"Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles and snares of evil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Therefore, take on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand the evil of this day and, at the end of all things, remain standing."
Ephesians 6:11-13
"In the painting, the woman clutches desperately at the knee of the statue, yearning up into its face, which stares down at her remorselessly. The statue holds out a bag of gold, but the woman ignores the money. She has moved beyond the love of money, to the love of Mammon himself. And so she has cut herself off from the love of God, embracing her own destruction."
Museum catalogue, Mammon the God of Worldliness
“A society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction.”
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Defining Deviancy Down
Gold was rallying and stocks were lackluster with the US dollar running at multi-year lows this morning.
The Fed released its 'Beige Book' at 2:00 PM. It was full of anecdotes about the tremendous jobs growth and robust economy, with growing labor shortages. And by implication, wage pressures.
As some noted, we suspect that this was aimed to please twitter man, el hombre naranja, and to justify the next round of interest rate increases. The Fed is glossing over the significant lapse in the number of employed in the Labor Participation Rate and hand-picking examples. But they have always been courtiers to power. Their independence and self-effacing goodness is a fairy tale, a farce. Unfortunately they are in good company with the other regulators, the pundits, and the politicians.
The labor shortages are for the most part artificial, because employers are not yet engaging in wage increases designed to attract talent, having become accustomed to thirty years of growing productivity and stagnant real wages.
Do not delude yourselves, and go only to those places where they tell you what you wish to hear. Where they flatter you with tales of your superiority, compared to these others. For this is an easy and carefree path, blithely into the abyss.
You know it is wrong, you can feel the unease when you part from these serpents and their soothing reassurances. But you cannot bear to face the truth, and the lies are smoothly seductive. Your vanity urges you to imagine yourself to be the real victim of these others, to justify yourself.
Let's see if this is the start of something new, or just the kind of tickle and comfort that the courtiers and careerists to power like to pay to their masters, and the god of the markets. There is nothing like a good wash and rinse in the market that the boys like better, just ahead of a stock options expiration. And from the short term overbought and oversold conditions it was a nice opportunity to game the system and pick up some easy profits from the public.
There will be a reckoning, and it may be historic. But they do not believe in it, they do not think that change or reform is possible. This is the true opium of the people.
Have a pleasant evening.
