Courtesy of Pam Martens
Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana)
On July 29, those savvy market watchers at Themis Trading posted a report on their blog about how a Republican Senator from Louisiana (about 1400 miles from Wall Street) had taken a peculiar interest in the long-delayed system that would shine a bright light on who might be rigging stock trading on any particular day.
The system is called the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) and the Securities and Exchange Commission has been stalling its creation for the entire 85 years the SEC has existed and been charged with investor protection. The idea of the CAT is to spot illegal and manipulative trading and pinpoint exactly what firms and individuals are placing the trades by looking at real-time data.
A stock market without a CAT is nothing more than a thinly disguised wealth transfer system for the one percent and, apparently, Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) wants to keep it that way.
Kennedy was the lead signatory of a letter dated July 24, 2019 to Jay Clayton, the Chairman of the SEC. Instead of raising legitimate concerns that Wall Street’s Dark Pools and/or high frequency traders at hedge funds owned by billionaires are rigging U.S. stock markets and ripping off Main Street investors every moment the stock market is open, Kennedy’s aim is to resurrect the McCarthy era and find an enticing foreign foe – the Chinese Communist Party. (You can’t make this stuff up.)
Kennedy, and the six other Republican Senators who signed the letter, don’t want trades to be linked to the individual making the trade because this information could be hacked by Communists. What is particularly laughable about this stalling maneuver is that if the Chinese Communist Party wanted to hack this personal information, it could do it through the checking accounts, credit card accounts, or brokerage accounts of these same Wall Street banks that are placing the retail trades.
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