SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Non-Farm Payrolls Tomorrow

"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

They kill us for their sport."

William Shakespeare, King Lear

It is easier for those who would be as a god to display their godly powers by crafting the simulacrums of life without vitality, such as asset bubbles. 

 

They lack that which is essential to create organic life and growth, which is the wisdom of love.

 

I suspect that we will see a fairly painful reckoning in the markets, probably within the next twelve months, but maybe not just yet.

While the lines of 'support' hold, the Fed has the wind at the back of the financial paper markets.

 

If you wish to know why there is no organic, broad-based recovery in the US, and probably the UK and Europe, listen to this short explanation from Elizabeth Warren here.

As you might have gathered from some of the quotes, I was rereading portions of Chesterton's book  Eugenics and Other Evils, what was then called 'scientific government.'    

I was particularly struck by one of his observations. 

“Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.”

 

What Chesterton refers to as 'abnormal innocence' is the willing naïveté of an ideology or theorists who suspend their experience and common sense to promote a particular ideal as the basis of a solution.  And of course the abnormal sin is evil, and not of the ordinary kind.  And the dupes are its deceptions.

 

In retrospect it is remarkable that he so deftly gets to the bottom of the social movements of his day, and almost predicts with stunning accuracy the adoption of mass sterilization and eventually mass euthanasia of 1930s and 1940s.

 

But we see similar examples even in our own time, if not of the same degree.  

 

The notion that people will act in perfectly good and rational ways is absurd when you say it that way.   But it is at the heart of so many of the economic theories that have plagued us in the deification of the modern markets and money in the past twenty to thirty years. 

 

This includes the massive confiscation and transfers of wealth through the abuse of financial paper, and the persecution and abuse of whole peoples and even nations through the tyranny of debts.

 

Dangerously willful delusions often open the door for great suffering and injustice.  And the irony is that they are so often enabled by the well-meaning sophistry of idealists, who would crush reality into meaningless to enable their models to roll forward with the greatest expediency.  

“I had thought of calling the next sort of superficial people the Idealists; but I think this implies a humility towards impersonal good they hardly show; so I call them the Autocrats. They are those who give us generally to understand that every modern reform will 'work' all right, because they will be there to see... And these people most certainly propose to be responsible for a whole movement after it has left their hands. Each man promises to be about a thousand policemen. If you ask them how this or that will work, they will answer, “Oh, I would certainly insist on this”; or “I would never go so far as that”; as if they could return to this earth and do what no ghost has ever done quite successfully—force men to forsake their sins. Of these it is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any more than the nature of a dog. If you let loose a law, it will do as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Such sense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled. But you will not be able to fulfil a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put into it.”  

G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

Elizabeth Warren On Corrosive Effects Of Big Money Politics on Public Policy

"The powers that ruled him had not fitted him with a knapsack, any more than they had fitted him with a future—or even a present. The destitute Englishman, so far from hoping to become anything, had never been allowed even to be anything.

...for the English it was the bottom rungs that were knocked out, so that they could not even begin to climb. And sooner or later, in exact proportion to his intelligence, the English plutocrat began to understand not only that the poor were impotent, but that their impotence had been his only power.

The truth was not merely that his riches had left them poor; it was that nothing but their poverty could have been strong enough to make him rich. It is this paradox, as we shall see, that creates the curious difference between him and every other kind of robber."

G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

This is the heart of the problem, why there has been no significant reform, no meaningful programs of infrastructure rebuilding, and why the US is suffering this mysterious, secular stagnation.

 

Part of it is the credibility trap.  How can long time insiders talk meaningfully about reform, when they were very much a part of the things, the changes, the repeal of long time safeguards and reforms from the past that created the problems?

 

They thought they were voting for change, and instead the two party system gave them another stooge of Big money.  And the Congress, despite record low approval ratings, does not seem all that concerned.  How can this be?

Big money owns Washington, and they like things exactly the way that they are.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Shaking Down that Open Interest

This is certainly an 'active month' for gold, at least on the Comex.

Quite a few punters are standing for delivery, or at least, what passes for delivery at The Bucket Shop.

Since supply is tight, better to try and reduce demand, and open interest with the usual tired bag of price rigging shenanigans.

How strong are those hands. What a drama. Not.

 

What happens in New York and London these days is a carney side show. 

 

The real markets are primarily in Asia.  

 

And they remain stubbornly physical, even though the Bucket Shop's sahibs in India are beside themselves in trying to find an effective way to paperize their precious metals.

 

I don't think that Mrs. Das will be handing over her jewelry for a bunch of paper claim tickets any time soon.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - It Rubs the Lotion On Its Skin

"It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again."

Buffalo Bill, The Silence of the Lambs

"Fed officials want to start raising the cost of your borrowing because they worry they’ve been giving you a free ride for too long with zero interest rates. We listen to Fed officials all of the time here at The Wall Street Journal, and they just can’t figure you out."

Jon Hilsenrath, The Wall Street Journal

I see where Ben Bernanke is worried that the US is losing economic control of the world, and is dismayed at the prospect of 'competing systems' with the rise of an alternative development bank and currency regime led by the BRICS.

And the Fed's friendly financial journalist mouthpiece Jon Hilsenrath asks why you are being so stubborn and stingy, and not out there spending.   Are you being awkward or something? 

 

You see, the Fed looks at the aggregate numbers, and from what they can tell from their models, people are saving just too darn much.

 

Perhaps if they paid more attention to median numbers and the broader public, they would see the skew in the distribution of income gains that have gained even greater momentum under their top down monetary regimes.  And then they would know that the one percent has plenty of excess income and capital gains from the bubble in paper assets.  And why Jamie Dimon just joined the ranks of the billionaires, while the median income continues to stagnate.

 

That is how good the financial kleptocrats are doing seven years after the financial crisis that they helped to cause with their serial frauds and blatant deceptions.  And of course, the serial felonies that they have committed but remain largely unreformed and unindicted since.

 

And as for the politicians, Billary gets a cool half million just for showing up, and talking.  Why don't the rest of you all get busy and do that?  Then you too can be rich.  I am sure you have a lot to say too.

 

Or you can write a column about things of which you seem to know very little, like Paul Krugman.  He is high-fiving the recovery caused by Fed money printing, that has not caused inflation.   He is so happy that his model predicted this!   Take a look at the velocity of money, Paul, and you will see why there is 'no inflation' if you look at the right government statistics. 

 

Perhaps it is because all the 'stimulus' went into inflating yet another financial asset bubble, and has trickled down to the servants of the privileged few, such as yourself perhaps, but not too many others.  There is inflation driven by the rentiers and their growing monopolies in healthcare and communications for example, but not much else.

 

So the moneyed class asks their servants to ask you, Why aren't you out there, recovering?   Are you trying to make the Fed and the Congress and the Mighty Reformer himself look bad?

 

But, alas, the rest of the American public, that broad base of consumption, is living pretty much hand to mouth, with little savings to cushion any sort of shock like a sickness or major car repair, and is facing very dire prospects for their non-retirement.  There are plenty of shit jobs for poverty wages if you live near a gated community of the wealthy, but that is about it.

 

Is it the credibility trap, that causes the pampered princes of New York and Washington to so totally misread the public, and the actual conditions they manage and forecast for their own country?   Is their blindness willful, an artifact of the credibility trap, or do they just live such sequestered, privileged lives that they have lost all contact with reality?

 

So get out there and buy, and work harder, and quit your whining you stupid sods.

 

Dangerous times, my friends, when the ruling class has lost even their meager sense of the public mood.  And yet they always seem to be so surprised, each time they steer the economy into the ditch.

 

Have a pleasant evening.