"Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions.”
Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 2017
“All make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”
Sophocles, Antigone
"Efforts to manage and manipulate asset prices are not new. But history provides little comfort that these practices work. Interfering with market prices occasionally buys time, but rarely do policy makers seize the window of opportunity to enact structural reform. Financial repression embeds the wrong incentives—obfuscation begets delay, and a robust recovery becomes unattainable."
Kevin Warsh, The Financial Repression Trap, 2011
"Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination."
Oscar Romero, Assassinated While Saying Mass, March 24, 1980
"Through a set of economic policies designed to bail out and subsidize failed and often tainted corporate enterprises, while actively promoting a false sense of confidence to support those policies, the public has become exposed, by those very people entrusted to protect them, to dangerously high levels of hidden counterparty risks.
The cautionary functions of the media, the political class, and the regulatory bodies have been routinely directed, distorted, and even silenced for the benefit of a highly compromised and increasingly self-serving elite. And this corruption has begun feeding on its own momentum, resulting in increasingly blatant examples of deception, distortion, and outright theft. This is crony capitalism, and its deadly credibility trap."
Jesse, Gold, Silver, and the May Jobs Report, June 2012
“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right."
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977
The Fed did pretty much what everyone expected it to do, the Economic Sophisticate notwithstanding.
The Dollar soared.
Gold and silver were hammered lower.
One interesting twist is that stock futures soared in the last 20 minutes of trading.
I suspect it was just some dumb thing that Trump said, or some 'corporate surprise.'
These are the times we are in, and the type of governance that some have demanded, and the rest in their apathy tolerate.
This is plutocracy, the malady of the West.
Have a pleasant evening.
