What we know for sure is that there is a derivatives trader in London working for JPM who was running a trading/capital position that is thought to be as large as $200 billion.  For JPM/Dimon to publicly claim that the embedded loss in this position is only 1% is complete fraud.    To begin with, JPM’s stated book value as of 12/31/11 is $183 billion.  There is no way in hell that JPM would call a surprise conference call to disclose a loss from a bad hedge that amounts to less than 1% of shareholder equity.  Even by today’s absurdly loose accounting standards, anything less than a 5% event is not considered to be meaningful. 

Central Banks Take Joint Action to Ease Debt Crisis … The Federal Reserve moved Wednesday with other major central banks to buttress the financial system by increasing the availability of dollars outside the United States, reflecting growing concern about the fallout of the European debt crisis. The banks announced that they would slash by roughly half the cost of an existing program under which banks in foreign countries can borrow dollars from their own central banks, which in turn get those dollars from the Fed. The banks also said that loans will be available until February 2013, extending a previous endpoint of August 2012. “The purpose of these actions is to ease strains in financial markets and thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit to households and businesses and so help foster economic activity,” the banks said in a statement. – NY Times

Dominant Social Theme: Thank goodness the cavalry is here.

Free-Market Analysis: This is, of course, the Anglosphere power elite’s fundamental dominant social theme. Our Money Power is good and we use it wisely and well on YOUR behalf. The “system” cannot be allowed to falter or fail. Not an inch of it. Of course, we ask, “Whose system is it, exactly?”

It is not the system of about three billion people who live, around the world, on a dollar a day. It is not the system of homeless people in the West. It is not the system of a hungry child. It is not the system of a Latino day-worker. It is not the system of the beret-clad performance artist in Greenwich Village. It is not even the system of a US Marine fighting in Afghanistan.

It a system that is of peculiar benefit to the elites. They own it. They run it. They utilize its awesome power as necessary. How can one doubt the existence of a power elite when one watches the sort of spectacle described above by the New York Times (see excerpt)? Here’s some more:

What on earth did Hank Paulson think his job was in the summer of 2008? As far as most of us were concerned, he was secretary of the US Treasury, answerable to the US people and to the president. But at the same time, in secret meetings, Paulson was hanging out with his old Goldman Sachs buddies, giving them invaluable information about what he was thinking in his new job.

The first news of this behavior came in October 2009, when Andrew Ross Sorkin revealed that Paulson had met with the entire board of Goldman Sachs in a Moscow hotel suite for an hour at the end of June 2008. He told them his views of the US and global economies, he previewed a market-moving speech he was about to give, and he even talked about the possibility that Lehman Brothers might blow up. Maybe it’s not so surprising that Goldman Sachs turned out to be so well positioned when Lehman did indeed do just that a few months later.

The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets…

Today we learn that the Goldman meeting in Moscow was not some kind of aberration. A few weeks later, on July 28 2008, Paulson met with a who’s who of the hedge-fund world in the headquarters of Eton Park Capital Management — a fund founded by former Goldman superstar Eric Mindich.

The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into “conservatorship” — a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets…

Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out…

The fund manager who described the meeting left after coffee and called his lawyer. The attorney’s quick conclusion: Paulson’s talk was material nonpublic information, and his client should immediately stop trading the shares of Washington- based Fannie and McLean, Virginia-based Freddie.

Who Will Bail Out the Fed?

By Jim Rickards, Sr. Managing Dir. Tangent Capital

November 23 (King World News) -  From Occupy Wall Street to the halls of Congress there is anger at bailouts orchestrated by the U.S. Federal Reserve. These bailouts have not been limited to banks but include brokers, money market funds and foreign corporations. The Fed has released details grudgingly and some disclosures were forced by the Dodd-Frank legislation. Gradually the bailouts have been revealed as if a veil were slowly being drawn to display a densely formed mosaic. The bailouts have enriched stockholders, bondholders and CEO’s while unemployment remains at depression levels and forty-six million Americans survive on food stamps.