amount of cash in the history of the world to Iraq, pallets full of $100 bullets.

Words, too, become reduced to quantum energy packets, in the minds of unreconstructed mechanists. What’s the difference between deploying snipers, and deploying Message Force Multipliers? They both:

* hide their violent intentions;
* target vulnerable audiences;
* make career-advancing killings.

The myth of the Newtonian mechanism is the Achilles Heel of our political economy. We can no longer simply apply more leverage to every problem under the sun while denying “externalities” like pollution, toxins, et cetera.

Metaphorically speaking, were in the same condition as Neo was when he awoke, to find himself an organic being in a hyper-mechanized world (in the movie The Matrix).

We’ve been reduced to “consumers,” mere appetites on two legs, when in fact we are self-sovereign citizens. That’s why I’ve been saying, reclaiming our inalienable humanity is the first step toward humanizing our politics. Mechanistic, atavistic, reductionism (the deliberate effort over the last 60 or more years, to reduce the social sciences to physics, the better to predict an control our behavior) marched us into this Waste Land. The view of society Blankfein presents for us, as opposed to the one he uses to make it rain money on his friends, is “through a glass, darkly.”

What happens if we turn that view around? I think that’s the beauty of this post. That’s exactly what massacio has done here, using Blankfein’s own myth-making, to expose the Lords of Wall Street as the despots they are at heart.

Keep up your writing Masaccio – I enjoy your posts. It looks like for every dollar we place in the hands of the Big Banks our economy suffers multidollar drainage out of productive activities and into speculation. This wastage has become a national security issue.

Goldman is providing capital to reopen the Mountain Pass rare earth mine. Private equity deal.

MOUNTAIN PASS SHAREHOLDERS

Molycorp Minerals, LLC. is a privately-owned company of an investor group primarily comprised of:

Resource Capital Funds
A Denver, CO and Perth, Australia based private equity firm specializing in global mining investments.

Goldman Sachs
A leading global banking, securities and investment management firm that provides a wide range of financial services worldwide.

Pegasus Capital Advisors
A private equity firm that focuses on businesses that make a meaningful contribution to society by positively affecting the environment, contributing to sustainability and enabling healthy living.

Traxys North America
A multi-billion dollar international metals and minerals marketing, distribution and trading company.

Tax the Rich at 90% and create the trickle up society where every citizen is guaranteed health care, education, housing and and a living wage job according to their abilities and education! Fuck the Rich they have screwed the rest of us for long enough. Time Corporations also paid a stipend for doing business in Our Country, they have also out lived their usefulness when they are taking jobs overseas at the expense of US citizens. Make them pay for what they have done. And for the Health Care Corporations they must be dissolved(let the owners take the hit they can afford it) and a single Payer system instituted so we don’t waste billions on making a few rich and denying many of any coverage!! Shit lets not forget to remove Corporate Personhood… they can’t vote can they, a simple law that says if you can’t vote you cannot donate to the political process. Theres more but later….

If these guys follow the path that most successful gold mines make in this country they’ll end up going placer. If they’re after something else then they might not be so aggressive.

Hmmm, I keep arriving at masaccio’s post late …

This Saturday’s Hoodwinked salon could address some of these matters, as in his solutions section John Perkins advocates using the democratic potential of a capitalist system as leverage to get the social changes we need. Some of his examples are drawn from recent experiences in China with government co-ordination of various industrial efforts. He then reminds us of examples from our own history that suggest we could find ways to achieve the same results here.

Also, here’s a link from Atrios to Cuomo’s bill against BofA. It’s in the matter of the Merrill Lynch acquisition, charging that the execs at BofA witheld information from shareholders that they should not have, and that might have caused the merger to be voted down.

Personally, I think that with government’s (federal much more than the States) credibility in the matter of regulatory oversight and enforcement at a low ebb, efforts like this case and any criminal version of it that could be filed based in existing laws and regulations over the conduct of finance, and especially lending to the public —lots of them— would get much farther than a lot of new regulations.

That, plus the list of rumored FDIC proposals that was posted at nakedcapitalism yesterday to rein in securitization, largely by making the the loan originators hold complete loans longer first and retain pieces of loans longer. The combination of measures would slow down the kind of pneumatic growth that we saw with Countrywide and that sort of firm, which was the source of the loans that got securitized and simultaneously the source of the house price bubble and our foreclosure woes, recall.

The measures would also make it much harder for the industry to become interconnected to the degree that the failure of any one component could be presented realistically as a cause for panic. It was the interconnectedness more than the size of Bear, Lehmann, and the others that made a case for doing an emergency rescue of those firms. (The “case” for the TARP and the other 100 per cent bailouts is another matter, looking like a totally indefensible one to me.)

“We have a social purpose.”

“Greed is good” for a new century.

Been there, done that.

