Is The Plunge Protection Team Manipulating Markets?

The President's Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG), also known as The Plunge Protection Team, released a statement in Oct 2008. It states:

The diversity of institutions and markets under stress, and the magnitude and complexity of the adjustment underway, requires that the tools available to policy makers, regulators and supervisors be used in forceful and coordinated ways across regulatory and supervisory agencies in the United States and throughout the world. This will involve moving with substantial force on a number of fronts.

Wikipedia states:

Financial writers for British newspapers The Observer and The Daily Telegraph, along with U.S. Congressman Ron Paul and writers Kevin Phillips (who claims “no personal firsthand knowledge” and is “not interested in becoming a conspiracy investigator”) [7] and John Crudele,[8] have charged the Working Group with going beyond their legal mandate. Claims about the Working Group, which are labeled conspiracy theories by some writers, generally include that it is an orchestrated mechanism that attempts to manipulate U.S. stock markets in the event of a market crash by using government funds to buy stocks, or other instruments such as stock index futures—acts which are forbidden by law. In August 2005, Sprott Asset Management released a report that argued that there is little doubt that the PPT intervened to protect the stock market.[9] However, these articles usually refer to the Working Group using moral suasion to attempt to convince banks to buy stock index futures. [10]

Get Rick Slick posted an article titled "Plunge Protection Team Alive and Well." The site included this video clip from Bloomberg allowing readers to infer that the Plunge Protection Team was the invisible hand behind our recently buoyed financial markets.



Here's another guy making the assertion that the Plunge Protection Team intervened on Oct 10 and Oct 28, 2008.



You can find more videos related to the Plunge Protection Team at YouTube. To date, most of the assertions about the Plunge Protection Team manipulating the stock markets has been categorized as conspiracy theories. I find interesting one assertion that the Plunge Protection Team may be manipulating Goldman Sachs to make trades on behalf of the Plunge Protection Team (source).

I remain interested and cautiously skeptical of assertions about the Plunge Protection Team. I believe that Government has a need to manipulate financial markets, but I haven't yet been able to find a high level member of the Plunge Protection Team inadvertently disclosing enough info to confirm the alleged "conspiracy ideas."