Jesse's Café Américain

"As prophet, Reinhold Niebuhr warned that what he called 'our dreams of managing history' — dreams borne out of a peculiar combination of arrogance, hypocrisy, and self-delusion — posed a large and potentially mortal threat to the United States. Today we ignore that warning at our peril.

Since the end of the Cold War the management of history has emerged as the all but explicitly stated purpose of American statecraft. In Washington, politicians speak knowingly about history's clearly discerned purpose and about the responsibility of the United States, at the zenith of its power, to guide history to its intended destination.

In Niebuhr's view, although history may be purposeful, it is also opaque, a drama in which both the story line and the dénouement remain hidden from view. The twists and turns that the plot has already taken suggest the need for a certain modesty in forecasting what is still to come. Yet as Niebuhr writes, 'modern man lacks the humility to accept the fact that the whole drama of history is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management.'

Such humility is in particularly short supply in present-day Washington. There, especially among neoconservatives and neoliberals, the conviction persists that Americans are called up on to serve, in Niebuhr's most memorable phrase, 'as tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection.'"

Andrew J. Bacevich

I might have subtitled this, A Plunder Society: The Three Trillion Dollar self-serving adventures of the military-industrial empire.

Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

Calgacus, as chronicled by Tacitus in his Agricola

The homepage for this interview is here.

SP 500 June Futures Daily Chart Close Up

The larger trend is intact as the market retreats from a short term overbought condition.

Within almost every trend there is a short term 'wash and rinse' cycle.

Let's see if the primary trend holds. It has almost grown sufficiently to be called 'the Bernanke Bubble.'

Banks Hold a Billion In Overseas Customer Money

If the financial crisis were more widespread how much worse do you think these customers would be faring?

Banks Hold $1 Billion in MF Global U.K. Cash, KPMG Says
By Kit Chellel
March 28, 2012

About $1 billion of MF Global Holding Ltd. U.K. clients’ money remains locked away in other financial institutions five months after the brokerage’s collapse, administrators KPMG LLP said.

KPMG has collected more than $500 million from those accounts to date, the firm said in an update published on its website. The figures relate to unsegregated client accounts, which MF Global was allowed to mix with its own funds and which have proved difficult for the administrators to recover.

KPMG said it was taking action to obtain the $1 billion of unsegregated assets from a “small number of financial institutions” that it didn’t identify. The firm threatened to sue banks that don’t hand over funds, it said at a London creditors meeting in January.

KPMG, appointed to wind up the London-based unit when the New York-based parent filed for bankruptcy in October, plans to produce statements setting out the account positions of 75 percent of customers by March 30. MF Global was the fifth- largest financial company to file for bankruptcy when it sought protection on Oct. 31 after getting margin calls on its bets on European sovereign debt.

MF Global customers that traded on the London Metal Exchange are unlikely to receive statements until April because of the complexity of their positions, KPMG said...

Read the rest here.