A New Digital Cash System Was Just Unveiled At A Secret Meeting For Bankers In New York

Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse Blog

Last month, a “secret meeting” that involved more than 100 executives from some of the biggest financial institutions in the United States was held in New York City.  During this “secret meeting“, a company known as “Chain” unveiled a technology that transforms U.S. dollars into “pure digital assets”.  Reportedly, there were representatives from Nasdaq, Citigroup, Visa, Fidelity, Fiserv and Pfizer in the room, and Chain also claims to be partnering with Capital One, State Street, and First Data.  This “revolutionary” technology is intended to completely change the way that we use money, and it would represent a major step toward a cashless society.  But if this new digital cash system is going to be so good for society, why was it unveiled during a secret meeting for Wall Street bankers?  Is there something more going on here than we are being told?

None of us probably would have ever heard about this secret meeting if it was not for a report in Bloomberg.  The following comes from their article entitled “Inside the Secret Meeting Where Wall Street Tested Digital Cash“…

On a recent Monday in April, more than 100 executives from some of the world’s largest financial institutions gathered for a private meeting at the Times Square office of Nasdaq Inc. They weren’t there to just talk about blockchain, the new technology some predict will transform finance, but to build and experiment with the software.
By the end of the day, they had seen something revolutionary: U.S. dollars transformed into pure digital assets, able to be used to execute and settle a trade instantly. That’s the promise of a blockchain, where the cumbersome and error-prone system that takes days to move money across town or around the world is replaced with almost instant certainty.

So it is not just Michael Snyder from The Economic Collapse Blog that is referring to this gathering as a “secret meeting”.  This is actually how it was described by Bloomberg.  And I think that there is a very good reason why this meeting was held in secret, because many in the general public would definitely be alarmed by this giant step toward a cashless society. 

Read more

After Charges of Running a Price Fixing Cartel on Nasdaq in the 90s, Wall Street Banks Are Now Trading Their Own Stocks in Darkness

Wall St. On Parade
Pam Martens and Russ Martens

On July 17, 1996, the U.S. Justice Department charged the biggest names on Wall Street, names like Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and predecessor firms to Citigroup, with pricing fixing on the electronic stock market known as Nasdaq.

The Justice Department felt the firms were so untrustworthy to make a fair electronic marketplace that as part of its settlement it required that some traders’ phone calls be tape recorded when making Nasdaq trades and it gave itself the right to randomly show up and listen in on the traders’ calls. The scandal made headlines for years and revealed that the price fixing had been going on under the unwatchful eye of regulators for more than a decade.

Now, more than six years after the greatest Wall Street crash since 1929, the public is still learning stomach-churning details about the lingering effects of de-regulating Wall Street.

Yesterday we learned that the very same Wall Street firms charged with price fixing in the 90s have somehow conned their regulators into allowing them to own their own dark pools – effectively unregulated stock exchanges – and make markets in the stock of their very own Wall Street bank.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) – a self-regulatory Wall Street body (which under a previous name was responsible for missing the Nasdaq price fixing for more than a decade) released trading data yesterday for the dark pools operating the week of May 12 – 16. This was the first time such data has been released. The data releases are set to continue.

Read more

People-safe robot is first non-human to close NASDAQ

Comment: Machines meeting those who think like machines. Cause for celebration?  If you are non-human  - flesh or silicon - very probably.

------------

New Scientist

Hillary Clinton, Richard Branson and Michael Jackson have all done it. Today a multi-jointed, people-friendly robot arm, called UR5, became the first non-human to ring the bell at the NASDAQ stock exchange, a twice daily act that marks the opening and closing of the market in Times Square, New York.

NASDAQ offers its bell-ringing up to companies, heads-of-state and community leaders as a means to make announcements or celebrate important milestones – Mark Zuckerberg rang the bell the day Facebook went public, for example.

UR5 was chosen to mark the launch of the first robot-specific stock market index, ROBO-STOX, which allows investors to track the value of the robotics industry as a whole.

"It is a very exciting step for us, and an exciting step for the robot industry as a whole," says Esben Østergaard of Universal Robots in Odense, Denmark, which makes UR5. "The world needs robots, and we are very happy to be chosen to represent this important event in the history of robot technology."

Read more