Economic Terrorism?

This is something I've never thought of before, but it makes a certain kind of sense.  Remember a while back I linked to a story where terrorists promised an October attack?  Do you think this would qualify?

Attributing the recent volatility on the stock market to economic terrorism or financial terrorism is perhaps a bit of a stretch however rumors are circulating on the Internet and elsewhere that it may be at least partially to blame.

This past weekend, on a Fox News special report "Rescue the Rescue" hosted by Neil Cavuto, Mike Huckabee brings up the possibility that the US stock market meltdown could be caused by terrorists bent on causing a financial crash. He notes that for 11 consecutive days there has been a large spike in the volume of sell transactions in the last 30 minutes that the US markets are open (video here).

While searching various blogs and forums we came across an interesting post on GodLikeProductions.com. One in which the poster with uncanny accuracy called the big drop on October 9th, attributing his prediction to a 'pattern'.

The post reads:

THE DOW WILL TAKE A DIVE AT 3:08 PM EST. SYSTEMATIC PATTERN OF NON INVESTOR CASH INFUSION SOLVED.

Trust me there is a pattern here.

Tune in at 3:08 and BEH@LD. Posted at 12:51PM on Oct. 9th

You can see it and the thread of the post here: GodLikeProductions

It's interesting to note, shortly after 3:00 the market indeed began to dive,closing at -654.

Jim Cramer of CNN's Mad Money also has suggested that this needs to be investigated.

Cramer suggests the damage being done to stocks through short selling, where Wall Street's most legendary institutions are losing value at alarming rates, could be the work of financial terrorism.

Cramer's been talking to the short sellers he knows, and that's the theory they've been putting forward. His sources said that it's doubtful that the market's traditional short sellers are behind the negative action we've seen lately. So there is the possibility that someone else has been trying to wreak havoc in the markets rather than just profit from the problems of Goldman Sachs.

Cramer, who was merely relaying what he heard, did say that, given the fact that the U.S. is in a "financial nationally emergency," the "financial terrorism thing, to me, has to be put on the table just because the regular short sellers are not doing this."

The Mad Money host urged the U.K.'s Financial Services Authority, which just banned short selling in financial stocks and now requires stricter disclosure from short sellers, to find out who's on the other side of these trades.

And there is more…

First is an article by Michael Webster that appeared on Right Side News, last month.

Financial Terrorism on Wall Street?

U.S. government law enforcement agencies including the SEC, FBI and DOJ are on alert and are believed investigating terror and other related short selling illegal manipulation of the market place.

It was reported that between August 26 and September 11, 2001, groups of speculators, including Middle Eastern country investors, some reported connected to terrorist such as Al Qaeda and the Ben Laden family, these groups were believed connected to predicting the demise of certain airline and buildings including the New York Trade Center. Still others were identified by the American Securities and Exchange Commission as Israeli citizens, who sold "short" a list of 38 stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as a result of the pending 911 attacks. According to the reports these speculators operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt, Germany, stock exchanges and their profits were specifically stated to be huge.

And this article by Joe Besecker of Emerald Asset Management Company.

Terror Attack on US Financials? Details of SEC Short Ban.

The following is excerpted from that article, referencing the musings of Mr. Besecker:

"He [Joe Besecker] raised an intriguing issue: None of the many hedgies he knew were pressing their bets recently. The bear raids on the banks and brokers were NOT a case of piling on by US based hedge funds. And from what he was seeing and hearing about in terms of order flow, the vast majority of the financial short selling the past week or so were being done overseas. It appears that the lion's share of shorting was coming out of overseas bourses such as London and Dubai.It may not be a coincidence that the financial short selling ban is both here and in London.

Then there is another coincidence: The huge increase in shorting of the financials occurred on the anniversary of 9/11. And on top of that, the same institutions attacked on 9/11/01 were the ones suffering in recent days.

Joe asked the question: Is anyone investigating whether this is a case of financial terrorism?

This is a very intriguing thought, especially since some legitimate resources are taking it seriously.  I would be very interested in seeing what those investigations find out with the overseas trading.

I'm not one for conspiracy theory, but is this really that far-fetched?  Let's walk through it.  We know that an enormous amount of U.S. resources are tied to overseas investors.  Nothing necessarily wrong with that - it's part of a global economy, though we certainly have way too much debt out there.  Anyway, we also know that terrorists support Obama almost universally (because he would adopt the same law enforcement mentality that Clinton used, which would allow them to go ahead and attack at will).  Furthermore, we know that Obama's current lead in the polls is mainly on the strength of the damaged economy and the negative associations -- fair or not -- between Bush's policies and McCain.  History shows us that no world power has remained a military power after its economy collapsed.  Finally, the terrorists know that if they conduct a violent attack on America before the election, the country will rally around McCain, who is clearly the better candidate on national security (it happened with Russia's attack on Georgia a few weeks ago), and McCain is promising to take the fight to them like Bush did.  So, let's put all of these facts together.  If our terrorist enemies wanted to make both a short term tactical strike and a long term strategic strike at the same time, what better way to do it than to make it an economical attack?  How many stories have we seen about how many trillions of dollars have been lost in the past few weeks?  How can American military might be properly deployed and operated if we can't afford to put gas in the tanks?  What better way to get the weak President they want (whom they also probably view as a Muslim) than to stack the election deck in his favor?

It seems to me that this economic crisis suits our terrorist enemies perfectly - undercutting our economic might, thus undercutting our military power; undermining American confidence in our elected leaders; distracting America from focus on them; propping up the candidate least likely to bring the fight to them.  It may not be correct, but it's too plausible to ignore entirely, don't you think?

Hmmm...

There's my two cents.