SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Hard Time Killin' Floor Blues

Markets were lightly traded as the adults hit the road early, and most of the kiddies were released from school at midday, as winter storm Janus pounded the northeastern US with high winds and an expected 8-14 inches of snow.

This gave the sagging SP 500 and chance to finish in the green, although VIX ticked up a little. This is a holiday shortened week in the States, and the economic news calendar is also light.

This will end. Badly, for quite a few people.

Have a pleasant evening.

Wm. K. Black: JP Morgan's Frauds Are Epic, Unprecedented, NSA Scandal a PR Disaster

"It turns out we were not just spying on terrorists, we were spying on the general population of the world...They decided they had to do something politically to curtail this because they are getting terrible publicity, and they’re getting terrible publicity not just in the United States...This turned into disaster in terms of public relations for the United States and in terms of diplomatic relations...

CEO Jamie Dimon has presided over the largest financial crime spree in world history. . . . It depends on how you count it, but it is more than a dozen, and more in the range of 15 major felonies that either the United States investigators have found, state investigators have found or foreign governments have found...JP Morgan’s frauds are epic in scale, unprecedented in world history...

The system is ungovernable... It has already largely imploded.”

William K. Black

Read the excerpts and see original interview here.

It is not that the system is ungovernable. It is that the system is ungovernable by morally ambivalent politicians, all of whom are caught in a credibility trap.

And the world is watching.

Weekend Reading: Carroll Quigley on Tragedy and Hope

 

 I own a first edition copy of Carroll Quigley's book, 'Tragedy and Hope' and I have read it, and have always found it, and the history behind the work, to be interesting.

Quigley was a mentor to Bill Clinton as a student at Georgetown, and was instrumental in obtaining Clinton's Rhodes scholarship.

Here is a pdf version of the article by Kevin Cole which is the substance of this video below:
Professor Carroll Quigley and the Article that Said Too Little

I would have preferred if the audio did not contain annoying background music and if the narrator had spoken a bit more slowly.

Martin Luther King: The Drum Major Instinct

People wish to have the power to otherwise do what they will. They wish to use God as a sort of vending machine, a compliant God, a God who does our will if one knows the right words to compel Him.  And they think that they have no sin, when they choose to give what they wish to Him, grudgingly, as they serve themselves.   And this pride, the refusal to serve, is the sin of the Fallen.

"And he answered, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’ and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’

'You have answered rightly,' Jesus replied. 'Do this and you will live.'

But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, 'And who is my neighbor?'

Luke 10:27-29”

And Martin Luther King corrects this tendency to be self-serving, rather than serving, in a most remarkable way in this famous sermon, an excerpt of which was played at his funeral observance.

And below that is a very brief statement by King on 'maladjustment,' or that is, the state of the principled person, who is in the world, but not of it.