David Cay Johnston: Keynote Address to Symposium on Wealth Disparity In America

David Cay Johnston is an American investigative journalist and author, a specialist in economics and tax issues, and winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting.

Since 2009 he has been a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer who teaches the tax, property and regulatory law of the ancient world at Syracuse University College of Law and Whitman School of Management.' From July 2011 until September 2012 he was a columnist for Reuters, writing, and producing video commentaries, on worldwide issues of tax, accounting, economics, public finance and business. Johnston is the board president of Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Gold Daily And Silver Weekly Charts - Patience Patients, the Clinical Monetary Trials Will Continue

The Fed brought out not so much the jawbone, but perhaps its dentures, and changed 'considerable' to 'patient' and set some expectations for a rate hike perhaps as early as April.

Of course this is all rubbish, and the Fed will do what they need to do to protect the US' financial paper, especially in the time of currency war.

Gold took a somewhat perfunctory hit by the little wiseguys sometime after the announcement, almost as an afterthought, and silver pretty much held its level.

 

If they can't keep the genie in the bottle we might be getting ready to rock 'n roll.  Can you feel things winding up, getting tighter and tighter, as the paper kings keep pushing it to the limit?

 

We can be patient too, Bubbe Yellen, while we wait for some potentially considerable changes to come.

I am leaving a bit early today to do things related to family and the holidays. These things will remain. The trappings and vanities of Empire are already turning to dust.

Gold and silver will be fine I suspect. But we must be wary of the desperation of those who are both corrupt and powerful.

Happy Hanukkah to all my Jewish friends, acquaintances, and patrons of Le Café.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Easy as She Goes

The markets are continuing their bounce off support today, after the Fed did little except move their lips a little in their last statement for 2014.

 

They will be 'patient' and I imagine they expect that you will be too.

 

The charts will be updated with the remainder of today's action tomorrow.

 

 

The Children of Victorian Britain, In the Heart of Empire

“Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.”

Chris Hedges


"Take up the White man's burden,
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard."

Rudyard Kipling


"For better or worse — fair and foul — the world we know today is in large measure a product of Britain's age of empire. The question is not whether British imperialism was without blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity. Perhaps in theory there could have been. But in practice?

...The policy mix favored by Victorian imperialists reads like something just published by the International Monetary Fund, if not the World Bank: free trade, balanced budgets, sound money, the common law, incorrupt administration and investment in infrastructure financed by international loans."

Niall Ferguson, Empire and The Empire Slinks Back


"To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation that is governed by shopkeepers."

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations


"First...there is not a single prince, state, or potentate, great or small, in India, with whom they have come into contact, whom they have not sold: I say sold, though sometimes they have not been able to deliver according to their bargain. Secondly, I say, that there is not a single treaty they have ever made which they have not broken. Thirdly, I say, that there is not a single prince or state, who ever put any trust in the [East India] Company, who is not utterly ruined; and that none are in any degree secure or flourishing, but in the exact proportion to their settled distrust and irreconcilable enmity to this nation."

Edmund Burke: Speech on Mr. Fox’s East India Bill, Dec. 1, 1783


"Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “throw away” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new...

While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control...

The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule."

Francis I, Evangelii et Gaudium