By Charles Hugh Smith
The dark pool of parasitic scum known as the stock market is an “attractive nuisance” that should be shut down.
In tort law, an attractive nuisance is any potentially hazardous object or condition that is likely to attract the naive and unwary, i.e. children.
A classic example is an abandoned swimming pool half-filled with fetid water.
Since many stock market investors are demonstrably naive about the risks and unwary of the dangers posed by the stock market (the proof of this is that they remain invested in the market), it is but a slight extrapolation of the attractive nuisance doctrine to declarethe stock market is clearly an “attractive nuisance” and should be closed immediately.
Is this really a legal stretch? Consider the conditions that characterize an attractive nuisance. I have edited these to pertain to the stock market and investors:
1. The market is one in which the Powers That Be (the exchanges, the Central State, the central bank, et al., the effective “owners” of the stock market) know or have reason to know that brainwashed or ill-informed investors are likely to risk their money in.
2. The market is one of which the Powers That Be know or have reason to know (and fully realize or should realize) will involve an unreasonable risk of financial loss or ruin to such investors.
3. The investors, because of their consumption of officially sanctioned propaganda and misrepresentation of market risk and return, do not discover or realize the risk involved in placing money in the stock market.
4. The utility to the Powers That Be of maintaining the condition and the burden of eliminating the danger are slight compared to the risk borne by investors.
5. The Powers That Be fail to exercise reasonable care to eliminate the risk or otherwise protect the investors from potentially catastrophic financial loss.
Can any reasonable person deny that the rigged, manipulated U.S. stock market is nothing but a predatory skimming operation that is increasingly at risk of systemic failure? If you have any doubts about the true nature of the American stock market, please read the new book Dark Pools: High-Speed Traders, A.I. Bandits, and the Threat to the Global Financial System (print edition) (Kindle edition) by financial reporter Scott Patterson.
Today’s stock market has as much in common with the market of the 1960s as a horse-drawn carriage has with a Formula 1 race car. Most of the trading on the market is done by computers that hold shares for perhaps 11 seconds before skimming a slice from investors who lack the high-speed data flows from the exchanges, warp-speed processing power and sophisticated algorithms.
Another huge chunk of market-moving activity is officially sanctioned manipulation by the Federal Reserve (the privately owned central bank of the U.S.) and Central State agents: the “fat finger” leaps at day’s end, the “stick saves” whenever gravity threatens to topple the corrupted market, and all the other interventions that are obvious to every active trader.
In effect, the stock market has become an officially sanctioned bucket shop where “ownership” of shares has been rendered meaningless. The market exists for two reasons: 1) to skim low-risk profits from naive/brainwashed investors and 2) as a propaganda front that can be lofted ever higher by authorities for the purposes of managing perceptions, i.e. the market is higher, so the economy is doing great, never mind what your own eyes and experience are telling you.
The stock market is demonstrably an “attractive nuisance” and should be closed immediately. It should never be reopened unless these conditions can be met: 1) All shares must be owned for at least four hours 2) All trading must be executed by humans on a transparent exchange where all trading activity (and open orders) is visible to all participants 3) Intervention in the market by the Federal Reserve or any Central State agency or agents is against the law.
If you insist on putting money at risk in the stock market, be aware that you are playing a rigged roulette wheel and thus you are a mark. You might win, or the entire game might collapse in a rotten heap of lies and corruption. Just remember that the market is ruled by parasites who need to keep their hosts (investors) alive so they can continue to feed off them (i.e. biotrophic parasites).
If the hosts all leave the market, the parasites will have only themselves to feed on, and they will quickly expire.
Read the Introduction (2,600 words) and Chapter One (7,600 words) for free. We are like passengers on the Titanic ten minutes after its fatal encounter with the iceberg: though our financial system seems unsinkable, its reliance on debt and financialization has already doomed it.We cannot know when the Central State and financial system will destabilize, we only know they will destabilize. We cannot know which of the State’s fast-rising debts and obligations will be renounced; we only know they will be renounced in one fashion or another.
The process of the unsustainable collapsing and a new, more sustainable model emerging is called revolution.Rather than being powerless, we hold the fundamental building blocks of power. We need neither permission nor political change to liberate ourselves. A powerless individual becomes powerful when he renounces the lies and complicity that enable the doomed Status Quo’s dominance.