Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary
There’s a few Golden Rules that most Wall Street traders intuitively know never to cross: “Don’t fight the Fed,” “Cut your losses short and let your profits run,” “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel,” and the one coined just last week: “Don’t bet against the folks with a military budget larger than the next ten biggest spenders combined.”
Of course, traders have egos and can sometimes forget the basics. The London Whale traders at JPMorgan elected not to cut their losses short and let them run to $6.2 billion, which led to press ink by the barrel, multiple Congressional hearings, indictments of traders, a $920 million settlement by JPMorgan and the trials have yet to start.
Now, once again, it seems that common sense has escaped the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street. Last Tuesday, Jay Carney, the Press Secretary of the Commander in Chief of the United States, told an assembly of reporters that he would not recommend investing in Russian equities right now, unless they were going to short them. Exactly one week later, Morgan Stanley, which boasts of “$1.7 trillion in client assets, nearly 17,000 Financial Advisors and 740 locations,” reinstated its “Buy” rating on Russian equities.
Carney was responding to a question from a reporter about the fact that the Russian stock market had seen a bounce over the past few days. Carney responded:
“I think it’s down for the year, and I think the ruble has lost its value, and I think that the long-term effect of actions taken by the Russian government in clear violation of the United Nations charter, in clear violation of its treaty commitments, that are destabilizing — and illegal — will have an impact on their economy all by themselves. They will also incur costs because of the sanctions that we and the EU have imposed, and there will be more actions taken under the authorities that exist with the two executive orders that the president has signed. So I wouldn’t — I wouldn’t, if I were you, invest in Russian equities right now, I think the… unless you’re going short.”
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