The dead bodies in the banking business just keep piling up, this time, in LIchtenstein, where a banker has been found murdered, and in the Netherlands, where a banker, his wife, and young daughter, are victims:

Lichtenstein bank CEO Frick Murdered

48 Year Old Man Killed in Bank Garage

Former Bank Helped Trigger Collapse

By now, it is (or at least should be) obvious to any reasonable person that all these suicides, from the unfortunate Chinese banker in Hong Kong, to the murder by defenestration that we've seen in New York and London with JP Morgan bankers, and now to Lichtenstein, Holland, and Scotland connections, are all somehow related and not accidental. We are now in a distinct and definite pattern. We are looking at murder. Look at what the stories have added up to thus far:

The "suicides" and murders have global extent, from China to Lichtenstein, thus suggesting that whatever is behind these murders is something of global extent; The suicides have been connected to allegations of fraud(as in the case of Herr Frick), or are tied to areas of finance where there has been rampant financial fraud, such as mortages, and the "suicide" by nail gun of Colorado mortgage title businessman, Richard Talley; The suicides have shown a consistent pattern of people connected to the computer-related aspects of finance, suggesting elements connected to high frequency trading and international financial clearing.

The question is, why all the murders?

One very obvious answer is suggested by the case of Lichtenstein banker Juergen Frick, one of the more recent victims, and clearly a murder victim, and that is the allegation of he raised of fraud. I have suggested this before, in connection with the hidden system of finance that I have argued was put into place after World War Two as a completely off the books system of finance designed as a covert (and vast) slush fund to finance secret research of a long term and exotic nature, and to fund covert operations. This has meant that the national security apparatus of the USA became involved in international banking (and therefore, its adjunct, clearing) at a very early period in the postwar world, and hence, the protection of this system, should anyone discover its internal workings or threaten to expose it, would be a national security secret, and certainly one that its managers would commit murder to protect.

In the operations of such a system, however, fraud becomes the norm, and hence, another reason for the evident pattern offers itself, and that is simply that with all the bad paper floating around - particularly in the wake of the credit default swaps and derivatives that were created prior to the crash of 2008 - evidence of the vast amounts of capital tied up in those securities has to be eliminated. We could, in other words, be looking at the liquidation of "loose ends" as the international financial community scrambles to reset back to normalcy, burning and shredding the bad paper, and anyone with deep knowledge of it. This has been the view argued in various places by my colleague Catherine Austin Fitts, to a certain extent.

But the Frick and Schmittmann cases linked above suggest another high octane speculative possibility, namely, that these bankers may be comparing notes, and coming to some interesting conclusions, conclusions I suggested yesterday in my blog about Goldman Sach's breathtaking and apparent withdrawal (for the moment) from one of its own High Frequency Trading "dark pools". What if Herr Frick discovered, during the course of his lawsuit, that the entity he had assumed had defrauded him, really hadn't, but rather, that it had been used by some other entity, that it had been hacked, as it were, and that no one, at least in the public aspect of the system, had defrauded him at all? What if he had discovered evidence that the entire system of international clearing had been hacked and was under someone else's control? In such a situation, one might hold panicked meetings in quiet board rooms, deciding what to do to protect one's assets, electronic or otherwise, and one might, like Goldman Sachs, decide on a moratorium on involvement in any system it suspected may have been compromised. One would also, I imagine, put out the quiet word that everyone in "the business" would have to be carefully monitored, and, if they came to close to this explosive secret, or were suspected of possibly going public with it, quietly advised to remain quiet about it.

Such a secret would, of course, be explosive and, if true, and made public, could severely damage the financial system, already battered from lack of trust. What if they have discovered the presence of "something else" in the financial system they thought they were in control of, something that was executing trades in clear contradiction to their own buy or sell orders, and even in some cases overriding them? There are three possibilities for such a "hidden trader," and I have mentioned one of them, but there are two others, and all three of them would be explosive news, if one had access to the numbers, orders, and programs, and could make a demonstrative and irrefutable case... that case would be a secret both worth exposing, and commiting murder to prevent from being exposed.

See you on the flip side.