Have We Reached a Financial Singularity?

Encouraging and supporting asset bubbles is essentially the only force remaining to keep the system intact as we know it.
The Singularity is based on the idea that machine intelligence will soon exceed human intelligence, and human history is unknowable beyond that point. This concept draws from a variety of sources, but for me the foundational idea comes from the physics of black holes, in which gravity concentrates the material of a collapsing star into a point of infinite gravitation, i.e. a singularity, that is surrounded by an event horizon that marks the line beyond which observers will inevitably be pulled to their destruction in the black hole. Observers cannot go back once they cross the event horizon, but they cannot see the inside of the black hole without going beyond the event horizon.
Longtime correspondent B. C. recently proposed that the global stock markets have reached a Financial Singularity in which trading machines now control the markets. Here are excerpts of B. C.’s emails on the topic: In some respects, “The Singularity” has occurred in the financial markets, only humans are incapable of perceiving it except by inference. I will reiterate from the past my assertion based on direct and highly suggestive personal evidence that the major US, UK, and EZ equity markets are being “managed” offshore by the TBTE (too big to exist) banks’ dark pools’ pass-through entities in the Caribbean banking centers, levering up US Treasury and MBS (mortgage-backed securities) holdings to jam equity index with the assistance of NYSE-Euronext exchange-sponsored HFT (high fequency trading) at the price margin.

This post was published at Charles Hugh Smith on WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 03, 2014.