Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
“An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.”
Laurence J. Peter
“Some student asked if he [Larry Summers] didn’t have essentially the same relationship with Bob Rubin. Wasn’t Summer’s opposition to capital controls just a sop to Wall Street banks, which wanted to recoup their risky investments regardless of how doing so affected the country in which they had invested?
'Summers just lost it,' said one audience member, a business school student. “He looked at the person and said, 'you don’t know what you’re talking about and how dare you ask this question of the president of Harvard?'”
Richard Bradley
"When the economy was very obviously building towards the financial crisis of 2008, how many economists were ignoring the bubble conditions, preferring to keep their noses in their statistics, a willful condition that I call data blindness.
It is not safe to see too much, and even less safe for the career minded to speak out against the actions of powerful insiders who control the benefactions of position, and the perks of the privileged class. It is much more judicious to hide one's nose in a selective book of statistics, ignoring the reality, and relying instead on being data blind or ideologically blind to what is really happening.
It is easier to say 'I didn't know of this injustice' and afterwards, 'who could see such a thing approaching?'
And then let it happen all over again."
Jesse 21 August 2014
And so here we are.
Stocks managed to move higher, with the SP 500 reaching another new all time high.
The tech heavy NDX and the broader Russell 2000 continue to lag.
Gold and silver continued to rebound sharply from the painfully obvious price manipulation of last week.
The Dollar dropped quite a bit, back down to the mid 92 area.
The equity market is on shaky underpinnings.
Something is going to knock it over, probably by about 10%, or more, most likely in September, maybe October.
In the end it could be something even relatively trivial in retrospect, as trigger events go.
A stiff market decline is no sure thing, if never is.
But if current behavior holds, the probabilities will increasingly favor such an outcome.
The Fed symposium at Jackson Hole starts on August 26th.
Chairman Powell speaks on the morning of the 27th.
Have a pleasant weekend.
