Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Barbarians in the Kitchen - History Will Not Absolve Us

 

Banking today is like playing Russian roulette— with someone else’s head.   With rewards often far outweighing the risks, the sense of responsibility has vanished.   There is a system that pushes you to take risks and a culture that shames anyone who admits errors or weakness.  Nobody ever challenges the front office.  You become part of the fabric of the place.  Then they dispose of you.

Joris Luyendijk, Swimming with Sharks, 2015

"When a society fails to restrain the worst behaviours of those who prey on others through the abuse of power or money, their example brings out the worst in a much larger subset of the population.  Bad behaviour breeds bad behaviour, and those who profit by it find ways to justify this through self-serving social and political theories.  People who have this weakness in their character are naturally attracted to high profile positions of power.  Psychopaths breed and nurture sociopaths, imitators who are able to extinguish their own empathy and remorse through ideology and excess."

Jesse, Without Empathy or Remorse, 13 August 2016

"The barbarian will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.  We sit by and watch the barbarian. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh.  But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

Hilaire Belloc, This and That and the Other, 1912

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 1971


Soft corruption is growing ever brazen, and pervades the corridors of power in the US.

Ignoring these things gives rise to vocal groups who will use it as an excuse for almost anything, any crime, betrayals, greed, cowardice, and eventually murder, in those public figures that flatter them and fatten their wallet.   

The events of this young century confirm this.   History suggests that is the way to national madness.

I am not sure where we're going, but we're on our way.

Stocks were hammered again today.

The VIX has climbed back up out of the doldrums.

Silver did a moon shot rally, and although beaten back from the highs, still managed to pull out a decent bounce back.

Gold struggled again although some of the miners were showing some life.  Hedges still on.

The Dollar chopped sideways for a slight loss.  How about that?

I hear there will be a stock index option expiration tomorrow.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

The Kansas City Fed will be hosting their annual soirée in Jackson Hole on August 24^th.

I wonder if they will have a Sports Book in addition to a bucket shop stock board and big screen ticker?

We are coming up on the 60^th anniversary of the political assassinations in the 1960s and the advent of endless war that changed the course of American history.

And the band played on.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Audacious Oligarchy - The Power Elite

 

"The economy - once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated.   The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered.   The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government.

People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite, and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.

The idea of the elite as composed of men and women having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite.

The American elite does not have any real image of peace — other than as an uneasy interlude existing precariously by virtue of the balance of mutual fright.  The only seriously accepted plan for peace is the fully loaded pistol.  In short, war or a high state of war-preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.

For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end.  Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.  America - a conservative country without any conservative ideology - appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality.  

The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken platitude.  In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservative mood, irrationality, are raised to principle.  Public relations and the official secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in the privately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and the political vacuum of modern America.

These men have replaced mind with platitude, and the dogmas by which they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counterbalance of mind prevails against them. They have replaced the responsible interpretation of events with the disguise of events by a maze of public relations.

What the main drift of the twentieth century has revealed is that the economy has become concentrated and incorporated in the great hierarchies, the military has become enlarged and decisive to the shape of the entire economic structure; and moreover the economic and the military have become structurally and deeply interrelated, as the economy has become a seemingly permanent war economy; and military men and policies have increasingly penetrated the corporate economy.

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956

Stocks rallied today, for no particular reason.

The chip sector led stocks higher, based on upgrades from Barclay.

Wash - rinse - repeat.   

Leave your shame at the curb.

Gold and silver were hit hard from the early trading, but managed to take much of it back with gold even finishing in the green.

Looks like a gut check ahead of the Comex precious metals option expiry on the 26^th.

 Different month, same crooked scams.

The US Dollar did nothing.

The VIX did nothing.

We may see some market moving data this week.

FOMC and Non-Farm Payrolls for January coming next week.

And the band played on.

Have a pleasant evening.