TL;DR: Yes, the Salem Witches were ultimately behind the 2008 financial crisis. Maybe that’s not a surprise at this point so I’ll just fill in some of the details.

I want to remind you of the titanic scale of this swindle. The Salem Witches are probably okay with us bitching and moaning about aid to Israel—totaling about $300 billion over 75 years when—with just one “crisis”—they can dip their hands into chests spilling over with dubloons and walk off unseen.

Experts will now tell you the whole bailout ended up anywhere from “profitable” for the government to “not as profitable as it could have been”. Seems dubious, but you can read about many of the gory details in Matt Taibbi’s long article, where we find how much money was floating around:

SECRETS AND LIES OF THE BAILOUT: The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. (Rolling Stone 1/4/2013)

Even worse, the $700 billion in TARP loans ended up being dwarfed by more than $7.7 trillion in secret emergency lending that the Fed awarded to Wall Street – loans that were only disclosed to the public after Congress forced an extraordinary one-time audit of the Federal Reserve. The extent of this “secret bailout” didn’t come out until November 2011, when Bloomberg Markets, which went to court to win the right to publish the data, detailed how the country’s biggest firms secretly received trillions in near-free money throughout the crisis.

One incident we might highlight was the daring daylight caper of the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America. We are told:

Trading partners' loss of confidence in Merrill Lynch's solvency… ultimately led to its sale.... Later that day [September 14], Merrill Lynch was sold to Bank of America…. This price represented a 70.1% premium over the September 12 closing price….

Congressional testimony by Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis, as well as internal emails released by the House Oversight Committee, indicated that the merger was transacted under pressure from federal officials, who said that they would otherwise seek the replacement of Bank of America's management as a condition of any government assistance.

I refer you to Mercy Lewis, "an accuser during the Salem Witch Trials", but Merrill itself also looks like a Salem Witch(tm) company. It was founded in 1914 by Charles Edward Merrill (1885-1956). There’s no direct connection that I found (yet), but if you start with his genealogy and drive backwards through his paternal line, you arrive at Nathaniel Merrill II (1601-1655).

Nathaniel lived in Newbury, MA, which is 13 miles north of Salem Village. Also noteworthy is that Ben Franklin’s maternal grandmother was Mary Folger, born Mary Morrell/Morrel/Morrill/Morrills/Morill. No genealogy for her, so it indicates to me that we’re touching a third rail.

Alright, so Merrill gets in deep kimchi then BofA pays 170 cents on the dollar for a company circling the drain. Sound right to you? No. What we see is that if the BofA oligarchs don’t let themselves get robbed, the feds will boot them out and not allow them rob America. And Smedley Darlington Butler thought war was a racket.

Now let’s go to the movies. You may have been under the impression that many of the details had already been filled in by the very popular 2015 film, The Big Short, and the highly-promoted 2010 nonfiction book on which it was based, also titled The Big Short. Hell, that book even received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award for 2011. Great job outing those financial dirty dealers, Michael Lewis! (Another Lewis already.)

There is a psywar trick at play, particularly with the film, in which viewers assume it to be compressed and “jazzed up” due to the necessities of the format. You end up thinking, “Well, it may not have been quite that bad, but it was still pretty bad.” The trick: a box is drawn around who did what and who was to blame. You will never, ever look outside that box. The Salem Witches always stand just outside the box.

Due to the complex nature of the situation, the film resorted to capturing your attention by using Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to do some exposition. Actually, go ahead and watch that clip because the beginning of it explains that the complexity of the financial system is itself part of the Wall Street “gag”.

I’m no Margot Robbie and her particular exposition isn’t important for our purposes, so I’ll rely on a couple of choice scenes and a bit of choice dialogue and we’ll go from there:

THE BIG SHORT - BEST SCENE, SHORTS TURN THE TABLES ON WALL STREET

[1:40] Dr. Michael Burry, operator of hedge fund Scion Capital [Christian Bale]: Where do you have our position marked?.... What? Can you explain that to me please? Because how can the value of an insurance contract not be affected by the demise of the very thing it insures?... They are correlated!”

[later] Finance Bro #1: This is fucking insane! You realize that? These people are crooks and they should be in prison!

Finance Bro #2: This is a massive story! Who wouldn’t publish it?

[later] Wall Street Journal journalist bro: No bank or ratings agency is gonna confirm a story like this.

The Big Short (2015) - FrontPoint Partners confronts Morgan Stanley Risk Assessors and S&P

[0:58] Mark Baum, leader of FrontPoint Partners [Steve Carrell]: So subprime loans go bad, but subprime bonds—which are made up of subprime loans—are more valuable?!... What about the ratings agencies? Moody’s, S&P? Are they downgrading the CDOs or mortgage bonds?

Finance Bro #3: Nope, they’re all still triple-A.

Baum: What the hell?! Are you fucking kidding me? Those fuckers, those motherfuckers!

[later, at Standard & Poor’s Rating Agency] Baum: Georgia, have you ever refused to rate any of these bond upper tranches triple-A?... Can you name one time in the past year where you checked the tape and you didn’t give the banks the triple-A percentage they wanted?

Georgia: If we don’t give them the ratings they’ll go to Moody’s, right down the block. If we don’t work with them, they’ll go to our competitors. Not our fault, simply the way the world works.

