Gold Daily And Silver Weekly Charts - HFT Distorts Commodity Prices

At the close there was breaking news regarding an email at MF Global identifying Jon Corzine as having ordered the customer funds transferred to meet a margin call. There is a more complete discussion and story of that topic above.

Gold and silver bounced back today, but they still finished up below key resistance. We'll have to see if they can continue to gain their footing and move higher next week.

Report Reuters UK: High Frequency Trading Distorts Commodity Prices

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Breaking News, MF Global 'Smoking Gun'

A dull day with only a little excitement as BATS exchange went IPO, and flubbed its own price quotes trading it for pennies, and a major error in APPl to the downside set off circuit breakers.

Other than that a snooze, with the usual uplift into the afternoon close after having been down most of the day.

Have a pleasant weekend.

"...How vainly seek
The selfish for that happiness denied
To aught but virtue! Blind and hardened, they,
Who hope for peace amid the storms of care,
Who covet power they know not how to use,
And sigh for pleasure they refuse to give,--
Madly they frustrate still their own designs;
And, where they hope that quiet to enjoy
Which virtue pictures, bitterness of soul,
Pining regrets, and vain repentances,
Disease, disgust and lassitude pervade
Their valueless and miserable lives...

But hoary-headed selfishness has felt
Its death-blow and is tottering to the grave;
A brighter morn awaits the human day,
When every transfer of earth's natural gifts
Shall be a commerce of good words and works;
When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame,
The fear of infamy, disease and woe,
War with its million horrors, and fierce hell,
Shall live but in the memory of time,
Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start,
Look back, and shudder at his younger years."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab

Vanity Fair: Jon Corzine's Riskiest Business

This is an interesting article on MF Global and Jon Corzine more broadly.

It is the story of industry wide greed, influence peddling, and the weakening of the regulatory agencies in a combination of powerful persuasion and anti-regulatory ideology aggressively promoted by money from self-serving financial interests.

It is good to remember that attempts to regulate and reform the industry are blocked by a powerful minority at almost every turn, and that the CFTC has two Republican appointees who oppose most of the proposals that Chairman Gensler puts forward.

However, it is not clear at all what support Gary Gensler and his Democratic colleagues were able to obtain from the economic people in the Obama Administration,  the tone of which was set by Tim Geithner and the now departed Larry Summers. The Obama Administration has been particularly hard on whistleblowers and internal dissent, and very quick to compromise on financial matters.

One thing that is lacking in American politics, that I have always admired in the Europeans, is the principled resignation. That is a tall order for a group of leaders who can barely scrape up enough moral fiber to take a principled stand, even on their own elected mandates, unless it is in the service of their rich and powerful benefactors in their ongoing game of thrones.

Vanity Fair
Jon Corzine’s Riskiest Business
By Bryan Burrough, William D. Cohan and Bethany McLean

"...Gary Gensler, a former Goldman colleague of Corzine’s, wanted to restrict the ability of a firm to invest its customers’ assets in sovereign debt and to use its customers’ cash to make loans to itself.

MF Global (along with the rest of the industry) freaked out, writing to the C.F.T.C. that the agency was trying to “fix something that is not broken.”

Corzine personally lobbied each of the C.F.T.C.’s commissioners, and after Gensler realized he didn’t have support from anyone, he was forced to delay a vote that was scheduled for July..."

Read the full article here.

In Honor of the 70th Anniversary of the Munich Students Movement - 3rd Leaflet

I have been remembering the 70th Anniversary of Die Weiße Rose, the Munich Students Movement and the series of leaflets which they produced and distributed in Nazi Germany during the height of the reign of terror and the madness.

You may read more about these brave souls here and here.

The two saddest words in any language are 'If only...'

The White Rose
Third Leaflet
Munich, 1942

Salus publica suprema lex
The good of the people is the law of the land.

All ideal forms of government are, of course, utopias.

But a state cannot be constructed on a pure ideal, a theoretical basis; rather, it must grow and ripen in the way an individual human being matures. But we must not forget that at the starting point of every civilization the state was already there in rudimentary form. The family is as old as man himself, and out of this initial bond mankind, endowed with reason, created for himself a state founded on justice, whose highest law was the common good.

