This story is amazing! I am simply speechless!

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) reports the following statistics on the derivatives markets for the second quarter of 2011.

Sobering statistics on the derivatives market from The Trading Report.

It's amazing how the English maintain their composure.

I would have had a hard time keeping a straight face on this interview. LOL!

Paul is talking about derivatives and the CNBC folks are asking for investment tips?

The volume of derivatives trading soared during August as investors participating in risk management utilized the financial instruments to hedge against significant volatility.

In The Great American Stickup, celebrated journalist Robert Scheer uncovers the hidden story behind one of the greatest financial crimes of our time: the Wall Street financial crash of 2008 and the consequent global recession. Instead of going where other journalists have gone in search of this story—the board rooms and trading floors of the big Wall Street firms—Scheer goes back to Washington, D.C., a veritable crime scene, beginning in the 1980s, where the captains of the finance industry, their lobbyists and allies among leading politicians destroyed an American regulatory system that had been functioning effectively since the era of the New Deal.

Robert Scheer writes the following in TruthDig:

Does Bill Clinton still not grasp that the current economic crisis is in large measure his legacy? Obviously that’s the case, or he wouldn’t have had the temerity to write a 14-point memo for Newsweek on how to fix the economy that never once refers to the home mortgage collapse and other manifestations of Wall Street greed that he enabled as president....

In his memoir Clinton pays tribute to Rubin as “the best and most important treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton.” He wrote that line in 2004, when Rubin, who had come to Clinton from a top job at Goldman Sachs and later left for Citigroup, was already clearly defined as someone who profited mightily from the very bills that he had pushed through while working for Clinton.

Please read more here.

As head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Brooksley Born became alarmed by the lack of oversight of the secretive, multitrillion-dollar over-the-counter derivatives market. Her attempts to regulate derivatives ran into fierce resistance from then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who prevailed upon Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation.

Please watch the video trailer for The Warning.

During the presidency of Larry Summers, Harvard's six-member board was clearly asleep at the wheel when Summers moved much of the university’s basic operating funds into risky derivatives investments, defying the warnings of its professional money managers (including moi). When the economic meltdown hit, $1.8 billion vanished.

Please read more here.

Well, it seems that Larry Summers is born again. He has finally figured out what the rest of us knew for a very, very long time - the U.S. economy is in big trouble.

Several folks contacted me and/or blogged about about Larry's new "uh-huh moment". Here's a funny example!