By the time you get to the end of this, you may agree that the way the world works is actually much darker than even S&P’s Georgia would have Mark Baum and all the rest of us believe. Before we get there, we have to get through a brief, boring lecture because I have to stress where the eye of the shitstorm really was in the 2008 crisis.

A gargantuan assload of financial instruments are bought and sold based on a system of valuation which assign a “credit rating”. You can think of it like buying refurb cellphones off Amazon that are “like new”, “excellent”, “very good”, “good”, “not too good at all”. That does not determine the dollars and cents you end up paying, but it will clearly will affect the price.

Ideally, everyone will agree on standards, and those standards will be applied by neutral parties. That role for the international financial world is filled by credit rating agencies. Their decisions influence bajillions of dollars scattered across profuse financial instruments of numerous different types.

What was happening at the heart of those two scenes was that the credit rating agencies were refusing to lower credit ratings when they should have. These were stepped-on and smoking cell phones still rated “factory fresh”. Can you guess who those fuckers, those motherfuckers were? It turns out we will not require an extensive analysis:

Credit rating is a highly concentrated industry, with the "Big Three" credit rating agencies controlling approximately 94% of the ratings business. Standard & Poor's (S&P) controls 50.0% of the global market with Moody's Investors Service controlling 31.7%,and Fitch Ratings controlling a further 12.5%.

In fact, you heard S&P and Moody’s referenced in the second clip. Watch the whole scene and Georgia felt we were all in quite a pickle. That is some bullshit right there.

Let’s knock half of it down right away and examine S&P Global Ratings, founded in 1860 by Henry Varnum Poor (1812-1905). Shall we browse around his genealogy a bit?

Henry’s grandfather was Dea. Ebenezer Poor (1732-1809). Eb had a sister named Deborah Poor and she married Stephen Barker, III (1719-1785). His grandfather was Lieutenant Stephen Barker (1659-1740).

I didn’t even bother looking up whether Stephen was personally involved in the kabuki, but at least four others of his immediate family were. For example, his sister-in-law was Abigail Barker (1656-1743), “among those accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials”.

Now we turn to Moody's Ratings, which Georgia of S&P told us was right down the block. They are much closer than her comment would have us think. Moody’s was founded by John Moody (financial analyst) (1868-1958). Weirdly, there’s no genealogy for a guy that seems pretty boring. We can locate his father, William Francis Moody (1834-1919), but that goes nowhere. Almost.

William’s wife was Sarah Jane Nichols (1839-1897), and we can trace her line back to Abraham Nichols (1662-1735), alive at the time of the trials. I don’t want to get bogged down, but you can see right on his page a Martin and a Hale. These people were all in Fairfield County, CT, so I’d say what we have is some outpost of the Salem Witches.

If that weak connection wasn’t enough for you (it wasn’t for me), it turns out Moody’s was owned from 1962 to 2000 by the mighty Dun & Bradstreet. We are told:

In March 1933, R. G. Dun & Company merged with competitor John M. Bradstreet to form today's Dun & Bradstreet.

That “John M. Bradstreet” is nearly a ghost. There was, however, literally a guy named John Bradstreet, (1652-1718), "an accused witch during the Salem Witch Trials". Are they related?

We would like to try to get from the genealogical record of the money-man John M. Bradstreet to that of the witch John Bradstreet. The page for the financier says, “Child of Randolph Meeker and Lydia Bradstreet”. That’s weird because (1) the terminology on the site has always been “Son of” and (2) John’s surname isn’t Meeker and (3) Lydia’s maiden name is not Bradstreet. The additional weird thing is that the portraits used on the two pages are the same guy. Frens, we are not getting off the dime with John M.

The analysis for Dun of D&B is both solid and outrageous. Robert Graham Dun was just handed a company he renamed R. G. Dun & Company, but the backstory cracks open the containment vessel and reveals the reactor core:

Dun & Bradstreet traces its history to July 20, 1841, with formation of The Mercantile Agency in New York City by Lewis Tappan. Recognizing the need for a centralized credit reporting system, Tappan formed the company to create a network of correspondents who would provide reliable, objective credit information to subscribers.

As mentioned, the gargantuan global grift revolved around credit reporting agencies. Also, how do you like having a credit score? Turns out this was the inception of both with the advent of “credit reporting”.

Note that you can’t get from that very long page back to where we just saw the concept invented. Neither can you do so from the page on “Credit score in the United States”, which does not even begin the history until the 1950’s. See how history is really (re)written?

So who was this Lewis Tappan (1788-1873) that we have to thank for all this? If you begin with his genealogy, you find his great-aunt was Abigail Noyes (1707-1787). Her husband was Daniel Noyes (1703-1765). His grandfather’s brother was Reverend Nicholas Noyes, Jr. (1647-1717). You can read all about his big dumb fake witch adventures and that of the rest of his family on the page for Nicholas Noyes.

Bonus (kinda): We skipped over it, so let me just make one comment on Fitch Ratings, which we are told represents only 12.5% of the market. It was founded by John Knowles Fitch. “Knowles” represents his mother’s bloodline, and it’s scrubbed. However, do you remember the AAA-rated MK-ULTRA entertainer/entrepreneur married to a weird rapper/Illuminati billionaire, the one who was accused of “extreme witchcraft” back in 2018? She was born Beyoncé Giselle Knowles.

Thanks so much for reading! Hope you enjoyed and/or were outraged!