Is this why stocks are UP?

Remember when Dr. Paul asked McCain about the PPT?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUZwL9GPcNw

Stock Rally Owing to Plunge Protection Team Conspiracy?
Written by Bob Adelmann

The 60 percent gain in stocks since March was largely caused by secret government purchases of stock-index futures, the CEO of TrimTabs claims.

The Plunge Protection Team (PPT), otherwise known as the Working Group on Financial Markets, has been the target of conspiracy theorists ever since an article in the Washington Post in 1997 first shed light on the operation. The Working Group was created by Executive Order following Black Monday’s market crash on October 19, 1987, when the stock market declined more than 20 percent in a single session. Its purpose was to give recommendations for legislative and private sector solutions for “enhancing the integrity, efficiency, orderliness, and competitiveness of financial markets and maintaining investor confidence.”

The Group is made up of the Secretary of the Treasury (Timothy Geithner), the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (Ben Bernanke), the chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (Elizabeth Murphy), and the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (Gary Gensler). Claims are made that this committee consists of an “orchestrated mechanism that attempts to manipulate U.S. stock markets in the event of a market crash by using government funds to buy stocks, or other instruments such as stock index futures — acts which are forbidden by law.”

Some of the attacks are dated and histrionic while others deny the existence of PPT altogether.

The recent massive rise in the stock market since March has raised serious issues by some highly credible observers.
Charles Biderman, founder and CEO of TrimTabs, a highly respected research firm that tracks money flows into and out of the markets, said on Tuesday, “We do not know the source of money that pushed [the market capitalization] up $6 trillion since Mid-March. We cannot identify the source of the new money that pushed stock prices up so far so fast. The money did not come from the traditional players:

Corporate America has been a huge net seller [of stocks].

Retail investor funds [stock mutual funds] have received just $17 billion since the start of April.

[Individual] investor sentiment has been mostly neutral since the rally began. We have no evidence [that] retail investors were piling into individual stocks.

Foreign investors have provided some buying power … but we suspect [these] purchases slowed in November and December.

Hedge funds … posted an outflow of $12 billion from April through November. We doubt their buying power.

Pension funds have not moved [substantially] into U.S. equities since the rally began.

Where did the money come from to push up stock prices? Biderman says, “We do not know where all the money has come from. What we do know is that the U.S. government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to support the auto industry, the housing market, and the banks and brokers. Why not support the stock market as well?”

Robert Heller, a former board member of the Federal Reserve, said in an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal, “Instead of flooding the entire economy with liquidity, and thereby increasing the danger of inflation, the Fed could support the stock market directly by buying market averages in the futures market, thereby stabilizing the market as a whole.”

Continue reading: http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/economy/commentary-m...