The state should exist as a parallel to the divine order, and the highest of all utopias, the civitas dei, is the model which in the end it should approximate. Here we will not pass judgment on the many possible forms of the state - democracy, constitutional monarchy, and so on.

But one matter needs to be brought out clearly and unambiguously. Every individual human being has a claim to a useful and just state, a state which secures freedom of the individual as well as the good of the whole. For, according to God's will, man is intended to pursue his natural goal, his earthly happiness, in self-reliance and self-chosen activity, freely and independently within the community of life and work of the nation.

But our present "state" is the dictatorship of evil. "Oh, we've known that for a long time," I hear you object, "and it isn't necessary to bring that to our attention again." But, I ask you, if you know that, why do you not act, why do you allow these men who are in power to rob you step by step, openly and in secret, of one set of your rights after another, until one day nothing, nothing at all will be left but a mechanized state system presided over by criminals and fools?

Is your spirit already so crushed by abuse that you forget it is your right - or rather, your moral duty - to change this system? But if a man no longer can summon the strength to demand his rights, then it is absolutely certain that he will perish. We would deserve to be dispersed through the earth like dust before the wind if we do not muster our powers at this late hour and finally find the courage which, up to now, we have lacked. Do not hide your cowardice behind a cloak of expediency, for with every new day that you hesitate, failing to oppose this offspring of Hell, your guilt, as in a parabolic curve, grows higher and higher.

Many, perhaps most, of the readers of these leaflets do not see clearly how they can practice an effective opposition. They do not see any avenues open to them. We want to try to show them that everyone is in a position to contribute to changing this system. It is not possible through solitary withdrawal, in the manner of embittered hermits, to prepare the ground for the overturn of this "government" or bring about the revolution at the earliest possible moment. No, it can be done only by the cooperation of many convinced, energetic people - people who are agreed as to the means they must use to attain their goal. We have no great number of choices as to these means. The only one available is passive resistance.

The meaning and the goal of passive resistance is to topple National Socialism, and in this struggle we must not recoil from any course, any action, whatever its nature. At all points we must oppose National Socialism, wherever it is open to attack. We must soon bring this monster of a state to an end. A victory of fascist Germany in this war would have immeasurable, frightful consequences. The military victory over Bolshevism dare not become the primary concern of the Germans. The defeat of the Nazis must unconditionally be the first order of business, the greater necessity of this latter requirement will be discussed in one of our forthcoming leaflets.

And now every convinced opponent of National Socialism must ask himself how he can fight against the present "state" in the most effective way, how he can strike it the most telling blows. Through passive resistance, without a doubt. We cannot provide each man with the blueprint for his acts, we can only suggest them in general terms, and he alone will find the way of achieving this end...

Please distribute this as widely as possible.

"Before the crown comes the cross."

Martin Luther King


"Easter Day is preceded by the forty days of Lent, to show us that they, and they only, who sow in tears, shall reap in joy."

John Henry Newman

Thankfully few are called to the martyr's crown, but we are all called to take up the cross and follow, each day, in each of our own small ways. That is all most of us can do, be still, and faithful, and wait on the Lord.

And for anyone who has done it, they know well that raising a family, going to work each day and doing all things well, being kind and understanding especially when you would like to do otherwise, and even staring a mortgage in the face for thirty years, all of these things are no picnic.

I realized today that when I was a younger man, I recall hearing people talk quite a bit about 'conscience.' Even in the public news, there was talk of acts of conscience, and a defense of their inherent nobility, and right and wrong in the moral sense, doing the right thing.

These days what we seem to hear about most is winning, continual war, and a ruthless culture of death.

Now the moral sense is just dollars and cents, and a continuing sacrifice to the gods of greed. We take pride in the ability to put a price on anything, but we seem to have lost a relative sense of the value of everything, or at least all that really matters.

America has faltered from its high ideals, that even if not always adhered to closely, were still a light to the world. Today the nation stands before God and the world not in humility but in defiance, with the blood of prophets on its hands, as the greatest power on earth, the unquestioned ruler of all it surveys. And that is an exceptional tragedy.