SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - The Summer Knows

"There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

Stocks were a bit on the wobbly side today, although the SP futures managed to close on the green.

The SP futures, or rather the manipulation of them, was a Robert Rubin innovation.   He noted that you can let a financial crisis happen, and go in afterwards and spend a great deal of money fixing the collateral damage in the markets.

Or you can intervene with leverage in the SP futures, specifically, in order to get ahead of the declines, and make the clean up job just that much easier.  Neater, cleaner, and best of all, cheaper.

And in the aftermath of the Mexican debt crisis, under Rubin's practical guidance and Greenspan's acquiescence, the Exchange Stabilisation Fund grew into a formidable presence, the abiding 'invisible hand' in the markets, also known colloquially as the 'Plunge Protection Team.'   It has one of the few federal budgets that never really gets audited, outside of the military.   And that is fitting, because these days paper money is an instrument of war.

But once you start that music playing, the trick is not how to keep it going, because a lie is almost inexhaustible as long as everyone still believes it.  No, the trick is how to ever stop.

Have a pleasant evening.

Die 3 Groschen-Oper - The Threepenny Opera

The Threepenny Opera, Die 3 Groschen-Oper, is a 1931 musical film directed by G. W. Pabst for the Weimar Berlin based Nero-Film AG.   It is loosely based on the highly successful musical drama of the same name by Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht that opened on 31 August 1928 at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.

The film is set in Victorian London, and focuses on the criminality and corruption of Macheath, Mackie Messer, or Mack the Knife, and his associates, including an old army comrade the chief of police, Tiger Brown.   Macheath sees and quickly woos Polly Peachum, incurring the wrath of her powerful father, who outfits and trains the large army of beggars who populate the substrata of imperial London.

The original stage production was much more a scathing critique of financial capitalism than the film. Brecht broke with the Nero production when they refused to use his rewrites, which had become more sharply politicial.

In the film the street singer is played by Ernst Busch, who was an ardent socialist like Brecht, and become quite famous after the war with the Communists in East Germany. Kurt Weill was married to the singer, Lotta Lenya, who plays Jenny in both the play and the film, and found a successful career in the West after fleeing Germany.

By 1933, when Weill and Brecht were forced to leave Germany by the Nazi Party's Machtergreifung, or bloodless coup d'etat, the play had been translated into 18 languages and performed more than 10,000 times on European stages.

The original street singer was played by the actor Kurt Gerron, who rose to fame in his role opposite Marlene Dietrich in Der Blaue Engel. Gerron, who refused Weill's pleas to emigrate to the US because he was afraid of change, was executed by the Nazis after helping to produce an infamous propaganda film at the concentration camp at Theresienstadt.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Counting the Cars on the NJ Turnpike

"It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Gold and silver managed to poke their heads a little higher today, struggling against strongly defended overhead resistance.

There were some deliveries in the Comex licensed gold and silver warehouses as noted on the reports below.

Reform ignored still comes, sooner or later. What might have once been clear and simple at first has been made into something more complicated by long repression and denial. What is both wondrous, and awful, is when that change finally comes, and what may be coming with it.

Have a pleasant evening.