There’s a huge difference between underwriting securities – creating a liquid market in which productive enterprises can sell (or buy) their own stock – which used to be Goldman’s major activity, and trading. Trading is also different from taking and holding direct investments in enterprises, which is a subset of underwriting in that it is Goldman itself that arranges or provides the funds for productive enterprises.

Trading securities, however, is a supercomputer enterprise in which Goldman bets against their own public positions to make small and sometimes large gains from news and events Goldman helps create. Insider information would often be a part of that exercise. More precisely, Goldman is a unique bottleneck through which massive amounts of confidential corporate and government data flow, which enables Goldman to use it and its aggregate implications before anyone else. Goldman thereby adds no value except to enrich itself; it creams the value from the work of others, leaving watery whey for “the market”.

It looks like this mine is being reopened for rare earth mineral production. Due to growing global and US demands for, and the current Chinese control of Rare Earth Minerals. Both the US and the UK are upset with China’s using control of rare earths as a potential political weapon. No that was not predictable.

If blood sucking is a social purpose then Lloyd Blankfien is correct.

Back in the 1950′s&60′s the financial sector accounted for 2% of corporate profits.

Over the last decade the financial sector accounted for 40% of corporate profits.

These gentlemen are middleman overhead, they are supposed to be lean and mean. Instead they are bloated and criminal.

And oh yeah, credit card and mortgage interest is included in our government GDP figures. Our GDP “recovery” basically amounts to banks gouging customers with new fees and cranking thier credit card interest rate to 30%. That is what Larry Summers statistical recovery is all about.

Social purpose… yeah maybe in hell.

And oh yeah, Obama sounds like Alan Kudlow talking about markets and “innovation”.

Yeah, China’s reacent announcement “You want rare earths, I’ll show you rare.” put a bit of crimp in the we’ll all make money off the rubes theory. Good to know they aren’t after just gold.

In my post, I pointed out that GS has invested a few millions in businesses to buy and sell. GS is an investor in the purchasing company, MolyCorp. Here’s a fascinating article on the subject. It says the company expects that it will cost $450million to bring the mine on-line, and that there is an earmark for $3 million to help MolyCorp develop proprietary methods for working the mine. Molycorp expects to be a vertically integrated company.

GS stands to make a fortune by underwriting a public offering and selling its cheap stock to the public. There are myriad other ways for them to do make huge profits. The property is the only significant deposit of rare earth minerals in the country, and is enough to prevent the Chinese from dominating this market, if it ever goes into operation. The article says that many of the rare earths are needed for military purposes, so the mine has national security implications.

As earlofhuntington points out, what GS is doing her is not about allocation of capital. Years ago, when I was securities commissioner, what it meant was that big Wall Street firms would scour the country looking for small businesses that could grow with more capital. This would enable the business to profit. For GS it means buying something the country needs, holding it in its own portfolio, and figuring out how to make the greatest profit, whether by reselling it to the government, selling it at inflated prices to the public, or holding and exploiting it.

A friend of mine is a local Prof. @ a State college and a Conserv. Economist. He likes to tell me were a service economy now. He says we’ve developed past having to make things. I told him BS! If u make nothing and all u do is a the finance circle jerk eventually u end up the slaves of someone else’s manufacturing base.

Ever wonder why there are so many Vampire epics in the Movies and on the tube these days? Do u think maybe its because we all feel a set a fangs in our collective necks these days?

A quadrillion dollars worth of derivitaves traded betting for sucess or failure of commitments is not value added to the GDP. Samuelson 101 Econ and my junior high school econ teacher describe certain activities that create real value in the economy. Wall street is not interested in that so much they are happy to create ways to drain the economy of value pocketing the profits. Casinos do not create value.

Where are the Lords of Wall Street now that their nation needs jobs in clean industries? Why they’re “manufacturing” credit default swaps, investing in their proprietary trading “industry”, and selling their “products” to each other and their clients in a sterile frenzy.

Really, really good points raised in this post, masaccio.

Turning paper in to bubbles is so much easier than turning paper into industrial plants, equipment, and operating capital. In the latter case, you have to be patient enough for the plants to be built or refitted, the equipment to be purchased or built, and the labor force to be hired. How are you going to churn the market with day trading on that?

Brokers and traders get fees per ANY transaction, don’t they?

That, and being able to bet with and against any given stock that’s available, means they have ways of profiting galore, almost unrestricted in any manner.

They do NOT exist to service the public good (witness the loss of 401K’s, savings plans of all sorts).

THIS, Spells Out In Detail what it’s all about Alfie, and how it’s rigged and played.

And NONE of it, is to better the masses.

No matter WHAT Jim Cramer and his ilk say on the teahveah!!!

*G*

What’s cookin in Awntie Toby’s Kitchen? *G*

Grim shit, indeed.

And thank you for your post, another great read from you.

Appreciate ALL you do with FDL, to help the rest of us understand better and be better informed.

That’s an interesting adversarial posit, hoss . . .

As opposed to the view that we’ve killed our own man base due to greed and the need for corporate feudalism to expand globally . . .

