How much are tech stocks worth? For a brief time on July 3, they were all worth $123.47. It happened during after-hours trading, and it happened because that’s what the Nasdaq trading platform said they were worth.
Nasdaq’s explanation is that third parties improperly sent test data to their system. That only raises more questions. We’re not going to go there, today. We’re going to go somewhere else, instead.
“Who do you trust?” may be the single most important question any of us will answer within our lifetimes. It’s true personally, politically, educationally, religiously and beyond. Let’s look at trust in a few different areas.
Stock prices fluctuate all the time. Like anything else, the value of any given stock is what a willing buyer and seller agree on at a given moment in time, when they actually make the buy-sell transaction.
Now suppose for a moment that there was no trade, but Nasdaq said that there was, and the transaction had happened for $123.47. What would make you trust – or distrust – their explanation for why that price was accurate, or why there was a mistake?
Now let’s look at the global warming industry. Michael “the hockey stick” Mann just refused to provide his raw global warming data to a Canadian court, one in which he has sued “global warming skeptics.” It’s a lot like the Nasdaq, isn’t it? The temperature data are what he says they are, before, during or after any adjustments he chooses to make, because he’s a closed system. Yet we should all just trust him and hand over our money, which is really our working life.
What about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, illegal voting and Russian election hacking? Whether you like it or not, we are all now funding the patrician lawyer’s retirement guild with our tax payments. One candidate could have her ex-president husband meet privately with the sitting attorney general, Loretta Lynch, to discuss a criminal email investigation of his presidential candidate wife, but the current attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself because he once met the Russian ambassador at a cocktail party. Who do you trust?
There are many hidden hands here, but I’m only going to point out a few. One is the intelligence community, which in this case is really the NSA, CIA and FBI for counterintelligence. The NSA has lost unknown oodles of its secret data and computer code to leakers, who have placed it on the Internet, where hackers can repurpose it. Ditto for the CIA, although they’re more biased toward their computer hacking tools, which, they were proud to announce, could make them look like somebody else. Russians, perhaps.
The FBI has been using the NSA (and probably CIA) data in place of conducting actual counterterrorism investigations. Their upper management leaked like a sieve to the media, and when the sieve broke they leaked all over both Hillary and then Donald. The FBI’s No. 2 at the top took $700,000 from a Clinton bundler for his wife’s election campaign, but never bothered to tell anyone about it. What could possibly go wrong?
Big media now live and die by the mouse-click. They could give a rat’s tail about the truth of anything they publish. If nothing exciting happened, they make it up. So what if they take America down with them? “We won the ratings war this month!”
Fake news. Anonymous sources. Fake stock prices. Fake Russians. Who do you trust, and why? And if you don’t trust anybody, then how do you live your life?
Who do you trust? Is there any evidence? Can we see it – or will it all be “classified”? Faked? Anonymous?
Who do you trust? In the current political environment, that determines your vote. We’re now down to instinctual reactions, which are another step below emotional decisions.
Nasdaq was hacked in 2010 and kept it quiet for quite some time. Reuters finally reported it.
Perhaps trust will continue to decay until a critical mass of us understand there is only one person any of us can unconditionally trust.
Media wishing to interview Craige McMillan, please contact media@wnd.com.
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