"Psychopaths [and sociopaths] have a grandiose self-structure which demands a scornful and detached devaluation of others, in order to ward off their envy toward the good perceived in other people."
Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience
“The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil.”
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929
“In a nation run by swine, all the pigs are upwardly mobile, and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.”
Hunter S. Thompson
"And where they make a desert, they call it peace."
Tacitus, Agricola
Donald and His Merry Pranksters were rolling out the greatest tax cut in history today.
It was interesting to watch the stock and precious metals futures fluctuate, as Messrs Cohn and Mnuchin were speaking. I did have a chance to do that today, since the daily hospital visits are in the morning, and I seem to be getting caught up with the household chores as the queen finds herself increasingly fatigued. Alas, the mispricing in these markets was so apparent that I could not resist making a few trades during the ebb and flow of expectations and short term trends that reversed somewhat sharply into the close. Even an old dog can hear the call to the chase now and again.
I won't characterize the plan yet, especially since it is still in its formative stage, to say the least. There are plenty of others who will be expending an enormous amount of energy to do that, with a great deal of furious rhetoric both pro and con. I will, in my own artfully lazy way, be on the lookout for some good commentaries that are lighter on the bias, and the 'say for pay.' That is not easy to do these days. Truth has been led down the blind alleys of the airwaves and the ivory towers, and strangled.
But let's just say that the hopes for The Recovery™ are not enhanced by anything that I have heard out of Washington in quite some time, and that outlook certainly did not change due to anything I may have heard today. Who knows what will actually come out of this Congress? We are watching the usual suspects who have been looting the country for the past twenty years or more. How would we expect anything to be different?
But as Garrison Keillor noted, even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. Lacking any other purpose in life, it would be good enough to live for their sake. And so we have some work to do.
Have a pleasant evening.