Perhaps they go hand in hand . . . somehow.

I maintain the view that corporate feudalist interests have bought and now control this country top to bottom and care nothing about the general masses. A 3rd world general public would be much easier to control, for the corporate best interests . . .

I also believe China needs us and we need China, so the singular adversarial thing don’t work me.

Too commie v. democracy old school for my to buy into anymore.

IF, IF we COULD separate banking from financing and investment, then there MIGHT be a shot at regulating or eliminating some of the questionable investment tactics WRT hedge funds, derivatives, CDS’s, short selling and naked short selling.

All practices that are used to make and break any company that the investment fucks want to break.

Again, THIS is the definitive read for newbies and oldies in the Wall Game . . Deep Capture.

Great comment, thanks!

The shorts are used to create phantom stocks, to make or break any company on the market the investment fucks choose.

Without regulation, SEVERE regulation and oversight, there has become more phantom stock than actual stock, by likely a huge disparity!

That’s a HUGE reason for the fall, and how the housing bubble got crashed!!!

Phantom stock, short selling, naked short selling . . . again, The Read About It All.

Yer on it like Sugar Hill Gang was on Apache.

Nice.

Bingo, and there you have the essence of what Deep Capture spells out, in detail, in largesse.

Perfect summation EOH . . thanks for that.

(I’m new, much thanks to many of you for your cogent contributions to my sanity.) I agree wholeheartedly with the thesis of the post, but I just wanted to be sure everyone knew that you can’t build a windmill without over 700 pounds of rare earth elements and China controls around 97% of the world’s supply (The Dines Letter, January 13, 2010). Same issue with hybrid batteries and other green technology. Hard to blame China for using their natural resources to grow their economy (they often require manufacture in China in return for access to the rare earths.) The U.S. sold off most of our inventory of rare earths in 1998, the one major mine in the U.S., Mountain Pass, is privately owned by-you guessed it-Goldman Sachs (Dines Letter cited above).

Or, destroying it to prop up another lesser competitor business . . . and on and on it goes.

Bidding for and against, building up, tearing down, using the Cramer’s and MSM of the world to spread disinfo and bent info to ruin or bolster anything that can get GS and the investment fucks another fee, another buy/sell profit, another short selling opportunity to profit from the FAILURE of a company stock.

Your posts are grand and they always bring out some REALLY great folks with terrific experiences and insights on the issue at hand . . . again, thanks! *G*

As a complete novice of such matters, I learn from each and every post and comment . . . .

Hmm, interesting, can you elucidate further on why it takes 700 lbs. of rare earth minerals to build a phreakin windmill?

I wouldn’t call THAT green, in any way, shape of form . . . I’d call that creating a need and fillling it, that won’t benefit the general public for shit, not to mention STALLING the development of real green energy to benefit the corporate feudalists . .

Thanks for a reply in advance, you really caught my eye with that point.

Train your fire on naked short selling, not legal short selling. If you don’t ever have to deliver shares when you cover, a naked short position (long tolerated by the SEC despite being a securities violation) can break a company, especially a small cap company. But legal short selling is one of the few defenses available to an investor in an inflated, Wall Street manipulated-to-the-upside market.

Investment analysis is my area rather than green technology, so I’m not sure. But from my reading it is clear rare earths are vital in many areas of green, it’s not a case of manufactured demand. Yet another thing on which the MSM is clueless (both the necessity for rare earth’s in green technology and China’s dominance regarding the resource).

This is one reason China is moving so much faster than we are on developing green (probably secondary to the problem of mind-boggling buffonery, complete lack of foresight and political paralysis on our side).

As long as the end product ends up saving more energy than the mining itself consumes it is green, but of course, scarcity makes the cost escalate. This is one of the arguments for nuclear power (U.S. has more uranium and access to uranium (Canada) than rare earths).

A few links to actual sources would help us understand the details of the point you’re trying to make.

If you are still around try these links for starters:

http://www.molycorp.com/

http://www.wikio.co.uk/article/china-entry-electric-car-market-dug-157329067

We have additional potential sources for lithium but the technology for recovery from geothermal sources for example is unproven so far.
However, if we don’t develop alternative sources for lithium or alternative materials for electrical batteries the supply is not only in the hands of ‘others’ – there just won’t be enough to make a dent in automobile energy related consumption beyond 10 % of the marketplace.

RBG,
Sorry, I did the best I could. My primary source is subscription based and very aggressive in punishing violators. Brief citations like the one I made @63 are permitted. Comments @67, made in response to questions from Larue @65, are based on facts I believe to be commonly accepted (if not well publicized by the MSM), and were intended for general interest purposes only. They might be in error in some way. But to explore those, Google will get you there without difficulty.

Yeah, mainstream economists have no idea what they are talking about.

Have your economic teaching friend read James Galbraith’s piece on mainstream economists:
“Who Are These Economists, Anyway?”
http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/HE/TA09EconomistGalbraith.pdf