Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
11/17/2011
Presented without comment, merely to confirm that the market as we know it, no longer exists.
Dear Clients, Industry Colleagues and Friends of Barnhardt Capital Management,
It is with regret and unflinching moral certainty that I announce that Barnhardt Capital Management has ceased operations. After six years of operating as an independent introducing brokerage, and eight years of employment as a broker before that, I found myself, this morning, for the first time since I was 20 years old, watching the futures and options markets open not as a participant, but as a mere spectator.
The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets – because they are not. And this goes not just for my clients, but for every futures and options account in the United States. The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse. Given this sad reality, I could not in good conscience take one more step as a commodity broker, soliciting trades that I knew were unsafe or holding funds that I knew to be in jeopardy.
The futures markets are very highly-leveraged and thus require an exceptionally firm base upon which to function. That base was the sacrosanct segregation of customer funds from clearing firm capital, with additional emergency financial backing provided by the exchanges themselves. Up until a few weeks ago, that base existed, and had worked flawlessly. Firms came and went, with some imploding in spectacular fashion. Whenever a firm failure happened, the customer funds were intact and the exchanges would step in to backstop everything and keep customers 100% liquid – even as their clearing firm collapsed and was quickly replaced by another firm within the system.
Everything changed just a few short weeks ago. A firm, led by a crony of the Obama regime, stole all of the non-margined cash held by customers of his firm. Let’s not sugar-coat this or make this crime seem “complex” and “abstract” by drowning ourselves in six-dollar words and uber-technical jargon. Jon Corzine STOLE the customer cash at MF Global. Knowing Jon Corzine, and knowing the abject lawlessness and contempt for humanity of the Marxist Obama regime and its cronies, this is not really a surprise. What was a surprise was the reaction of the exchanges and regulators. Their reaction has been to take a bad situation and make it orders of magnitude worse. Specifically, they froze customers out of their accounts WHILE THE MARKETS CONTINUED TO TRADE, refusing to even allow them to liquidate. This is unfathomable…
The article continues at ZeroHedge.
Ann Barnhardt blogs at http://barnhardt.biz/
Update: ‘It’s going to happen again’ – Financial meltdown committee head
…The U.S. politician-businessman that Congress put in charge of determining the reasons for the 2008 financial crisis has a sobering message for us: “It’s going to happen again.”
Phil Angelides, the real estate developer and former California state treasurer who chaired the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, said on Friday that “all across the marketplace the warning signs were there” of a coming disaster but the mechanisms and political will to stop it were not…
…Congress’s official investigation into the financial crisis, the so-called Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, will convene its first meeting today. Unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi’s handpicked chairman of the commission Phil Angelides, has deep ties to radical left-wing politics, including the Van Jones-connected Apollo Alliance, which he chairs, and ACORN, which is an Apollo member and endorsed and actively supported his gubernatorial campaign…
Update: Sheriff Joe Biden: When Our Economy Was Crumbling, I Knew The Man I Had To Call — Jon Corzine. And When $600 Million of Investors’ Money Was Essentially Embezzled From a Hedge Fund… Just Hit Redial, I Guess, at Ace of Spades HQ
