"The calm words of the wise are worth more than the shouts of the rulers of fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one unrighteous man can destroy much that is good."
Ecclesiastes 9:17-18
"These are peoples that have lost the power of astonishment at their own actions. When they give birth to a fantastic fashion or a foolish law, they do not start or stare at the monster they have brought forth. They have grown used to their own unreason; chaos is their cosmos; and the whirlwind is the breath of their nostrils.
These nations are really in danger of going off their heads en masse; of becoming one vast vision of imbecility, with toppling cities and crazy countrysides, all dotted with industrious lunatics.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Mad Official, 1912
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
“Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.”
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794
"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. Discipline seems to him irrational.
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 and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles."
Hillaire Belloc, 1912
Stocks soared for the State of the Union, and then promptly flopped.
VIX ticked back up, but was well off its high.
The Dollar spiked again in the afternoon and then back down to nearly unchanged.
Bitcoin seems to be firmly locked into a rather narrow trading range. I have been playing swings in it for a while now, and its a good earner, as the mob bosses would say. Fitting, because crypto does seems like organized crime.
Gold and silver caught a bid.
While the domestic economic data is interesting and all that, it is the geo-political factors that will be weighing most heavily on the risk markets and the precious metals.
Vance and Rubio have been hitting on the FUD factor (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) in support of a war with Iran that is very reminiscent on the drumbeats for the war with Iraq in 2003. Which was also a bunch of hoo-haw.
He-who-must-not-be-named wants this war, and has been lobbying for it since the 1990s.
Trump doesn't want to do it, and his generals know it is a tactical headache, but here we are.
The volatility in this market must be unsettled for the average punter. It reminds me of other late stage bubbles we have known and loved.
Keep your leverage low, your positions flexible, and always, always avoid taking 'the big hit.' It can wipe out many years of trading profits almost overnight.
Have a pleasant evening.
