For General Electric Co., hawking subprime mort­gages was a long way from making light bulbs and jet engines.

That didn't stop the industrial giant from jumping into the subprime business in 2004, lending blue-chip re­spectability to the market for risky home loans by pay­ing roughly half a billion dollars to buy California-based WMC Mortgage Corp.

All is not as it appears in the global oil markets, which in my view have become entirely dysfunctional and no longer fit for its purpose. I believe that the market price is about to collapse as it did in 2008 and that this will mark the end of an era in which the market has been run by and on behalf of trading and financial intermediaries.

In this post I forecast the imminent death of the crude oil market, and I identify the killers; the re-birth of the global market in crude oil in new form will be the subject of another post.
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Global Oil Pricing*

Readers, Wray is describing the "other" shoe which will soon drop. Another near term event will be the collapse of the European Monetary Union, which will be caused by political and economic stupidity. I've been busy on other fronts and the arithmetic of the clock and calendar are relatively fixed. The only paths out of this process will be very painful, and a eager horde of vampires wanting to resume their blood lust, even though the rest of the economic commons has collapsed. The wag's definition of insanity seems appropriate.

Speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of millions. What does it say about our system that we can so casually inflict so much pain?

Readers, As of 7/16/10 see and listen to the interview By Democracy Now with Kaufman, the author of this article, http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/16/the_food_bubble_how_wall_street

The under-fire oil company isn't too busy to be fighting financial regulation in Washington.

Readers, we can only assume that the derivatives market has been a significant source of fictional income for BP as well as the the already identified Wall Street mob of squids. I would guess that their involvement in the derivative markets is actually larger than the probable fines from the bungled deep water oil well or they wouldn't risk this kind of exposure at this time. Tadit Anderson

Readers, this sort of investing is also described as "self dealing" and "insider trading" and in the rest of the universe this behavior is generally considered to be fraudulent and criminal. All of the tap dancing in the world won't make that go away. Admin.

A hedge fund, Magnetar, helped create arcane mortgage-based instruments, pushed for risky things to go inside them and then bet against the investments.

In late 2005, the booming U.S. housing market seemed to be slowing. The Federal Reserve had begun raising interest rates. Subprime mortgage company shares were

Readers, personally I would have entitled this article differently, more on the order of Don't Forget Greece, But Look At How This Derivative Collapse Is Spreading To Other Countries. In about a year the economic landscape is going to look much worse. Neo-Classical or as William Black likes to say, Theo-Classical Economics, is essentially as massive criminal conspiracy, some times also described as corporatism.

“Yet on a wholesale basis, Goldman Sachs and others not only had the inside information, they had created it. That is why Goldman started trading against the the interests of its clients to whom it was selling mortgage backed securities that were designed to fail”

“Both the investor and the borrower would have understood that sometimes very little of the investors’ money was actually being used to fund mortgages, with the rest being sued to buy insurance, credit default swaps, pay fees, profits, kickbacks and commissions.”

Comments: Everyone now has heard of credit default swaps but very few people understand what they mean and fewer still understand their importance in connection with the securitization of residential mortgage loans and other types of loans.The importance of understanding the operation of a CDS contract in the context of foreclosure defense cannot be understated.