You are here

Report on the Toronto gold conference cites GATA

Section: Daily Dispatches

By John Crudele
New York Post
Tuesday,March 13,2001
a href=http://www.nypost.com/business/26334.htmhttp://www.nypost.com/business/2...

The most important guy in the world right now is Peter Fisher.
Peter who?

Forget about Alan Greenspan. The Federal Reserve chairman had his
chance to solve a stock market problem that he created by allowing a
speculative bubble to form. Fisher is the guy who now has to rescue
Greenspan.

Let me introduce you to Peter Fisher.

Right now he is the little-known executive vice president of the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A Democrat, Fisher had been the
fixer during the Clinton administration -- the guy who kept in
constant touch with the important people on Wall Street who made
problems go away.

They'd whisper to Fisher that the market was in trouble, and the New
York Fed would fix the problem. In no small way, this sort of
collusion helped create the problem, but that's a story for another
day.

In fact, Fisher's job as a fixer was so important that the Wall
Street Journal once did a peculiar feature story about the early
morning antics of this Fed kingpin. But the newspaper missed the main
point: Fisher wasn't just innocently monitoring markets; he was
manipulating them.

Why is Fisher so important now?

Because he was recently nominated for Treasury undersecretary for
domestic finance. And in that job he'd officially be in charge of
domestic debt management policies and programs for the federal
government.

Unofficially, he'll be the liaison between the Bush administration
and Wall Street. He would be, in other words, Bush's go-to man in the
same way that he and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin did during the
Clinton years.

Anyone who has been watching the financial markets of late knows why
Fisher is so important. The stock market is collapsing. And even
after yesterday's devastation, the market could still go into a
freefall stage.

This torture isn't about to end soon. With the Fed unable to boost
the economy fast enough through interest rate cuts, the stocks that
are represented by the Dow and Samp;P indices are likely to be a lot
lower before they start moving up.

And if the Dow and Samp;P keep falling, people will notice.

That's what Peter Fisher has to stop. So what can Fisher do that
Greenspan can't?

He has to rig the stock market.

There is something called the Working Group on Financial Markets --
also known as the Plunge Protection Team. Fisher is an important PPT
member, along with Greenspan and officials of the Securities amp;
Exchange Commission and the New York Stock Exchange Commission.

The team knows what it has to do. It has to create artificial buying
to sop up some of the very real selling that's going on right now.

The last time I suggested rigging the market, I was inundated with
hate mail from purists. The Japanese may do it, they said. But
America doesn't rig its markets, they screamed.

Not true.

America rigs its bond markets whenever the U.S. Treasury adds or
subtracts from the amount of public debt. The currency markets are
constantly rigged. And the stock market is, but mainly through the
movement of interest rates.

Greenspan and George W. Bush just aren't very good at the art of
rigging.

Fisher is better.

He has already orchestrated the bailout of Long-Term Capital
Management, which nearly caused the collapse of the world financial
system back in 1998. And Fisher has done any number of other market
rescues through those early-morning phone calls with his pals in the
Wall Street bull community.

Fisher can't be timid about the current situation.

He and the Bush administration need to inject money directly into the
market. They need to buy the heck out of stock index futures
contracts, which will give a lift to the entire equities market.

Forget about waiting for interest rate cuts. By the time Greenspan's
solution starts working, we'll all be broke