SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Wash Cycle Is Almost Finished

I figure we have about 15 or so more points of upside potential in the SP 500, barring exogenous events, and then it turns into a slower slog higher with the usual wash and rinse cycles to keep the HFT and predator trading desks happy.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - 'Peace In Our Time'

"Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

Frederick Douglass

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras seems to have folded precipitously, after apparently having taken all other options off the table including a Grexit, a movement toward the burgeoning China Development Bank, an impasse.

His strategy seemed a bit out of joint. I have heard that Victoria Nuland made him an offer he could not refuse, and he did not wish or did not have the option to offer a 'principled resignation' as did Varoufakis.

(Note: I am now mulling this and a few other things over in light of this new interview by Varoufakis.)

It could be that he was then taken aback and surprised by the sheer ferocity of the European (German) proposal, which was to essentially make Greek into a protectorate, and to visit a looting of national assets, given that the loans being granted are completely unpayable and the collateral will be forfeit.

 

He certainly is not the first Western leader to have capitulated when a 'gun' has been held to their head.  There is a certain rhyme, and a sense of déjà vu in all this.  We must do these things, because of the imperative of (pick one:  destiny, our blood, they have given us no choice, it is in their nature to be ruled, to safeguard our freedom, and/or the logic of the market)

 

There was intraday commentary along these lines here.

 

There is certainly room for criticizing Syriza in this. I admit I was supportive of their efforts, and still am.  I will try not to judge their efforts too harshly until all the facts are revealed. Since I am not eager to be a martyr, I rarely find it appropriate to insist on that path for anyone else. But I did think this characterization from John Pilger bears some merit.

The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind – but their revolution is the perverse, familiar appropriation of social democratic and parliamentary movements by liberals groomed to comply with neo-liberal drivel and a social engineering whose authentic face is that of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s finance minister, an imperial thug.

Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as 'liberal' or even 'left',  Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, “schooled in postmodernism”, as Alex Lantier wrote.

For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle, regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syriza’s luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but “better terms” of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor. When merged with “identity politics” and its insidious distractions, the consequence is not resistance, but subservience. “Mainstream” political life in Britain exemplifies this.

John Pilger, The Problem of Greece is not Only a Tragedy: It is a Lie

I wonder how much of Anglo-American political realities that Pilger is projecting on the Greeks.  It is hard to me to judge.

 

But this is mere speculation and second guessing, and we have to focus on what is next. Certainly the Greek people will be foolish to accept the terms to which their Prime Minister has agreed. But what they will do about it, if anything, is another matter.  One hopes that they will make a stand, if only to break the momentum of what James Galbraith has called 'the neoliberal project' in which the US in involved despite all its dissembling about it.

Those who complain about the abuse of power and financial repression in their own cases, as those in the precious metals are sometimes known to do, are foolish if they think that what is happening in Greece means nothing for them.   The cause of freedom makes all free people brothers and sisters, and those who see themselves as standing proudly alone will fall, miserably and alone. 

The global financial class is pleased that any pain to be visited from the bad behavior of, wait for it, the global financial class including some of the usual and almost omnipresent suspects, will be presumably visited upon the Greek public alone.

And there will be a feast of sorts for the vulture class.

This is the continuation of a financial strategy being pursued by the Western developed economies for some years now.   It is not 'ordoliberal', which is a nice historical diversion, so much as neo-liberal, a fashion of political management that has swept the West thanks in great part to the economic and political influence of the US and the UK.

What makes it different in this case of Greece is that it is being done, not to a Third World country, but to a long established Western nation and a member of the European community.   If there is any good to come out of this, at least the neo-liberal financial class has been revealed for who and what they truly are.  And so we can no longer claim any illusions, no plausible excuse in our believing them once again.

‘In the [1967] coup d’état the choice of weapon used in order to bring down democracy then was the tanks.  Well, this time it was the banks.  The banks were used by foreign powers to take over the government.  The difference is that this time they’re taking over all public property.’

Yanis Varoufakis

And so we see Hillary the populist railing about wages and Wall Street today, while riding on a tidal wave of big money, insider dealings, and soft payoffs from the moneyed interests.  But it is all in the patter, the words, the quality of the performance, the identity politics, don't ya know.  This is a spectacle, a play on the national stage, and an act of political fiction. And so facts don't matter, just the entertainment factor.  How else could one account for at least half of the Republican candidates?

 

We are seeing the same thing being done on a much more local scale in the UK and the US surely, with certain locales being turned into virtual protectorates after being caught up in a web of corruption, financial fraud, and unpayable debts by officially sanctioned Banks.

Consider this not an anomaly, but an experiment in progress, with more to follow.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Celebrating The Recovery™ Again

 

Stocks were in rally mode today as the threat of 'Grexit' was resolved, for now.

 

I dare to suggest that this is just another phantom from that continuing fable called The Recovery™.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Greek Deal From Germany - Reading Between the Lines - Darkness Over the Earth

 

Perhaps the Greeks made a mistake, and relied too much on rationality, on a belief in a Eurozone in which good sense and reason would prevail.   As it was, the Germans were willing to ruthlessly crush the Greek banking system, while the ECB and IMF stood idly by, fomenting a financial panic and humanitarian disaster in order to displace a sovereign government and put an entire nation 'in its place.'   We certainly have seen this kind of example made before.

This was an exercise in raw power.  It was a financial blitzkrieg, an act of economic warfare and reckless destruction on a people that ought to be condemned by the free world.  But this kind of ruthless abuse of financial systems seems to be the accepted thing now amongst the developed economies.  And we might view Greece as a sort of an experiment in a new form of warfare and ruthlessness, as were Guernica, Warsaw, and Lidice.

 

It is a shame if the Greeks have not prepared for Grexit, although there are still clearly options despite the naysayers who see only difficulties in everything.   Freedom is rarely the easier way.

 

The lesson that the countries of the Eurozone cannot trust Germany to act with wisdom and goodwill was known, but now we also see that restraint is also not in their repetoire.  If one can read between the lines, it would be a pity if the rest of the European countries do not start planning now for their own active exit from such an failed concept as the European Monetary Union.

 

And it would be a tragedy if the rest of the world does not now see plainly where a single currency for the world would also take them, where it is already taking them.   Modern theories about its benign utility to do only good aside, money is raw power.  And one must be exceptionally careful of granting that power to create and distribute and manage money into the hands of vain and corruptible people without stringent  transparency, checks and balances, and provisions for justice and individual freedom.

 

Are the lights going out all over Europe?   Not yet, but there is a darkness casting its shadow over the earth.   I fear that Greece is only the beginning of a new phase in the degradation of the human condition by the power of insatiable greed, and spiritual wickedness in high places.

 

 

"The earth, entire peoples and individual persons are being brutally punished. And behind all this pain, death and destruction there is the stench of what Basil of Caesarea called 'the dung of the devil'.  An unfettered pursuit of money rules.  The service of the common good is left behind.

Once capital becomes an idol and guides people’s decisions, once greed for money presides over the entire socioeconomic system, it ruins society, it condemns and enslaves men and women, it destroys human fraternity, it sets people against one another and, as we clearly see, it even puts at risk our common home."

Francis I