“The mythological Narcissus rejected the advances of the nymph Echo and was punished by the goddess Nemesis. He was consigned to pine away as he fell in love with his own reflection - exactly as Echo had pined away for him. How apt. Narcissists are punished by echoes and reflections of their problematic personalities up to this very day.
Narcissists are said to be in love with themselves. But this is a fallacy. Narcissus is not in love with himself. He is in love with his 'reflection'...
In the narcissist's surrealistic world, even language is pathologized. It mutates into a weapon of self-defence, a verbal fortification, a medium without a message, replacing words with duplicitous and ambiguous vocables.
When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid narratives: self-directed confabulations which place him at the center of others' allegedly malign attention."
Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited
“There's a reason narcissists don't learn from mistakes and that's because they never get past the first step which is admitting that they made one. It's always an assistant's fault, an adviser's fault, a lawyer's fault. Ask them to account for a mistake any other way and they'll say, 'what mistake?”
Jeffrey Kluger, The Narcissist Next Door
Gold and silver managed to nudge up a little tighter into the overhead resistance at 1166 gold and 16+ for silver.
The Bucket Shop was dead quiet on precious metal deliveries yesterday. No surprise there. And no surprise that the bullion continues to slowly leak out of the warehouses as shown in the reports below.
There was intraday commentary on a remarkable spike in an indicator that in the past has presaged significant stock market corrections. You may find some value in reading it at Stock Share Risk Measure Rises To Highest Level Ever.
As the Austrian school likes to say about the velocity of money, the risk measure in question, the skew, doesn't do anything, in much the same sense that the speedometer on your car does not do anything. What it does is provide some information that may prove to be useful, especially when you are heading into a sharp turn at over 100 mph.
And that information suggests that there is an exceptionally high probability of a stock market decline of significance within the next two years or so, depending on how some exogenous events may unfold.
I learned the hard way after the tech bubble not to underestimate the Greenspan put, and the willingness of the Fed and their courtiers to throw the real economy under the bus to pump up an asset bubble for the benefit of the Banks, even when the financiers are acting at their very worst.
I like gold and silver more now than I have in some time. As I suggest in the intraday piece on the mispricing of risks, I do not see how the Street is going to avoid a very embarrassing break in the bullion market if things keep going on as they are.
But we may find some of the antics of Big Money's courtiers to be amusing as they continue to say and do the most ludicrous things in order to save the hides, bail out once more if you will, of their felonious cousins at the Banks.
After the bell JPM missed both top line revenues and their earnings estimates, even with a ten percent reduction in loss allowances.
Just doing God's work.
As I suggested in the intraday commentary, there is a strong likelihood of another financial crisis coming. There is already a search for a scapegoat to deflect attention from the recurrent and ongoing looting of Main Street.
"Make no mistake about it, just as Lehman Brothers was set up to take the fall for triggering the 2008 collapse, China is being groomed as the new scapegoat for the coming crisis. But China’s economic slump is only a symptom, not the disease."Have a pleasant evening.
Pam and Russ Martens, The Real Reason Global Stocks Are Flashing Red this Morning
