Wednesday, July 8, 2009

The "top secret" Futures game plan

Cramer's facetious "take" on commodity traders trying to stop regulation:

Dear Fellow Futures Traders:

Today we find ourselves under assault by a son of Illinois, the great capital of futures, and his chief of staff who has always done our bidding.

It is time we swing into action, because the notion that we should ever have to put up more than 10% capital or have to tell people who we represent or that there should ever be a distinction between investing and speculating and real or phony buying is the moment we become communists and we should expect all of our property to be expropriated.

So here is what we must do, our to-do list, while we swing around millions turned into billions by our own self-regulation.

1. Call the congressman you bought in the last dozen elections and explain to him the way the world works and the deal he made when he took the money. Be very explicit -- it was for unfettered capitalism and the right to do whatever the heck we want in these markets.

2. Gin up those professors from the schools you gave a lot of money to and have them write papers that show the markets are deep and can't be manipulated.

3. Get some of those George Bush regulators, the ones who didn't believe in regulation, to make statements talking about the importance of free markets, Thomas Jefferson and the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

4. Get on TV and fool anchors into saying that you have never seen manipulation and the markets are way too big to be manipulated.

5. Call some big clients and have them put in full-page ads in The New York Times about "The Meaning of Freedom in a Democracy."

6. Rustle up some captains of industry who don't know what they are talking about and give them the speech about how much liquidity speculators provide, which makes for "better markets."

7. Vehemently deny -- even though we know otherwise -- that the $140 oil price had anything to do with manipulation; insist it was 100% China-driven.

8. Blame the problems we have been having on too much regulation and oversight.

9. Call Rahm Emmanuel, the president's chief of staff, and remind him he is from the great state of futures.

10. Threaten to pull offshore.

Remember, it is bizarre that stocks, of no national importance whatsoever, require 50% margin, but this commodity, of national and international importance -- the most important commodity in the world -- requires almost nothing to buy.

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