Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Wehret den Anfängen - Indicators Flashing Red

"To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: 'inverted totalitarianism,' a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on “private media” than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.

It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison — 751 per 100,000 people — of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has 'emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation’s political traditions.'

The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization [and deregulation].

Chalmers Johnson, Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled


“Be the person that your dog thinks you are.”

George Eliot aka Mary Ann Evans

This is what they call the 'dog days' of summer market trading.

Even the spokesmodels pom-poms were drooping today along with volumes, although they did manage a 'new highs' exclamation after the close.

And yes, stocks were marginally higher on light volumes.

Gold and silver were pretty much unchanged as the Dollar and Bonds moved a tad higher.

What is the old saying of Jesse Livermore? 'Never short a dull market.'

Citibank turned in lackluster results today, with profits based largely on one timers and cost cutting. The banking sector was a drag all day, although Citi managed to gain some ground finally. Go figure.

Gold continues to wind within a symmetrical triangle. Stocks continue to drift higher on lazy algo pumping.

The darkness continues to spread and gain force, as the unspeakable slowly becomes customary, and then finally acceptable.   If you to wish to never see that madness again, then wehret den anfängen, stop it in the beginning. 

I have included two charts immediately below that suggest that a global recession is on the horizon.

I was busy with people working here all day.  I really don't like to have anyone come over and do these things, but sometimes you just have to do it.

I had not expected them to come today, but they called early this morning and said they had a cancellation so would I like to have them come over.   It was ok with me.  I like to get these things done and over.

But besides directing traffic,  I did manage to keep busy with many little things that have been on my 'to do' list, now that most of the big things have been done.

But as you well know, when working outside in this kind of heat and humidity it does not take long before the thought of an ice cold glass of tonic water and lime on ice becomes an almost irresistible attraction.

Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

AC /on.

Have a cool and pleasant evening.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Non-Farm Payrolls On Friday

"The existence of cash — a bearer instrument with a zero interest rate — limits central banks’ ability to 'stimulate a depressed economy.'  The worry is that people will change their deposits for cash if a central bank moves rates into negative territory."

Financial Times, The Case For Retiring Another 'Barbarous Relic'

Since the Nikkei bought the Financial Times earlier this year one wonders if they are able to interpret the real meaning of their own editorial policy.  Could anything be more blatantly repugnant than the above?

'Negative rates' is a euphemism for the slow but steady confiscation of all savings, a broader 'bail in.'  It is designed to drive people into financial paper assets and consumption. It is all about the elimination of safe havens, of places to hide from gross incompetence and wealth transfers.

Negative interest rates are the signature moment in the decline of a republic and the rise of corporate feudalism.   They take our wealth at no cost or effort for themselves, and lend it back to us at interest and without risk, being assured of a continuing supply of subsidy from their central Bank.

There will be quite a bit of economic news at the end of the week, including a Non-Farm Payrolls report for the month of August.

Gold is in an interesting position here, as can be seen on the chart.

The Bucket Shop was quiet, except for a small but steady stream of bullion out of their warehouses for both metals.

Have a pleasant evening.

Land of Idols: Lies, Wars, Empire

"The goal has been the 'Third Worldization' of the United States:

• an increasingly underemployed, lower-wage work-force;
• a small but growing moneyed class that pays almost no taxes;
• the privatization or elimination of human services;
• the elimination of public education for low-income people;
• the easing of restrictions against child labor;
• the exporting of industries and jobs to low-wage, free-trade countries;
• the breaking of labor unions;
• and the elimination of occupational safety and environmental controls and regulations."

Michael Parenti, Land of Idols, 1993

Inequality Matters: Why Nations Fail

"To Egyptians, the things that have held them back include an ineffective and corrupt state and a society where they cannot use their talent, ambition, ingenuity, and what education they can get. But they also recognize that the roots of these problems are political.

All the economic impediments they face stem from the way political power in Egypt is exercised and monopolized by a narrow elite. This, they understand, is the first thing that has to change.

Yet, in believing this, the protestors of Tahrir Square have sharply diverged from the conventional wisdom on this topic. When they reason about why a country such as Egypt is poor, most academics and commentators emphasize completely different factors.

Some stress that Egypt’s poverty is determined primarily by its geography, by the fact that the country is mostly a desert and lacks adequate rainfall, and that its soils and climate do not allow productive agriculture. Others instead point to cultural attributes of Egyptians that are supposedly inimical to economic development and prosperity. Egyptians, they argue, lack the same sort of work ethic and cultural traits that have allowed others to prosper, and instead have accepted Islamic beliefs that are inconsistent with economic success.

A third approach, the one dominant among economists and policy pundits, is based on the notion that the rulers of Egypt simply don’t know what is needed to make their country prosperous, and have followed incorrect policies and strategies in the past. If these rulers would only get the right advice from the right advisers, the thinking goes, prosperity would follow. To these academics and pundits, the fact that Egypt has been ruled by narrow elites feathering their nests at the expense of society seems irrelevant to understanding the country’s economic problems.

