“Yet while the rest of the populace was suffering, the rich just got richer. In 2009 and 2010, years in which millions were unable to find work, the top one percent reaped 93 percent of the 'recovery' income, and corporations are making more than they ever did. And the Republicans can still propose even further cuts in the taxes of 'job creators' whose only job creation has been for their own lawyers and lobbyists."
Garry Wills
"The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present.
And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the Street believes that the world will always be the same, and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever."
Federico Garcia Lorca
It turned out to be a good day to be long bullion and short stocks if you ignored the price gyrations caused by obvious price manipulation and speculative excess fueled by hot money and loose regulations.
Greek elections which are on Sunday 17 June are overhanging the markets this week. The trade going into the weekend could be interesting.
If Spain takes the money from the ECB and uses it to bail out its banks, leaving the people with austerity and the debt payments, then the government will be on the path to self-destruction.
The economic recovery in Iceland looms large, where they rejected the banks' fraudulent legacy, and jailed two of the bank execs this week.
The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained growth and recovery.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt, The Man in the Arena,, Paris, April 23, 1910
The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.”
Vince Lombardi
Never give in to fear. Refuse to lose.
