These are the crooks who want to run your world

Fascinating article in Bloomberg about the nickel trading collapse which will tell you (me, anyway) far more than you possibly knew about nickel, commodity trading, and the rigged game our masters of the universe are playing.

The 18 Minutes of Trading Chaos That Broke the Nickle Market

It’s a long article that I very much enjoyed reading, but essentially, nickel futures, which historically have traded in the $30,000 - $40,000 range, soared last Tuesday, March 8th, to as high as $100,000 before settling at $80,000, squeezing short-sellers including JP Morgan-Chase, and some very large Chinese players, and they didn’t like it. So the London Metal Exchange (LME) backed them out: it canceled all trades that had taken place the day before: $3.9 billion, which freed short traders from their contracted obligation to pay margin calls on the $80,000 nickel price and “in effect, rewound the market to the moment when prices closed on Monday at $48,078”.

There were objections: “For the LME to cancel nickel trades between willing buyers and sellers is unforgiveable. UNFORGIVEABLE,” tweeted Mark Thompson, a former trader at Trafigura and Apollo. Cliff Asness, founder of AQR Capital Management, accused the LME, which was for more than a century owned by its members but in 2012 was sold to Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing, of “stealing money from market participants trading in good faith and giving it to Chinese nickel producers and their banks.”

A commentator on Substack provides and even lengthier discussion of this debacle, and starts off with a similar game involving what should have been a scandal last year involving Viacom stock and manipulation by Goldman Sachs and other WSJ financial behemoths. All this is way over my head, and I’m sure there are Wall Streeters who not only understand the nuances of the markets but are capable of making a creditable defense for their actions, but my take-away is that the people plotting at their World Economic Forum to bring about “The Great Reset” and to impose their idea of proper order to an unruly world are, basically, crooks, in it for their own gain. Why do Larry Fink of BlackRock and other financial and tech titans want to destroy the fossil fuel industry? Impose a universal income on people they intend to impoverish? It’s not for your own good; count on it.