by Jeff Berwick
Do you own stocks in a brokerage account? You may be surprised to find out that you don’t. Your brokerage owns them.
It is one of the dirtiest little secrets in the brokerage business. And 99.9% of people have no idea it is even being done to them. It’s called “street name registration” and it’s how the brokerage where you hold your stocks “registers” your shares. To save money and time, and to allow your shares to be included as assets that THEY can use to do what they want with, your brokerage never actually registers you as an owner of the shares.
Even worse, street name registration allows your broker to lend your shares to short sellers, thereby driving down the price of your own stocks. Additionally, this method allows your broker to “re-hypothecate” your assets–meaning it allows your broker to borrow money against your shares and speculate in the derivatives market!
These hidden risks are planting the seeds of tomorrow’s ultimate collapse – In which there may be a system-wide collapse of broker dealers, taking down millions of investors, and ensuring permanent non-recoverable losses to an entire generation!
MF GLOBAL WAS JUST THE FIRST TO GO DOWN
MF Global investors found out first hand just how secure their funds were. Most don’t realize it, but MF Global was a clearing house for both stocks and futures. Like many/most brokerages, they “invest” their own funds, often on a highly leveraged basis, to earn income. But, with the recent collapse of Greek Government bonds, and with MF Global’s highly leveraged position in them, MF Global was bankrupted in an instant.
The problem is, they tried to cover their losses with their customer’s own funds! You see, unless your shares are registered in your own name – a process that isn’t that difficult nor costly – your brokerage considers it as assets they can use for their own needs.
Plus, once a brokerage goes bankrupt – something that will happen more and more as the financial crisis continues – if you hadn’t personally registered your shares then your shares go down as assets of the brokerage and are used to pay off their creditors.
“Several million private accounts may vanish–Brokerage accounts, Pension funds, Mutual funds, they’re all at risk. We are getting into the middle stages of implosion, where I believe the public will not wake up until at least one million private accounts are stolen, and completely vanish.” -Jim Willie, The Hat Trick Letter
THE WESTERN FINANCIAL SYSTEM IS IN A STATE OF COLLAPSE
The reason for this coming broker-dealer crisis is quite simple. The entire western financial system is built on debt… it’s an anti-capitalist system set-up to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. It started in 1913 with the founding of The Federal Reserve, it went further down the slippery slope with gold confiscation in the US in 1933 and reached the beginning of the end in 1971 with Nixon closing the gold window, turning the US dollar (officially called the Federal Reserve Note) into a completely fiat currency.
In more recent times, it was the repeal of the Glass-Steagel act that allowed Investment Banks to acquire broker-dealers, and pass the risks of 100-1 leverage downstream to all client accounts. Therefore, your stock investments are now only as safe as the speculative portfolio of your broker-dealer! Considering most Western Investment Houses are leveraged at least 40-1, this means your stocks are no safer than a 40-1 bet on European bonds! (Which most western investment banks are leveraged to the teeth with)
Some believe their stocks will be protected by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC), which insures stocks accounts from broker collapse up to $500k for securities, and account cash balances up to $250k. But what if you have more than $250k in cash and/or more than $500k of securities in your account? What if one of the largest broker dealers in the country went bust, bringing down thousands of accounts and depleting the entire reserves of the SIPC? What if the SIPC itself goes bankrupt? What few people are aware of, is that the SIPC only carries about $1 billion in funds to cover investors! This means only one or two high profile broker dealer bankruptcies will be enough to completely wipe out the SIPC.
Some may claim the U.S. government will bail out the SIPC to whatever extent needed. But what if two major broker dealers went bust while at the same time the U.S. government suffers a major Treasury bond auction failure? This is all but a certainty in the coming years.
And the same thing applies in Canada to Canadian brokerages and Canadian stocks. The Canadian economy is intricately tied to the US. In fact, not many people are aware, but all that backs the Canadian dollar is the US dollar. The Canadian Government sold all its gold decades ago.
The entire monetary & financial system is headed for its final destination – total collapse… and 2008 was just the beginning.
“If you were lucky enough not to be a customer of MF Global … then you should view the MFG episode as a warning shot. You might not get another warning shot.” -Steven Saville, The Speculative Investor
ONE LAST BUBBLE?
But, we’ve been predicting there are still a few more years left… not 10. But maybe 2 to 3 more years… or a little more. We believe the Federal Reserve and all western central banks will print enough money to get the system through for another few years… just enough for them to get out of office and retired to their Caribbean island villas before all the western fiat currencies enter hyperinflation.
And, we believe this will create one final bubble. The tech bubble is dead. The housing bubble is dead. And the bubble in government debt is in its death throes. What will be the final bubble? It will be in gold and silver mining stocks.
But the question remains — how can we safely invest in gold and silver mining shares and avoid the collapse brought on by the coming broker dealer crisis?
There are two methods of owning stocks your broker-dealer will never tell you about. These two methods completely remove the broker dealer counter party risk attached to your shares – effectively removing them from “the system.”
These two methods deprive your broker dealer the abilities to sell your stocks short and to “re-hypothecate” them. Your broker dealer will never willingly tell you about these methods – because they make more money when your shares are in their hands – precisely where risks are greatest to you.
These methods are so safe, that even if your broker dealer collapsed tomorrow, and stole every penny from every client investment account you would be able to sleep safe and sound, knowing your stocks are far out of reach, and legally unavailable to access by your broker-dealer.
This means everyone – all brokers in the Unites States and Canada. If every broker collapsed tomorrow due to waves of bankruptcies, these ownership methods will protect you 100%. You will be able to sleep safe and sound at night, knowing your shares are carrying zero counter party risk.
That’s why we’ve supported Tekoa Da Silva, a bright young man and publisher of Bull Market Timing in putting together a complete research paper outlining the process to register your shares and giving you all the info you need to know to do it easily, quickly and properly. He spent hundreds of hours dealing with broker dealers, transfer agents, public companies, and the SIPC in researching and finding out all the details on how to get your shares outside of the system.
We’ve put all his research together into a Special Report called “BulletProof Shares”. You can get more information and purchase this report at BulletProof Shares.
THE GREATEST BUYING OPPORTUNITY OF A GENERATION
There will be more opportunity in this crisis than in any other in the past century. But, in order to profit from the coming crisis you need to ensure that if/when your brokerage goes bankrupt you still retain ownership of your shares. Shares are proof of ownership of a real asset and don’t depend on a stock exchange or a brokerage… as long as you make sure you register them properly.
If you are able to preserve & accumulate wealth during the collapse, you will be offered the greatest buying opportunity of our generation. Blue-chip companies may be purchased for pennies on the dollar…but the trick is to safely protect your assets until we reach that point.
We’ve been covering the ongoing collapse of the western financial system and we’ve been adamant that there are two main ways to protect yourself and profit from the collapse by owning gold and silver bullion and the miners who produce precious metals.
Owning gold and silver bullion will protect your assets… and owning shares in the miners will likely result in massive profits. However, this multi-generational profit opportunity will only present itself for those who can make it through the collapse with ownership of their shares intact.
Unless you’ve gone through the process outlined in BulletProof Shares then you don’t really own your stocks… your broker does.
Please protect yourself now and pass this along to anyone you know who owns US or Canadian traded stocks before it is too late.
