Charts for a Quiet Post Holiday Monday - Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday - It's Back

The markets were quiet today, and perhaps a bit more thoughtful as they gave back some of the recent outsized gains in some areas, and declines in others.

Gold gained more than silver which was a bit odd. Yes, it was a risk re-assessment sort of a day, but in London some of the industrial metals like lead and zinc had done quite well.

This market is likely to be more data and less euphoria driven over the next few weeks, as we have the Non-Farm Payrolls along with a few other goodies like the second estimate of Q3 GDP and the ISM Index.

This coming weekend there will be a referendum on the constitution in Italy that may take on a Brexit-like significance.  We'll have to keep an eye on that one.

The Fed will be getting its last chance for this year to raise rates by 25 to 50 basis points in December.  I doubt they will be deterred by anything short of shockingly bad economic news.

And finally, that back breaker of utopian monetary theories, the Zimbabwe Dollar, is making a post hyper-inflationary comeback.  They ought to have listened to Tim Allen and given their monetary policies more power.

Yeah, India's Modi knows what we're talking about—  a little monetary wet work to flush out the old fiatscos and take a strong grip on the value of your currency by the vulnerable parts.

Have a pleasant evening.

The Incredible Lightness of Thinking In the Liberal Professional Class and the Ascended Masters of Hypocrisy

"Listening to the leading figures of the Democratic party establishment, however, you’d never know it. Cool contentment is the governing emotion in these circles. What they have in mind for 2016 is what we might call a campaign of militant complacency. They are dissociated from the mood of the nation, and they do not care...

What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation [with corporate corruption] but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation."

Thomas Frank


"Too many of America's elites-among the super-rich, the CEOs, and many of my colleagues in academia-have abandoned a commitment to social responsibility.  They chase wealth and power, the rest of society be damned."

Jeffrey Sachs


"This elite-generated social control maintains the status quo because the status quo benefits and validates those who created and sit atop it.  People rise to prominence when they parrot the orthodoxy rather than critically analyze it. Intellectual regurgitation is prized over independent thought. Real change in politics or society cannot occur under the orthodoxy because if it did, it would threaten the legitimacy of the professional class and all of the systems that helped them achieve their status.

Kristine Mattis, The Cult of the Professional Class

The continuing reaction of the liberal elite to the repudiation of the Democratic establishment by their traditional constituencies of the young and working people is a wonder to behold.  They thrash back and forth between a denial of their failure, and disgust at everyone else they can blame for it.

cf Paul Krugman, The Populism Perplex.

It could not possibly be because of anything they might have done or failed to do.   And so they are caught in a credibility trap.

It is frustrating because they do not know how to extract themselves from it, admit their errors and reform the system, without undermining the very assumptions that entitle them, in their own minds at least, to rule as the highly honored insiders, the elect of professional accomplishment.  

Caution on language.

History Lesson

Tsar Nicholas II:   I know what will make them happy. They're children, and they need a Tsar!  They need tradition.  Not this!  They're the victims of agitators.  A Duma would make them bewildered and discontented.  And don't tell me about London and Berlin. God save us from the mess they're in!

Count Witte:   I see. So they talk, pray, march, plead, petition and what do they get? Cossacks, prison, flogging, police, spies, and now, after today, they will be shot.

Is this God's will?  Are these His methods?  Make war on your own people?   How long do you think they're going to stand there and let you shoot them?  YOU ask ME who's responsible?  YOU ask?

Tsar Nicholas II:   The English have a parliament.   Our British cousins gave their rights away.   The Hapsburgs, and the Hoehenzollerns too.  The Romanovs will not. What I was given, I will give my son.

"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich."

John Kenneth Galbraith