"O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king.
But if not, even if he does not preserve us, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the images of gold you have set up and commanded us to worship."
Daniel 3:16-18
"Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works."
John Mills, Credit Cycles and the Origin of Commercial Panics, December 11th, 1867
"In the twelve hapless years of the present millennium, we have looked on as three great bubbles of consensus vanity have inflated and burst, each with consequences more dire than the last. But what rankles now is our failure to come to terms with how we were played.
The real mistake was my own. I believed that our public intelligentsia had succumbed to an amazing series of cognitive failures; that time after time they had gotten the facts wrong, ignored the clanging bullshit detector, made the sort of mistakes that would disqualify them from publishing in The Baffler, let alone the Washington Post.
What I didn't understand was that these weren't cognitive failures at all; they were moral failures, mistakes that were hard-wired into the belief systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in question. As such they were mistakes that-- from the point of view of those organizations or professions or classes-- shed no discredit on the individual chowderheads who made them.
Holding them accountable was out of the question, and it remains off the table today. These people ignored every flashing red signal, refused to listen to the whistleblowers, blew off the obvious screaming indicators that something was going wrong in the boardrooms of the nation, even talked us into an unnecessary war, and the bailout apparatus still stands ready should they fuck things up again.
If economists— and journalists, and bankers, and bond analysts, and accountants— don’t pay some price for egregious and repeated misrepresentations of reality, then markets aren’t efficient after all. Either the gentlemen of the consensus must go, or their cherished hypothesis must be abandoned. The world isn’t gullible enough to believe both of them any longer."
Thomas Frank, Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly, The Baffler, March 26, 2012
"I know nothing that I may say can influence you. You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There is no Republican Party. There is no Democratic Party. You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy. You talk verbosely in antiquated terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while you wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel.”
Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1907
Looting, lying, and lawlessness will continue, until America is great again.
The West is becoming more and more like The Planet of the Apes. The gorillas have all the horses and weapons, and ride around enslaving and shooting human beings.
Donald blinked in a big way today on his wonderful tariffs, announcing on his Truth Social that he was placing a 90 day moratorium for the most part, except for a general 10% tariff, and a whopping 125% tariff on China.
This ignited a firestorm of the buying of risk on the tape. Toss out those hedges and full speed ahead.
Who says money can't buy friends in high places.
The White House, through its spokesmodel Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed the media for this change, saying that they just do not understand The Art of the Deal.
Gold and silver rocketed higher.
The VIX plummeted.
Bitcoin rallied back.
And the band played on.
Have a pleasant evening.
