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From our trusted reporters at "Wall Street on Parade:"
Just as "The Big Short" movie, based on the Michael Lewis book by the same name, is drawing crowds at theatres and explaining in layman’s terms how the subprime mortgage fraud was perpetrated on Wall Street, a movie trailer for a new film, "Money Monster," coming in the first half of this year, has been released. "Money Monster" stars George Clooney and Julia Roberts and is directed by Jodie Foster. The official summary describes the plot as follows:
“In the taut and tense thriller" Money Monster," Lee Gates (George Clooney) is a bombastic TV personality whose popular financial network show has made him the money wiz of Wall Street. But after he hawks a high tech stock that mysteriously crashes, an irate investor (Jack O’Connell) takes Gates, his crew, and his ace producer Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts) hostage live on air. Unfolding in real time, Gates and Fenn must find a way to keep themselves alive while simultaneously uncovering the truth behind a tangle of big money lies.”In the trailer below, you’ll notice a distinct similarity to the character played by Clooney and the real-life Jim Cramer, host of “Mad Money” on CNBC. (They’re probably beefing up security on Cramer’s set as we write this.)
According to "Variety," also to be released this year is the movie “Equity,” starring Anna Gunn. The movie is officially billed as “the first female-driven Wall Street film” which “follows a senior investment banker who is threatened by a financial scandal and must untangle a web of corruption.”
As it happens, untangling a web of corruption is the underlying theme of "The Big Short," "Money Monster," and "Equity" – all further buttressing the fact that when Senator Bernie Sanders says the business model of Wall Street is fraud, he ain’t just whistling Dixie.
Of course, some of the most alarming and more recent charges of rigging on Wall Street came in 2014 in another Michael Lewis bestseller, "Flash Boys." There seems to be some confusion as to whether that movie will, or will not, get made. Clearly, Wall Street would prefer that it doesn’t. As Lewis explained to Steve Kroft in a detailed interview on "60 Minutes" on March 30, 2014:
Steve Kroft: What’s the headline here?If scriptwriters are having trouble trying to get their heads around the message in "Flash Boys" and how to present the maniacal rigging of the U.S. stock exchanges by high frequency traders to a movie-going audience without inducing loud snoring in the theater, they might want to take a look at how brilliantly Senator Elizabeth Warren zeroed in on the story line.
Michael Lewis: Stock market’s rigged. The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism is rigged.
Steve Kroft: By whom?
Michael Lewis: By a combination of these stock exchanges, the big Wall Street banks and high-frequency traders.
Steve Kroft: Who are the victims?
Michael Lewis: Everybody who has an investment in the stock market.
In a June 18, 2014 hearing of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment, Senator Warren gave this spot-on analogy:
“For me the term high frequency trading seems wrong. You know this isn’t trading. Traders have good days and bad days. Some days they make good trades and they make lots of money and some days they have bad trades and they lose a lot of money. But high frequency traders have only good days.Congress and regulators have done nothing meaningful to stop this scam since the book was released and Lewis appeared on "60 Minutes." It’s time for the Hollywood cameras to roll.
“In its recent IPO filing, the high frequency trading firm, Virtu, reported that it had been trading for 1,238 days and it had made money on 1,237 of those days…The question is that high frequency trading firms aren’t making money by taking on risks. They’re making money by charging a very small fee to investors. And the question is whether they’re charging that fee in return for providing a valuable service or they’re charging that fee by just skimming a little money off the top of every trade…
“High frequency trading reminds me a little of the scam in "Office Space." You know, you take just a little bit of money from every trade in the hope that no one will complain. But taking a little bit of money from zillions of trades adds up to billions of dollars in profits for these high frequency traders and billions of dollars in losses for our retirement funds and our mutual funds and everybody else in the market place. It also means a tilt in the playing field for those who don’t have the information or have the access to the speed or big enough to play in this game.”