In this book we’ll argue that the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, not most academics and commentators, have the right idea. In fact, Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. Political power has been narrowly concentrated, and has been used to create great wealth for those who possess it, such as the $70 billion fortune apparently accumulated by ex-president Mubarak. The losers have been the Egyptian people, as they only too well understand.

We’ll show that this interpretation of Egyptian poverty, the people’s interpretation, turns out to provide a general explanation for why poor countries are poor. Whether it is North Korea, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe, we’ll show that poor countries are poor for the same reason that Egypt is poor.

Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities.

We’ll show that to understand why there is such inequality in the world today we have to delve into the past and study the historical dynamics of societies. We’ll see that the reason that Britain is richer than Egypt is because in 1688, Britain (or England, to be exact) had a revolution that transformed the politics and thus the economics of the nation. People fought for and won more political rights, and they used them to expand their economic opportunities. The result was a fundamentally different political and economic trajectory, culminating in the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution and the technologies it unleashed didn’t spread to Egypt, as that country was under the control of the Ottoman Empire, which treated Egypt in rather the same way as the Mubarak family later did. Ottoman rule in Egypt was overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798, but the country then fell under the control of British colonialism, which had as little interest as the Ottomans in promoting Egypt’s prosperity.

Though the Egyptians shook off the Ottoman and British empires and, in 1952, overthrew their monarchy, these were not revolutions like that of 1688 in England, and rather than fundamentally transforming politics in Egypt, they brought to power another elite as disinterested in achieving prosperity for ordinary Egyptians as the Ottoman and British had been. In consequence, the basic structure of society did not change, and Egypt stayed poor."

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained recovery.

Austerity During a Recession Is Economically Insane - A Warning From History

"The German’s and the ECB are not demanding any sacrifices from European elites. They explicitly target the working class and government workers’ wages and oppose any increased taxation of the wealthy. The Berlin Consensus is a road map to ever greater inequality."

Bill Black


"Thank God the US opted for bailouts and not handouts...People in economic distress should suck it up and cope."

Charlie Munger

I will not mince words with this. I see a world on the brink of war, for all the same old reasons. It will take many forms political and financial, at first civil and then regional. If this does not resolve the situation then the conflict will expand and continue by other means.

The elites' price for peace will be a world without borders, or at most three or four spheres of influence, under their direct control and planning.

Appeasement will only serve to inflame their lust for power and dreams of domination.  They see themselves as moving from victory to victory. The tide of reform is being turned aside by special interests, compromise is viewed as ideological impurity, and legitimate protests are met by not by recognition and justice but by indifference and repression. This will not stand.

"The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities...

In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technotronic Era, 1970

In fairness to Brzezinski, the above quotes in context seem more a forecast, and a threat to be feared rather than a prescription to be followed. 

But others do not fear it, and the threats are real, and with much precedent in history.  They have been viewed favorably by any number of groups where the elite get together to discuss their plans and goals.  Their contempt and distrust of the individual, inferior beings unlike themselves at least in their own minds, is perennial.   The infamous Project for the New American Century that was a center for neo-conservative thinking is just one such example.

Stimulus without significant economic reform leads only to bubbles and more of the same conditions that led to the financial crisis in the first place. The answer is growth, but growth that is real and more broadly based.

The greatest impediment to this solution is greed and financial corruption of the financial predator class that has benefited the most from the distortions that they promoted in the last three decades.

Austerity *might* have a chance if it was accompanied by significant financial reform that did not rely on highly regressive wage reductions to bridge the economic gaps. But it is not likely.   

Without reform, austerity is economic tyranny, a form of neo-colonialism that has been promoted until recently by the developed nations on the Third World, which itself is beginning to rebel against the viceroys and puppets of the powerful.   But now it has come home to feed on its own, and the faithful middle class stands aghast, in quiet disbelief.

The propagandists like to frame the question as 'who will pay,' rather than 'how do we stop the stealing, corruption and waste, and resume healthy growth in the real economy?  So as they often do, they entice the professional and middle class to back their plans from fear, until it is too late.

"...propaganda is entirely founded on the exploitation of the weakness of the human heart. It does not address itself to the strong or the heroic. It tells the rich they are going to lose their money. It tells the worker this is a rich man's war. It tells the intellectual and the artist that all he cherished is being destroyed by war. It tells the lover of good things that soon he would have none of them. It says to the Christian believer: 'How can you accept this massacre?' It tells the adventurer - 'a man like you should profit by the misfortunes of your country.'"

Edouard Daladier, 29 January 1940, radio address to the French people

Will the people never learn? Will their leaders set Europe on fire again before they come to their senses and have to be put down?  And how soon afterwards will the UK and the US have their own moments of crisis?

Although we have been fortunately insulated from this in the developed nations in this generation, it is the oldest theme of history, and one to which we seem determined to return.  And despite the delusions of many, there are never any real winners, only heartache and destruction.

"...Overall, European nations showed significant budgetary restraints in the decade leading up to the Great Recession. Most of the periphery did so – Greece is a special case. The Cato Institute, for example, praised Iceland and Ireland as models of restraint. Spain also received praise. The claim that the periphery was “profligate” through large budgetary deficits in the run up to the crisis reverses the facts.

