"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man and in his own Person restored the image of God in all. Through our relationship with the Incarnation we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin and recover our solidarity with all mankind." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship 1937
Stocks were mixed to a little higher today as the 'better than expected' headline number of jobs added in the Non-Farm Payrolls Report failed to impress the markets.
The numbers reinforce the trend of adding lots of low-paying and part time unskilled jobs that will do little to nothing to stimulate and sustain aggregate demand and economic recovery.
"There is no clean way to make a hundred million bucks. Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them. Decent people lost their jobs. Big money is big power, and big power gets used wrong. It's the system...
The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean."
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
"The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterwards with more awful effect.”
Robert W. Chambers, The King In Yellow
The US dollar took a trip downtown today, and silver and gold were on the move higher still.
Tomorrow we will get the Non-Farm Payrolls report, classified 813 in the Dewey Decimal system, 'Modern American Fiction.'
The Fed is looking for cover to raise rates, because they need some room beneath their wings so that they can maneuver deftly when the next financial crisis follows their latest financial asset bubble, as night follows day.
Negative interest is the policy choice of brain dead bureaucrats, in much the same way that fiscal austerity in a balance sheet recession sounds appealing if you are at least several steps removed from any serious approximation of reality. That does not mean that the Fed would not follow the ECB and go there under the duress of tarnishing their reputations, such as they are. The problem is that the American people are far too heavily armed to tolerate that sort of blatant confiscation, without quite a bit more preparation.
Gold is at a very key juncture. It needs to break out through 1270 and stick a weekly close there, hard, and hang on to it. The 'handle' has formed oddly, with hardly the kind of test of the lower bound of the chart formation support that we would like to see under our belts by now. A second drop down to the 1200 level that held would have much more conventional.
But we *might* be in a bit of a special situation now, bullion-wise, with the float of gold having dried up badly in London and New York, as the seemingly inexhaustible buyers of Asia are spending their paper dolleros on hard goods, rather than cheap consumables. They clearly are not following the globalist script.
Ray Dalio was talking up gold among other things on Bloomberg bubble vision today, prescribing the usual 5 to 10% allocation for it in your portfolio.
I do not think we will reach the denouement for this until June, if ever, but the data wrangler from the barrier reef was estimating right about now when we were discussing this last year. So let's keep an open mind and let the market tell us what it knows, and the things that we may not be able to see from our place in the cheaper seats.
It does not look like there are many good choices, much less heroes, in our future. But history has a way of surprising us when we least expect it. And that is not always a good thing.
The little waif from the mean streets of the city is doing well in our household, starting to lighten up a bit, relax, and fit in. She is a snuggler for sure, and a little treasure. It feels good to do good for the less unfortunate. It is the kind of reward that does not break or tarnish; it endures.
I think it has to do with love, simple unselfish love. It has always surprised me that more people don't get that, don't get on board with it. Perhaps they are not equipped for it. It takes a human being to love and to be loved in return.
Perhaps there are few seeds that could thrive in such hard, dry ground as some peoples' hearts. It is easy to be hard; all the finest and most powerful seem to be doing it. They live life large, in order to make up for the lack of true vitality, just the imitation of life. But as Dostoevsky said, 'hell is the suffering of being unable to love.'
That is too bad, because the best, the most enduring parts of life are easily overlooked and missed. A baby's laugh, the surprised smile of a spouse, unexpected help, a houseful of grandchildren, a kind word, a good night's sleep, the satisfaction of a job well done: God's tender mercies.
"There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Stocks were a bit on the wobbly side today, although the SP futures managed to close on the green.
The SP futures, or rather the manipulation of them, was a Robert Rubin innovation. He noted that you can let a financial crisis happen, and go in afterwards and spend a great deal of money fixing the collateral damage in the markets.
Or you can intervene with leverage in the SP futures, specifically, in order to get ahead of the declines, and make the clean up job just that much easier. Neater, cleaner, and best of all, cheaper.
And in the aftermath of the Mexican debt crisis, under Rubin's practical guidance and Greenspan's acquiescence, the Exchange Stabilisation Fund grew into a formidable presence, the abiding 'invisible hand' in the markets, also known colloquially as the 'Plunge Protection Team.' It has one of the few federal budgets that never really gets audited, outside of the military. And that is fitting, because these days paper money is an instrument of war.
But once you start that music playing, the trick is not how to keep it going, because a lie is almost inexhaustible as long as everyone still believes it. No, the trick is how to ever stop.
The Threepenny Opera, Die 3 Groschen-Oper, is a 1931 musical film directed by G. W. Pabst for the Weimar Berlin based Nero-Film AG. It is loosely based on the highly successful musical drama of the same name by Kurt Weil and Bertolt Brecht that opened on 31 August 1928 at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm.
The film is set in Victorian London, and focuses on the criminality and corruption of Macheath, Mackie Messer, or Mack the Knife, and his associates, including an old army comrade the chief of police, Tiger Brown. Macheath sees and quickly woos Polly Peachum, incurring the wrath of her powerful father, who outfits and trains the large army of beggars who populate the substrata of imperial London.
The original stage production was much more a scathing critique of financial capitalism than the film. Brecht broke with the Nero production when they refused to use his rewrites, which had become more sharply politicial.
In the film the street singer is played by Ernst Busch, who was an ardent socialist like Brecht, and become quite famous after the war with the Communists in East Germany. Kurt Weill was married to the singer, Lotta Lenya, who plays Jenny in both the play and the film, and found a successful career in the West after fleeing Germany.
By 1933, when Weill and Brecht were forced to leave Germany by the Nazi Party's Machtergreifung, or bloodless coup d'etat, the play had been translated into 18 languages and performed more than 10,000 times on European stages.
The original street singer was played by the actor Kurt Gerron, who rose to fame in his role opposite Marlene Dietrich in Der Blaue Engel. Gerron, who refused Weill's pleas to emigrate to the US because he was afraid of change, was executed by the Nazis after helping to produce an infamous propaganda film at the concentration camp at Theresienstadt.
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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