"The crash was caused by greed, not social policy. The problem was that banks were using derivative tricks to successfully disguise toxic subprime loans as good investments. All that housing credit was available because it was profitable for banks to offer it, not because they were forced by Fannie/Freddie or anyone else to lend it." Matt Taibbi
"Beware the leaven of the Pharisees, which is pious, hollow hypocrisy. There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, and hidden, that shall not be made known. Whatever has been said in the darkness shall be heard in the light: and what has been whispered behind closed doors shall be shouted from the roof tops."
Luke 12:1-3
“Those among the fortunate rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand the neediness of poverty, because they are needy themselves, after a fashion; but they cannot understand true impoverishment.
Capable of giving alms, perhaps, but incapable of stripping themselves bare, they will be moved to the sound of beautiful music, at Jesus’s sufferings— but His Cross, the reality of the self-denial of His Cross, will horrify them. For they want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, and hanging from a beautiful woman's throat.”
Léon Bloy
The charts are still pretty much lined up in areas where one might expect to see some movement when volatility returns to the markets.
The option expiry tomorrow is more significant for gold than silver.
"He who sows good seed is the Son of Man,
the field is the world, the good seed the children of the kingdom.
The weeds are the children of the evil one,
and the enemy who sows them is the devil.
The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.
Just as weeds are collected and burned up with fire,
so will it be at the end of the age.
The Son of Man will send his angels,
and they will collect out of his kingdom
all who cause others to sin and all evildoers."
Matthew 13:30-41
"No place so sacred from such fops is barred,
Nor is Paul's church more safe than Paul's churchyard:
Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead:
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism
In a way I am glad that I am so caught up in my long vigil of duty and love. It lightens my exposure to the barking tangerine, and the ever more brazen offenses of the despicables, while putting all things into a much better perspective.
This too shall pass, and perhaps more quickly than we, and the wealthy and powerful of the world, can imagine.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
Lewis Carroll
"Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin—
spiritual advisor to the Romanovs.
In 1916, at a dinner in his honor,
he was poisoned, shot stabbed,
clubbed, drowned, and castrated."
Hellboy, 2003
"A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power."
W. B. Yeats
Tomorrow is a stock options expiration.
Next week there will be a precious metals option expiration on the Comex and an FOMC meeting.
If the metals can make it past these, then the path to a breakout from the current intermediate rangebound trend may be clear.
Lately it has been popular in some circles to talk about the US being a 'late stage democracy' that has 'never been more ripe for tyranny.'
Sometimes they like to drag in Plato to give their thought pieces a gleam of higher learning and a supposed grounding in history.
But their pieces fall into that trap, that very sort of temporal vanity and self-centered preoccupation to despair that Newman notes so well in saying that "every century is like every other, and to those who live in it seems worse than all times before it."
Would you be surprised to hear that less than one hundred years ago there was an actual plot, bankrolled by some of the most powerful and famous figures of the American one percent, to use military force to depose a sitting American President and instead install a fascist in the White House who would be more compliant with their greed and lust for power?
The model for this takeover would have been similar to Benito Mussolini's infamous 'march on Rome.'
Would you be further surprised to know that some of these unrepentant financial figures then went on to help bankroll Hitler, and continued doing business with his atrocious regime even as their most vile business partners actively fought the US, their own country, in the war?
How well does this fit the efficient markets and rational actor models that so much of economic theory, and certain factions in modern political ideology, seems to rely? If only we can get rid of government, and then people will be free to spread their natural goodness and take wing like angels. Let us free the pathological and sociopaths from external constraints, and their better natures will surely rise to the occasion. And if not, we can surely explain it to them with our economic learning.
It never ceases to amaze how many economic and social models of human behavior are based, not in history, but rather on simplistically convenient constructs and myths that serve the status quo and the power of Big Money.
A better model perhaps is to think that freedom and truth are always under threat by those who value neither more than their own obsessive lust for power and money, beyond all reason. That last is important to remember because the current liberal impulse is to simply blame bad information for some of the most outrageous abuses of power and privilege. If only we could explain the economic benefits of general prosperity rather than relying on such weak tea as 'moral arguments.'
Alas, it seems to be the duty of each generation to defend what has been given to them by their forebears against the continuing threats of the perversion of knowledge and reason that is tyranny. And what is odd about it is that it seems to catch each subsequent generation by surprise.
I am not sure that I understand why FDR and his administration did not take more dramatic action in pursuing such perfidy as the plot to overthrow the republic by the fortunate few. It certainly was not for personal gain and power, as it seems to be the case of our more recent betrayers of justice in not pursuing the indictment and public prosecution of financial crimes.
We may have arrived at that time, that rendezvous with destiny, in which we either stand for truth and justice, or fall one by one in a contemptible struggle against the forces of injustice and duplicity. But we are certainly not the first, and not even the most distantly distinctive in this challenge, as compared to our parents, and grandparents, and great-grandparents.
Freedom in not a prize to be won and held forever. Rather, it is a continuing commitment and state of mind to view certain principles above others. And one of them is certainly not personal greed.
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