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When you socialize the losses and privatize the gains for a powerful few, when you reward the perpetrators and punish the innocent and unsophisticated victims of fraud, when you idolize greed, selfishness and deception and vilify simple hard work and honest decency, how can one really expect a healthy, vibrant economy? You are birthing a monster.
Austerity will not improve this picture, and will inflict intense misery on the growing number of unfortunates. They know this, but they don't care. When the oppressed react, there will be calls to put them down, to subdue them, savagely. Provoke and react. Never waste a crisis, and if you need it, create one.
This is the road to hell.
The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained recovery.
Very nice bounce in the metals as silver turned green for the week and gold looks to have the potential to form at least a temporary bottom. The miners in my portfolio added some serious leverage to the gains, despite the short index hedges. Those hedges were increased into the close, as I remain skeptical of a sustained equity rally and any recovery in the real economy.
Distractions like trolls and sensationalists on chatboards and comment threads are more than annoyances, and will cost you money. The notion that all opinions are equally valid and valuable is romantic, egalitarian rubbish.
It is good and necessary to hear different views, and the discerning mind seeks out quality perspectives of all types. But it is not productive to waste time with baseless swill tossed out by trolls and 'analysts' too lazy to put some real work, facts, and diligence into their opinions.
You would not eat garbage off the street. Why would you put something that is of a similar character into your mind, so it will affect your investment accounts? Be selective in how you spend your time. There are quite a few opinionated idiots and broken traders who would love to drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Distractions can affect your trading. If they do, get rid of them.
Trading is just a business, and so one should treat it as such. It is neither good nor bad, but a craft of sorts if you will. One has to be on the right side of the market, and it has nothing to do with courage, and everything to do with knowledge, luck, and skill.
Conducting ourselves honorably and standing for the truth, upholding our oaths if you will, is a calling however, a high aspiration which we all receive, but which not all take up. And as with all worthy things it is never easy or accidental, and there are always failures as we learn, so we should not be too discouraged when we stumble and fall, or when we are fearful or confused. This is the human condition of us all.
But courage is moving forward, not when we are certain of every step to victory, but rather, when we are certain that this is the right thing to do, and are determined to do it as well as we can, come what may.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt, Sorbonne, 23 April 1910
End of quarter paint job, helped in part by the sweet deal that the 'regulators' at the Fed cut for the banks and their debit card fees.
The Fed had originally proposed capping the fees at around .12, but today decided to give the banks almost double that at .22, and delay implementation of the rule from July to October. Mastercard and Visa, along with the financial sector, rallied on the better than expected tax on the real economy to help support bank profits.
Let's see how equities go into the long holiday weekend. Today was more window dressing for the trading desks to calcualate their quarterly results.
