“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Orationum
“Capitalism is at risk of failing today not because we are running out of innovations, or because markets are failing to inspire private actions, but because we’ve lost sight of the operational failings of unfettered gluttony. We are neglecting a torrent of market failures in infrastructure, finance, and the environment. We are turning our backs on a grotesque worsening of income inequality and willfully continuing to slash social benefits. We are destroying the Earth as if we are indeed the last generation.”
Jeffrey Sachs, Self-Interest, Without Morals, Leads to Self-Destruction, Financial Times, 18 January 2012
Demagogues are willing to do or say anything to gain office or to consolidate their power. Unconstrained by ideology, they have no concern for the consequences of their actions. Anything that serves to make them more powerful is good enough for them — even if the political system that facilitated their rise should be destroyed in the process."
Daniel Ziblatt, Saving Democracy from Demagogues, 2022
"The barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”
Hilaire Belloc, The Barbarians, 1912
As the trading year draws to a close, the paint to make the results (and bonuses) for the Wall Street wiseguys will be applied liberally to the tape.
The economic hitmen have come home to roost.
Stocks rallied to new highs.
The Dollar chopped sideways with a bit of a little loss.
VIX rose, even with stocks rallying.
Gold and silver did very little.
FOMC coming up on Wednesday.
Syria is overcome, and being carved up by the US, Turkey, and Israel.
That which is unsustainable will not be sustained.
And where they make a desert, they call it peace.
Have a pleasant evening.
