"We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake.
Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The US Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K."
Eddie George, Governor Bank of England, in a conversation with the CEO of Lonmin, September 1999
The dollar plunged and gold sharply rebounded this afternoon, thanks to an offhand remark by Trumpolini in a CNBC interview that he is 'not thrilled' with the Fed raising interest rates.
I think this highlights how divorced gold and silver, but especially gold, are from supply and demand, with gold being treated as just another currency cross and paper trading vehicle.
But Asia keeps taking more and more physical gold off the table, into their own deep storage, not to be seen again for many years.
This is going to blow up in the faces of the Banks and the regulators, and will shakes many an institution and exchange to their foundations.
It was a quiet trading day with stocks off a bit, 'digesting' their recent gains if you will.
Weakness in the earnings reports, despite the huge gift of corporate tax cuts, has the Street feeling a bit uneasy.
Those companies that have mastered their accounting, and reside primarily in the world of financial paper shuffling like the Banks, are doing well.
But for corporations with ties to that pesky real world economy, not so much.
Wages are stagnant for workers, but the banksters and their congressmen are buying yachts.
What could go wrong with that?
I was thinking today about something Thomas Frank said in his video Q&A at Politics & Prose bookstore that I had posted yesterday.
He said that while he did not like Trump, but he was glad that we had this kind of bad actor now, one who is not particularly good at pulling the levers of government power, like Ted Cruz would have been.
Uh, Thomas, that is exactly why so many people, including and especially Democrats, did not vote for Hillary. Because she was exactly that kind of clever creature. Even without having both houses of Congress in her party, the damage she could have done would have been profound. Her husband Bill did more to advance the deregulation of financial markets and neoliberalism than many a Republican in his ruthless pursuit of self-interest.
And Hillary showed a ruthless disregard for the people in pursuit of power in the way in which she manipulated the elite insiders in her party to crush progressives and the rising populism which threatened the money flows to the corporate Democratic pockets from Wall Sttreet's Big Money.
Not to mention how she and her crew, even while not in power, can whip up hysteria like Russiagate to take the public eye off the shocking revelations in their emails. But the credibility trap keeps so many people from accepting this.
And if you want to know who the members of the Deep State are, they are the ones against whom no criticism, not even skeptical doubt, can be permitted or tolerated by the punditry class.
It is unpatriotic not to trust them, blindly. No matter what they say, no matter how little evidence they may provide to back it up. No matter what lies they have been caught in recent memory.
And we are seeing quite a bit of that sort of establishment outrage at the very kind of skepticism that keeps a democracy healthy, and secures it from the abuse of official power.
Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.
There is a stock option expiration tomorrow.
Have a pleasant evening.
