Peak Prosperity, Released on 7/18/20

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

GDP falls -35%, the worst quarterly drop in the history of the US economy….and the Too Big To Fail banks make record revenues.

Got that? Over 50 million Americans have lost their jobs as a result of the economic carnage inflicted by the covid-19 pandemic. And yet the big banks are not only unscathed, but positively swimming in profits.

We live in a system run by the banks, for the benefit of the banks. We, the public, are simply grist for its mill.

After all the US Federal Reserve, which wields immense global power and influence as the controller of the world’s reserve currency, is owned by its private member banks. Should we really be surprised how the banks always seem to come out on top?

And while we frequently criticize Fed policy for enriching Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, the banks are also picking our pockets in other ways that the public is largely blind to.

In today’s video, we talk with expert guest Joe Saluzzi of Themis Trading, an expert on high frequency trading (HFT) algorithms. He exposes a whole world of hyperfast technology operating in the markets that most regular investors are completely unaware of and vulnerable to.

Joe’s key takeaway is to realize that the markets, and the financial institutions operating them, are casinos. They have engineered the system to slant the odds in their favor. If you invest your hard-earned capital without clearly understanding the risks in play, then you’re the sucker at the poker table.

And as we do each week, we ask the lead partners at New Harbor Financial, Peak Prosperity’s endorsed financial advisor, to help folks determine how best to invest given the threats Joe details.

We also take a close look at the market action since last week, which may have reached the zenith of its “blow-off top” on Monday. Big Tech, which has driven the euphoric rally since the March lows, has been struggling all week. Netflix just disappointed substantially last night and if more members of the FAANGs release similarly weak guidance in their upcoming earnings reports, the potential sector breakdown we’ve been concerned about could suddenly follow. Suffice it to say, we’re monitoring the situation closely.

Adam Taggart is the President and Co-Founder of Peak Prosperity. He wears many hats, but his basic job is to handle the business side of things so that his fellow co-founder, Chris Martenson, is free to think and write. Adam is an experienced Silicon Valley internet executive and Stanford MBA. Prior to partnering with Chris (Adam was General Manager of our earlier site, ChrisMartenson.com), he was a Vice President at Yahoo!, a company he served for nine years. Before that, he did the ‘startup thing’ (mySimon.com, sold to CNET in 2001). As a fresh-faced graduate from Brown University in the early 1990s, Adam got a first-hand look at all that was broken with Wall Street as an investment banking analyst for Merrill Lynch. Most importantly, he’s a devoted husband and dad.

  Adam Taggart, Bank Bailouts, banking crisis, federal reserve, wall street, wall street bailouts