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| Personal Copy From My Library |
"There was time when average Americans could be counted upon to know correctly whether the country was going up or down, because in those days when America prospered, the American people prospered as well. These days things are different.
If you look at the middle of the 1930's (the Depression) up until the year 1980, the lower 90 percent of the population of this country, what you might call the American people, that group took home 70 percent of the growth in the country's income.
If you look at the same numbers from 1997 up until now, from the height of the great Dot Com bubble up to the present, you will find that this same group, the American people, pocketed none of this country's income growth at all.
Our share of these great good times was zero, folks. The upper ten percent of the population, by which we mean our country's financiers and managers and professionals, consumed the entire thing. To be a young person in America these days is to understand instinctively the downward slope that so many of us are on."
Thomas Frank, What to Make of the Age of Trump, Kansas City, 6 April 2017
“Based on the value of the stock market compared to GDP, with modifications, this is the most expensive market in American history."
Jeremy Grantham, CNBC Interview, 26 June 2026
"I would say that practically all the financial journals were on the take. This includes reporters for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Herald-Tribune, you name it. So if you were a pool operator, you'd call your friend at The Times and say, "Look, Charlie, there's an envelope waiting for you here and we think that perhaps you should write something nice about RCA." And Charlie would write something nice about RCA. A publicity man called A. Newton Plummer had canceled checks from practically every major journalist in New York City.
Then, they would begin to — what was called painting the tape. Now, what's happening is the stock goes from 10 to 15 to 20 and now, it's at 20 and you start buying, other people start buying at 30, 40. The original group, the pool, they've stopped buying. They're selling you the stock. It's now 50 and they're out of it. And what happens, of course, is the stock collapses."
Robert Sobel, The Crash of 1929, PBS Frontline, April 24, 2012
"An investigation later discovered that business journalists for at least eight papers promoted stocks in their writing in return for bribes. The most embarrassing were at the Wall Street Journal. The revelations about the Journal reporters came out during hearings by the Senate Banking and Currency Committee in 1932, more than three years later, when Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia produced cancelled checks written to the Journal reporters from publicist A. Newton Plummer. The stories based on the bribes had gone as far back as 1923."
University of North Carolina, History of Business Journalism: 1920s
"I have come to realize that the vast majority of decent, wonderful people, have no idea how they are being hoodwinked day in and day out by the scum of this world. We are lied to, misled, bamboozled, suckered, cheated, misrepresented, conned, manipulated and royally screwed. They take us to the cleaners day in and day out in every way possible. We, the people, pay the price of their cheating, their folly, their lying and their sheer stupidity."
Pierre Rinfret, Parida.com, 2004 (before he passed on in 2006)
"Control frauds in the financial markets are by their very nature conspiratorial in that they involve the suborning of regulators, ratings agencies, exchanges, the media, and legislators to ignore and facilitate misrepresentation that enable white collar crime. They are difficult to prosecute because by their nature they involve twisting the legal into the extra-legal on a broad basis to achieve a particular financial effect, while limiting many specific aspects to the letter of the law, or at least the gray areas.
By and large they operate in the shadows, hiding behind secrecy and a general mindset towards short term greed and lapses in ethics. Investigations following the Crash of 1929 and the S&L crisis demonstrated that the existence of such pervasive lapses in stewardship do exist."
Jesse, Control Frauds Extend Bubbles Maximizing Damage, 27 April 2010
"When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality."
John Kenneth Galbraith, Power and the Useful Economist, 1973
Stocks wobbled around today, as the geopolitical risks raise their ugly heads over the official proclamations and celebrations of peace.
Gold and silver bounced around as usual, finishing higher on the day.
Bitcoin in also bouncing around, stuck for now on the lower end of its intermediate trading range.
VIX of course fell.
We can't have any disappointments for Donnie's big 250th anniversary celebration of himself.
Iran and Russia may not have gotten the memo.
Breaking News after the bell: US forces struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites today as a response to Iran's drone attack yesterday on a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz, per CENTCOM. These are the first US strikes since the MOU was signed.
If you are getting your news from the ideologically/financially aligned mainstream news channels, you may have no idea what is going on, and what is coming your way.
I can remember an online acquaintance telling me in the aftermath of 9/11 and the aggressive campaign for waging war on Iraq that he could not bear to watch anything but Fox News.
I made a promise to myself that if the whole WMD agitprop turned out to be false, I would never watch the mainstream media channels again. And it was false, and I no longer watch them.
It is not news, it is not journalism. It is performative art for pay.
So we move forward into the holiday-shortened trading week to come.
What the Epstein files need now is a new Daniel Ellsberg. They really are that bad. They will never be willingly released by either party. Insiders take care of their own and don't criticize each other, as they say in the halls of power.
Have a pleasant weekend.
