DOW JONES TOPS 17,000 - A New Record High in Its 118 Year History

Trevor Timm of the Electronic Freedom Frontier dug up a very interesting nugget. It was embedded in the heralded December 2013 White House task force report on spying and snooping.

"Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise manipulate financial systems."

Were the authors just anticipating a possible crime? Or were they reflecting the fact that the NSA had already been engaging in the crime?

If this was just a bit of anticipation, why leave it naked in the report? Why not say there was no current evidence the NSA had been manipulating financial systems?

Those systems would, of course, include the stock market, and all trading markets around the world. Well, there is definite evidence of other NSA financial snooping. From Spiegel Online, 9/15/13:

"The NSA's Tracfin data bank also contained data from the Brussels-based Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a network used by thousands of banks to send transaction information securely...the NSA spied on the organization on several levels, involving, among others, the [NSA] agency's 'tailored access operations' division..." The NSA's "tailored access operations" division uses roughly 1000 hackers and analysts in its spying efforts. The next step in all this spying would naturally involve penetrating trading markets and, using the deep data obtained, manipulate the markets to the advantage of the NSA and preferred clients.

"Looking over the shoulder" of Wall St. insiders would be child's play for NSA. Ditto for predicting political events that would temporarily drive markets down and provide golden opportunities for highly profitable short selling.

And if the Pentagon, under which the NSA is organized, requires heavy amounts of money for off-the-books black budget ops, what better place to go than their own NSA?

Peter Schiff: I think it's a disaster. disaster it is. Most people think the U.S. economy is recovering, maybe a bit more sluggish than they would like. People talk about a jobless recovery. But the reality is it's not a recovery at all. We are not recovering from anything. The country is getting sicker.

Mr. Schiff: America is that interest rates are too low. We don't save enough, we spend too much, we borrow too much, we don't produce enough. borrow from the rest of the world. We have to import goods, because we don't invest in productivity. global reset bilderberg debt fiat currency

The evidence devastating global economic changes in 2014 as a result of our national debt, further impoverishment of the working class, and massive new tax burdens resulting from President Obama's health care legislation. The fundamentals,

What's more, the trajectory of our stock markets over the last eighteen months has been eerily reminiscent of markets back in 1929, right before the crash that led to a decade's long depression in America. Marc Faber: This is not a very healthy market
"The U.S. market is in a very dicey position where it could easily drop 10, 20 percent," he said. Marc Faber, investment guru and the editor of the Gloom, Boom and Doom report, warned particularly in the United States — were vulnerable to sharp falls.

A bull run in equities that started around five years ago has caused much debate in recent months with some investors believing that it may be running out of steam. However, some remain optimistic that extra liquidity—provided by central banks around the world—would continue to help bolster the asset class.

Today's bull market is the fourth biggest since the 1929 crash after stocks have nearly tripled since the financial-crisis low set in early 2009.

But more than any modern bull market, this one stands alone in that it's squarely out of step with economic growth. It's being driven higher by just a few wealthy participants and traders who have tacitly, perhaps even unknowingly, agreed to drive prices higher.