Austerity during a serious recession is economically insane. It is a pro-cyclical policy that makes the recession more severe. A more severe recession is a mass destroyer of wealth and quality of life. It is pure waste.

It is the primary cause of dramatic increases in public deficits and debt. Unemployment reduces tax payments and increases demands for public spending. One cannot decide to end a budgetary deficit during a recession by adopting austerity. Austerity (some combination of cutting government spending and increasing taxes) reduces private and public sector demand.

This means that imposing austerity is likely to deepen the recession and can make the national deficit and debt larger. It is analogous to the medical insanity of bleeding patients to cure them of disease – and then bleeding them more because the prior bleeding make them sicker.

Europeans of the periphery are having austerity imposed on them by German demands – and they are subjected to repeated insults from German and Dutch leaders for failing to balance their budgets because the austerity imposed by Germany deepened their recession and slashed their tax revenues.

Germany’s demands for austerity have thrown the euro zone back into recession – but it has forced the periphery into Great Depression levels of unemployment. German-imposed austerity, the Berlin Consensus, is even more draconian than the Washington Consensus in Latin America. Germany and the ECB are open that they are not simply demanding austerity and massive privatization – they are also demanding dramatic reductions in working class wages throughout the EU.

The German’s and the ECB are not demanding any sacrifices from European elites. They explicitly target the working class and government workers’ wages and oppose any increased taxation of the wealthy. The Berlin Consensus is a road map to ever greater inequality..."

Read the rest here.

The Berlin Consensus is a road map to civil unrest and war.  It is a war which the powerful few think that they can win, and in their arrogant pride they may be willing to attempt it --- again.  The same industrial and financial interest intend to try and tame the madness once again to serve their self-serving ends, no matter which way in which they try to rationalize it.

But they forget that the madness serves none, only itself.

May God have mercy on us.

Stocks Rally With Wall Street Banks as King of the Hill

Meredith Whitney made a bull call on Goldman, and the stock market rallied as a result.

There are some important qualifiers in this that the markets seem to be ignoring.

Goldman is positioned as more of a 'one-off' in her forecast, which remains decidedly gloomy for the overall economy, with unemployment as it is under reported by the BLS rising to 13%.

She believes that Goldman will benefit from being in the position to take fees and profits from the heavy government debt issuance to come in the US, especially since it was able to eliminate some long term rivals in Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

Ironically, a richer Goldman does little or nothing for the overall economy since the company pays out about half its profits in bonuses to employees. There is some trickle down to the real economy as they buy their luxury cars, place their children in the finest private schools, and make huge contributions to key politicians, but not much else.

Goldman is not a commercial bank. It has taken on that name to tap into the Government funds, and despite their noises about paying back their TARP, they are huge beneficiaries of the ongoing bailout of AIG with their 100% payouts on Credit Default Swaps.

So, the people give their tax money to Goldman, and in turn a little of it trickles back to those working in the luxury industries, perhaps as servants to great households, and certainly as politicians managing the outlays of public monies to Wall Street.

The debasement of the currency is going to hit the middle class particularly hard, since the monetary inflation is being so heavily targeted to the wealthy few, while little or no quality jobs creation is stimulated. And it is the middle class that is paying for this, in more ways than one.

And economists call gold a barbarous relic.

WSJ
Meredith Whitney Bullish On Goldman,Sees 2Q Above Views
By Ed Welsch

NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) will benefit from being a key player in a "tsunami of debt issuance" by governments as they try to fill gaps in underfunded budgets, financial analyst Meredith Whitney said Monday in an upgrade of Goldman to "buy."

Whitney predicted Goldman Sachs would post second-quarter results Tuesday above Street estimates - she expects earnings of $4.65 a share, compared with the average analyst estimate of $3.48, according to a survey of analysts by Thomson Reuters. She set her 12-month price target on Goldman shares at $186.

Shares of Goldman Sachs rose 2.7% in recent trading to $145.75.

A bullish call from Whitney is rare; she gained renown during the financial crisis for initially unpopular bearish calls on the stocks of large banks that ultimately proved to be correct.

However, Whitney said her bullish view of Goldman is rooted in her overall bearish outlook for the U.S. economy and other U.S. financial companies. While Goldman has made most of its money in the past through a focus on equity markets, Whitney said during the next two years the firm will shift focus to the government debt markets, facilitating new issuance from local, state, federal and sovereign governments as they try to raise money to fill budget gaps.

Whitney raised her earnings estimates for Goldman in 2010 to $19.65, compared to the average analyst expectation of $14.44, and for 2011 to $22.10, compared to the average expectation of $16.75.

She predicted that sovereign and municipal debt markets will grow more than 20% over the next 18 months, and that the state and local municipal debt market could eventually grow more than 50%.

While Whitney predicted U.S. corporate debt will reach about 60% of the levels of the last three years, she said Goldman will get a larger share of that market as well, due to the absence of formerly key players, including Lehman Brothers Holding Inc. (LEH) and Bear Stearns Cos.

Whitney also expects Goldman to take advantage of relatively high capital levels to buy back stock, and by late 2010 could reach the share count level it had before raising capital this year and last.