SPROTT ASSET MANAGEMENT INC.
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Executive Summary
This report examines information indicating that the U.S. government has surreptitiouslyintervened in the American stock market. Important findings include the following:
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A statement by former presidential adviser George Stephanopoulos and credibleBritish press reports appear to confirm suspicions that the United States has a so-called “Plunge Protection Team” whose primary responsibility is the preventionof destabilizing stock market declines. Comprising key government agencies,stock exchanges and large Wall Street firms, this informal group was apparentlycreated in 1989 as an outgrowth of the President’s Working Group on FinancialMarkets. This revelation is significant because the government has never admittedto private-sector membership in the Working Group.
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The Plunge Protection Team is not merely concerned with the stability of thestock market. Speaking in 2001 as a correspondent for ABC’s “Good MorningAmerica,” Stephanopoulos also revealed that at the time of the Long Term CapitalManagement crisis in 1998, the Federal Reserve directed large banks to prop upthe currency markets. This was apparently done to diffuse a global currency crisis.We believe this crisis was rooted in the disorderly unwinding of the yen-carrytrade, which resulted in the U.S. dollar plummeting against the Japanese currency.
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In response to the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Federal Reserve and largeWall Street firms prepared to support the main stock markets by buying shares if panic selling ensued. Multiple news reports indicate that investment banks andbrokerage houses took concerted actions in the aftermath of the tragedy.
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Before the 2003 Iraq invasion, the U.S. and Japan reached an agreement tointervene in stock markets if a financial crisis occurred during the war. Though itwas announced at a press conference by a Japanese government official, the U.S.never publicly acknowledged the accord.
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We believe the stability of domestic stock markets is considered by the U.S.government to be a matter of national security. Interventions are likely justifiedon the grounds that the health of the U.S. financial markets is integral toAmerican preeminence and world stability. This conclusion flows from anextraordinary financial war game exercise conducted by the Council on ForeignRelations in 2000 and attended by key policy-makers. In this vein, an article in
Euromoney
magazine disclosed that simulation participants displayed awillingness to consider government intervention in the stock market in the eventof a financial crisis.
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A 1989
USA Today
story revealed that government regulators asked marketparticipants to buy stocks in October 1989 to prevent another plunge. When theseovertures proved ineffective, large brokerage firms appear to have intervened inthe futures market to support the underlying index. In this regard, the recovery
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