But the roller coaster actually began on Tuesday, 8-2-11, the day after the last-minute deal to raise the U.S. debt ceiling — a deal that was supposed to avoid the downgrade that happened anyway five days later.  The Dow changed directions for eight consecutive trading sessions after that, another first.  

The volatility was unprecedented, leaving analysts at a loss to explain it. High frequency program trading no doubt added to the wild swings, but why the daily reversals?  Why didn’t the market head down and just keep going, as it did in September 2008? 

Many economists have been pointing out that last week’s panic esembled the fear that swept financial markets after the collapse of US investment bank Lehman Brothers in September 2008.

Then as now, banks stopped lending each other money. Then as now, banks’ cash deposits at the central bank doubled within days.

But on Tuesday, August 9, the market gained more points from its low than it lost on Monday. Why? A tug of war seemed to be going on between two titanic forces, one bent on crashing the market, the other on propping it up.

as “:

It seems the Bilderbergers are less interested in governing the world than in owning the world. The “world company” was a term first used at a Bilderberger meeting in Canada in 1968 by George Ball, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs and a managing director of banking giants Lehman Brothers and Kuhn Loeb. The world company was to be a new form of colonialism, in which global assets would be acquired by economic rather than military coercion. The company would extend across national boundaries, aggressively engaging in mergers and acquisitions until the assets of the world were subsumed under one privately-owned corporation, with nation-states subservient to a private international central banking system.  

The idea behind each and every Bilderberg meeting is to create what they themselves call THE ARISTOCRACY OF PURPOSE between European and North American elites on the best way to manage the planet. In other words, the creation of a global network of giant cartels, more powerful than any nation on Earth, destined to control the necessities of life of the rest of humanity.&nbsp

. . . This explains what George Ball . . . said back in 1968, at a Bilderberg meeting in Canada: “Where does one find a legitimate base for the power of corporate management to make decisions that can profoundly affect the economic life of nations to whose governments they have only limited responsibility?”

The problem with today’s system is that the world is run by monetary systems, not by national credit systems. . . . [Y]ou don’t want a monetary system to run the world. You want sovereign nation-states to have their own credit systems, which is the system of their currency. . . . [T]he possibility of productive, non-inflationary credit creation by the state, which is firmly stated in the US Constitution, was excluded by Maastricht [the Treaty of the European Union] as a method of determining economic and financial policy.

Battle of the Titans

What turned the market around, according to Der Spiegel, was the European Central Bank, which saved the day by embarking on a program of buying Spanish and Italian bonds. Sidestepping the Maastricht Treaty, the ECB said it would engage in the equivalent of “quantitative easing,” purchasing bonds with money created with accounting entries on its books.  It had done this earlier with Greek and Irish sovereign debt but had resisted doing it with Spanish and Italian bonds, which were much larger obligations. On Tuesday, August 16, the ECB announced that it was engaging in a record $32 billion bond-buying spree in an attempt to appease the markets and save the Eurozone from collapse.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was also expected to come through with another round of quantitative easing, but his speech on August 9 made no mention of QE3. As blogger Jesse Livermore summarized the market’s response:

.
 . . [T]he markets sold off rather rapidly as no announcement was made about That leaves the question, why the suspicious downgrade on August 5, AFTER the government had made major concessions just to avoid default, and despite the embarrassing revelation that S&P’s figures were off by $2 trillion? Suspicious bloggers have pointed out that Lehman Brothers was brought down by a massive bear raid on 9-11-08, echoing the disaster of 9-11-01; that the S&P downgrade hit the market on 8-8-11; and that the S&P fell exactly 6.66% and the Dow fell exactly 5.55% on that date.  In Illuminati lore, these are power numbers, of the sort chosen for power moves.

The Securities Exchange Commission announced on August 8 that it is investigating the downgrade. According to the Financial Times, the move is part of a preliminary examination into potential insider trading. 

Whatever can be said about the first two weeks of August, their market action was unprecedented, unnatural, and bears close observation.

*Ellen Brown is president of the Public Banking Institute and the author of eleven books. She developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles.  In Web of Debt, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and “the money trust.”.