2 comments:
i posted this graph and tried to explain it: http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/crude-oil.aspx
even i was amazed at the degree of financialization in the commodity markets...
here’s what i ended up with:
while we've got that chart up, we'll look at a few other things that it shows us...on the top, we have CLG 16 or CL 1, identifiers of the oil contract being traded, with CL the exchange symbol for us WTI oil and 1 being the first or front month contract, the one which is typically quoted when the financial press talks about the price of oil; next to that, we have trading volume: 899566, which is the number of contracts that changed hands on Friday, the most recent day on the chart...likewise, across the bottom, we have red and green bars for each trading day of the last 3 months, which graphically shows the number of contracts that traded each day, with red indicating trading on a day when the price for this oil contract was down, and green representing trading on a day when the price for this oil contract was up, as indicated by 1000000 and 2000000 on the margin, indicating trading volume of 1 million or 2 million contracts...now, here's the thing; each of those contracts represents the a trade of 1000 barrels of oil, meaning that on Friday, when 899,566 contracts changed hands, rights to 899,566,000 barrels of oil were traded; similarly, when 1,289,527 contracts changed hands on Thursday,1,289,527,000 barrels of oil were traded...hence, since nearly 6 million contracts for February oil were traded at the NYMEX this week, that represents net trades of electronic contracts that had claim to 6 billion barrels of oil...that sounds like a lot of oil, and it is; if you've been paying close attention to the EIA stats we review most every week, total US oil production has been running at about 9.2 million barrels per day; that means daily oil trading for just this one oil contract in New York has been more than 100 times the amount of oil we produce daily over the past week...likewise, the amount of oil that we've had stored at Cushing and various other depots around the country has been running between 450 million and 480 million barrels over the past several months; that means daily oil trading for just this one contract in New York has typically been more than twice the oil that exists anywhere above ground in the entire country...but while one contract may be swapped electronically several times a day, no physical oil ever changes hands in this strictly financial market, which is where oil prices are actually set; when a fracker starts to drill, he'll typically hedge by selling his future output through such an exchange, just as the price the refinery pays for oil is set by this market...and this is just one contract at one main exchange; there are dozens of less active contracts and less active exchanges, including those in Europe, where similar volumes of oil contracts are traded....so whatever we might say about the oil companies, they are at least getting their hands dirty while making a living off of the dirty oil products we use; at the same time, there are these other bottom feeders at market monitors in New York who do nothing but swap electronic oil, who nonetheless still manage to get very rich between the time the oil comes out of the ground and the time it's delivered to a refinery to make the products that we use...
ooooh!
You know how much I love it when you talk dirty.
Oil, gas, drilling . . .
money grubbing.
oooh!
Love you.
...now, here's the thing; each of those contracts represents the a trade of 1000 barrels of oil, meaning that on Friday, when 899,566 contracts changed hands, rights to 899,566,000 barrels of oil were traded; similarly, when 1,289,527 contracts changed hands on Thursday,1,289,527,000 barrels of oil were traded...hence, since nearly 6 million contracts for February oil were traded at the NYMEX this week, that represents net trades of electronic contracts that had claim to 6 billion barrels of oil...that sounds like a lot of oil, and it is; if you've been paying close attention to the EIA stats we review most every week, total US oil production has been running at about 9.2 million barrels per day; that means daily oil trading for just this one oil contract in New York has been more than 100 times the amount of oil we produce daily over the past week...likewise, the amount of oil that we've had stored at Cushing and various other depots around the country has been running between 450 million and 480 million barrels over the past several months; that means daily oil trading for just this one contract in New York has typically been more than twice the oil that exists anywhere above ground in the entire country...but while one contract may be swapped electronically several times a day, no physical oil ever changes hands in this strictly financial market, which is where oil prices are actually set; when a fracker starts to drill, he'll typically hedge by selling his future output through such an exchange, just as the price the refinery pays for oil is set by this market...and this is just one contract at one main exchange; there are dozens of less active contracts and less active exchanges, including those in Europe, where similar volumes of oil contracts are traded....so whatever we might say about the oil companies, they are at least getting their hands dirty while making a living off of the dirty oil products we use; at the same time, there are these other bottom feeders at market monitors in New York who do nothing but swap electronic oil, who nonetheless still manage to get very rich between the time the oil comes out of the ground and the time it's delivered to a refinery to make the products that we use...
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