Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Audacious Oligarchy

 

"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759


"But the complaint is damning because what James alleges is not especially complex and does not require much imagination or financial numeracy.  The figures are all right there in filings and documents, rather than lost in the miasma of vagueness and mob-boss talk Trump often uses in other venues.  Either the documents say what James says they do and Trump was juking the stats, or they don’t and he’s been unfairly maligned.

At the very least the claims accord with lots of existing evidence, uncovered by WNYC, ProPublica, and other news organizations.  They match up with rumors that have swirled around Trump for years, and with the disdain with which many actual New York real-estate titans treat the Trump Organization.  And they also fit in with what we know about Trump’s dealings in other ventures, like the fraudulent 'Trump University' or the Trump Foundation, the self-dealing so-called charity that James forced to shut down in a 2019 settlement.

The schemes alleged are so remarkable because they don’t involve tricks like filing false documents. Trump wasn’t doctoring the numbers on forms; he was just brazenly telling different things to different people and assuming that he wouldn’t get caught, and that if he did, he could settle (as he tried to do with James this month) or bluff his way through or it make it go away with a countersuit.  For a long time, he was right.  Any prosecutor with the will and the manpower could have connected the dots on parts of this alleged fraud long ago.

The parallels between this alleged approach and Trump’s presidency are easy to see.  I have written that Trump ran his campaign and administration the way he did his businesses, but it is also the case that he ran his business like he did his administration: by saying whatever he needed to say at any given moment, not sweating contradictions, and overall treating reality not as a fixed thing but as something malleable and contingent, to be warped according to his needs at any given moment.

If James is successful, those conditions could be a fatal blow to the Trump Organization, effectively ending its run as a family business and a going concern in New York. Whether that will happen, of course, is up to a judge and not up to her, and Trump will have his chance to respond. He is likely to do so with blustering brazenness and flagrant misrepresentations, and given his past record, that just might work."

David Graham, The Atlantic, It's Fraud All the Way Down


"We are coming apart as a society, and inequality is right at the core of that. When the 90 percent are getting worse off and they’re trying to figure out what happened, they’re not people like me who get to spend four or five hours a day studying these things and then writing about them — they’re people who have to make a living and get through life. And they’re going to be swayed by demagogues and filled with fear about the other, rather than bringing us together."

David Cay Johnston,  Inequality's Looming Disaster, May 2014


“Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.”

Tacitus


More bread, more circuses.

Are you not entertained? 

At least distracted?

The Fed raised 75 bp today as expected, but it was the projections of future increases that threw the risk markets for a loop.

I have highlighted them in the daily economic data report that I posted below.

The Dollar rocketed higher on the expectations of higher rates, sinking a close on the 111 handle.  Wow.

This is the highest that index DXY has been since 2000.

Gold and silver finished slightly higher, most likely diverging from stocks on a 'flight to safety.'

Interestingly the VIX finished relatively flat.

I have often wondered if the large number of gold and silver contracts that certain banks post on the COMEX clearing reports for 'customers' include the funds and ETNs for which they have custodial responsibilities.

Let's see what the rest of the week brings.

Have a pleasant evening.

David Cay Johnston: Keynote Address to Symposium on Wealth Disparity In America

David Cay Johnston is an American investigative journalist and author, a specialist in economics and tax issues, and winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting.

Since 2009 he has been a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer who teaches the tax, property and regulatory law of the ancient world at Syracuse University College of Law and Whitman School of Management.' From July 2011 until September 2012 he was a columnist for Reuters, writing, and producing video commentaries, on worldwide issues of tax, accounting, economics, public finance and business. Johnston is the board president of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

David Cay Johnston: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality

“Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many."

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

This helps to explain why there will be no sustainable recovery. 

It is a matter of un-official policy.

David Cay Johnston: The Monopolists Rule

“You will even read about an insurance company owned by one of America’s most admired billionaires [Buffett] that asked a paralyzed man to die because the cost of keeping him alive was cutting into the insurer’s profits.”

“No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge customers, shortchange workers and erect barriers to fair play. A big reason is that so little of the news, which informs us about the world around us, addresses the private, government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward.”

David Cay Johnston

 

Third World America.

Real News: Deep State, Big Lies, Organized Plunder, and the Power of the Moneyed Interests

A new set of interesting conversations with David Cay Johnston about his work as an investigative reporter and writer on the Real News.

This is what the one percent do not wish you to hear or understand. You will not hear this on any prime time news programs. Not even Public Broadcasting will touch this story.

This is how easily the system is manipulated, by design, for those who have the money, means, and the connections. I think Johnston explains it much better than most.

In the upcoming elections, and especially the Presidential elections of 2016, it is highly unlikely that either major party candidate will not be fully vetted and approved by the moneyed interests as a corporate brand, no matter what big time wrestling theatrics are staged to portray them as 'different' and get people worked up about it. This is not a choice; this is just sad.

Try to listen to what Johnston says without knee jerk reactions from the slogans that have been inserted by endless repetition into your thinking by corporate news outlets and think tanks. Try to hear the facts as they are.

The 'deep state' is at the heart of the partnership between private power and the government.

Part 3


Part 4


Part 1


Part 2

David Cay Johnston: On Crony Capitalism, Control Frauds, and the Gods of Greed and Power

David Cay Johnston is an investigative journalist and author, a specialist in economics and tax issues, and winner of a 2001 Pulitzer Prize.

Since 2009 he has been a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer who teaches the tax, property and regulatory law of the ancient world at Syracuse University College of Law and Whitman School of Management.

Why have you never heard of David Cay Johnston or his ideas before? Why is he almost never interviewed on the mainstream media.

Because in times of general deception, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. And we are in those times, and are caught in a credibility trap.

It is not the same as a coup d'état, but has many of the same appearances and characteristics.

It is the convergence of like minded kleptocrats and the amoral careerists who support whatever status quo that happens to exist. It is the banality of the willing functionary and the bureaucrat, and the inability of a moral center to withstand it.  

Neither austerity or stimulus will work until there is meaningful reform.