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Wall Street To Hold Quantum Dawn 2, Cyber-Attack Drill
BioTitan writes "It will be determined whether Wall Street could withstand a coordinated, large-scale cyberattack during the Quantum Dawn 2 exercise on July 18. Top firms will work together and with the government to find weak points in their systems. The exercise is a major shift from the first Quantum Dawn in November 2011, which simulated a physical terrorist attack on Wall Street (there was no physical exercise, it was all behind computers), and had firms try to prevent a mock stock market from crashing."
...in your A/C ducts. Also make the openings in the ducts hard for people to get through. And always, ALWAYS check every firefighter or SWAT guy who comes through the building, even if he is ordering you around.
Now if this is a 100% software-based cyber-attack, just put "LATEST SYSTEM (TM)" somewhere on your screen so the enemy IT guys can just tell their boss, "I can't do this, it's the LATEST SYSTEM." That way they are forced to go "STRAIGHT IN" which, see firefighter advice above.
A good part of the consumer wealth in this country is invested on wall street. As a result, when the market contracts, people become more worried about their retirement and become less willing to spend money.
Shortly after BoA bought Merrill Lynch, I happened to be in Sears buying two ovens. I was the only one in the store. I also bought a car a few days later, at the end of the quarter, and was able to get a great deal because nobody was buying.
What happens on Wall Street does a huge amount to shape the willingness of people to spend money--including the willingness of endowed institutions to spend money. That makes it important to the economy.
When lower Manhattan flooded last winter, the systems behind the exchanges were just fine. None of them are actually in Manhattan. (The big NASDAQ billboard at Times Square is just advertising. There is no NASDAQ facility at that location.) NASDAQ doesn't even have a trading floor. NYSE/Euronext was prepared to shift trading control to Chicago, where they also own Arca, another exchange.
The Wall Street firms panicked at the plan for trading going on without them. They demanded that the exchanges be shut down until the firms could get back up. That was done.
Doesn't matter.
We're looking for holes that work AGAINST the interests of big money, not FOR them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"... the indirect purchase of GOVERNMENT issued debt by the FEDERAL Reserve aka Quantitative Easing?"
The Federal Reserve is about as "federal" as my neighbor's hemorrhoids. Other than having some people on the board government-appointed, it's not government at all. Each of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks is little more than a co-op of PRIVATE member banks, many of them largely owned by foreign interests.
"Note this is a flow of money TO the government from the banking system. The banks are simple intermediates in the process. They don't profit on the transaction."
Go back to school yourself. Quantitative Easing, by definition, is the buying of bonds WITH NEWLY CREATED DOLLARS. And I'll let you in on a little clue: the government pays interest on every one of those dollars created by the Federal Reserve.
It is BY DEFINITION inflationary. It is INTENDED TO BE inflationary (Bernanke's own words). And that inflation takes money straight out of citizens' pockets. Don't believe me? Compare your grocery bill to what it was 5 years ago. And commodities like food are among the FIRST things to go up.
"The idea that this is extorting money from the taxpayers is complete unvarnished BS."
It is nothing of the sort. The taxpayers get the money extorted from them all right. Just not directly. That's the beauty of the Federal Reserve system. Much of that loss comes from eventual higher government debt and inflation. But you had better believe it is real.