SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Psychopathia Financialis

“A psychopath can tell what you’re thinking but what they don’t do is feel what you feel. These are people without a conscience.”

Bob Hare

It was 'fear on' as concerns about a Greece default had stocks selling off led lower by the financials. The VIX remained elevated. We will have to see if anything comes out of the G7 or the ECB before Monday.

The Ten Year Treasury hit a record low of 1.91 yield today.

Gold and silver were repeatedly pummeled but remained resilient in the light trading sessions overnight and in the access market this evening. The perception management was painfully obvious.

Although there were many smacking Obama today, it was not clear what he might have offered as a solution to please the Congressional sociopaths on the right, except human sacrifices of the poor, the elderly, the immigrants, and the different. The hyper-polarization of the monied interests has been inflamed by the moral hazard of the bailouts and excuses of the financial sector fraud. These fellows despise conciliation and compromise as weakness.

This is one of those remarkable episodes in history that Americans, Europeans, and Brits might have trouble explaining to their grandchildren.  But ignorance is a familiar excuse. 

About That Seemingly Irrational Need for Bonuses...

Psychopath: A person with an antisocial personality disorder, manifested in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior without empathy or remorse.

He would sell his mother for an eighth.

He would betray his most solemn promise on a whim.

He was a law unto himself, forcing others to serve his needs.

He would grab society's tit and suck it dry.

He would grasp and tear until he showed them all.

He was beyond good and evil--- He was an American hero.

"Our hypothesis was that psychopathic traits are also linked to dysfunction in dopamine reward circuitry," Buckholtz said. "Consistent with what we thought, we found people with high levels of psychopathic traits had almost four times the amount of dopamine released in response to amphetamine."

In the second portion of the experiment, the research subjects were told they would receive a monetary reward for completing a simple task. Their brains were scanned with fMRI while they were performing the task. The researchers found in those individuals with elevated psychopathic traits the dopamine reward area of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, was much more active while they were anticipating the monetary reward than in the other volunteers.

"It may be that because of these exaggerated dopamine responses, once they focus on the chance to get a reward, psychopaths are unable to alter their attention until they get what they're after," Buckholtz said. Added Zald, "It's not just that they don't appreciate the potential threat, but that the anticipation or motivation for reward overwhelms those concerns."

Psychopaths' Brains Wired to Seek Rewards No Matter the Consequences

So let's give deregulation and the efficient markets hypothesis another chance to really maximize the damage.

An entire society built around white punks on dopamine, trapped in the infantile stage of development, allocating resources for the many, the arbiters of utility and worth, from Wall Street to the Congress: this is what America has become.