Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Théâtre de l'Absurde - Tales from Two Dimensional Davos Men

Estragon:  We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

Vladimir:  Yes, yes, we're magicians...

Estragon: Who believes him?

Vladimir: Everybody. It's the only version they know."

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot


The world needs a new generation of policymakers who don’t hobnob with billionaire speculators and who understand workers’ concerns. Unfortunately, the change will not come smoothly."

Andy Xie


"At the root of America's economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America's political and economic elite. A society of markets, laws, and elections is not enough if the rich and powerful fail to behave with respect, honesty, and compassion toward the rest of society and toward the world."

Jeffrey Sachs


"Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence. Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them.

People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right."

John Kenneth Galbraith

Stocks were in selloff mode from the overnight, as the rumors about trade deals that lifted the markets late last week had grown stale.

The economic news was not helping, either domestically or from overseas.

Some late afternoon rumor calibration from Larry Kudlow had stocks coming off their lows of the day, but still closing with some less than inconsequentials losses.

Gold and silver finished higher as the Dollar managed to close nearly unchanged after a dipsy doodle day.

The news of the day from Davos was almost unbelievably scripted and vacuous behind the headlines, while at the same time mildly nauseating.   Much like so many modern reality TV shows.

Speaking of which, McConnell has agreed to bring some of the Democratic 'kick the can' proposals over opening the government for a few weeks to a floor vote in the Senate.  They will also vote on Trumpolini's compromise proposal.

Need little, want less, love more.  For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant evening.

Snakes in Suits and Their Enablers - The Love of Most Will Grow Cold

"A confident, aggressive delivery style - often larded with jargon, clichés, and flowery phrases - makes up for the lack of substance and sincerity in their interactions with others ... they are masters of impression management; their insight into the psyche of others combined with a superficial - but convincing - verbal fluency allows them to change their personas skillfully as it suits the situation and their game plan.

They are known for their ability to don many masks, change 'who they are' depending upon the person with whom they are interacting, and make themselves appear likable to their intended victim."

Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, Snakes in Suits


"All my life I have been fighting against the spirit of narrowness and violence, arrogance, intolerance in its absolute, merciless consistency.  I have also worked to overcome this spirit with its evil consequences, such as nationalism in excess, racial persecution, and materialism.  In regards to this, the National Socialists are correct in killing me.  I have striven to make its consequences milder for its victims and to prepare the way for a change. In that, my conscience drove me – and in the end, that is a man's duty."

Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Lawyer Executed in Plötzensee Prison on 23 January 1945


"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Minister Executed in Flossenbürg Camp on 9 April 1945


'We cannot hope to affect the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep.'

Carl von Ossietzky,  Journalist Died in Berlin-Pankow under Gestapo custody, 4 May 1938


"Only people can be truly ugly, because they have free will to separate themselves from this [creation's] song of praise.  It often seems they will drown out this hymn with cannon thunder, curses, and blasphemy.  But I have realized they will not succeed. And so I want to throw myself on the side of the victor.”

Sophie Scholl, Student Executed in Munich by guillotine, 22 February 1943


"This elite-generated social control maintains the status quo because the status quo benefits and validates those who created and sit atop it. People rise to prominence when they parrot the orthodoxy rather than critically analyze it.  Intellectual regurgitation is prized over independent thought.  Voices of the dispossessed, different, and un(formally)educated are neglected regardless of their morality, import, and validity. Real change in politics or society cannot occur under the orthodoxy because if it did, it would threaten the legitimacy of the professional class and all of the systems that helped them achieve their status."

Kristine Mattis, The Cult of the Professional Class


"What is more disturbing to our peace of mind than the unconditional loyalty of members of totalitarian movements, and the popular support of totalitarian regimes, is the unquestionable attraction these movements exert on the elite, and not only on the mob elements in society. It would be rash indeed to discount, because of artistic vagaries or scholarly naivete, the terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count among its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members.

Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by 'a world of enemies,' 'one against all,' that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind lonjg before it is used to destroy the humanity, of man."

Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism


"Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity.  What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation."

Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion


“There is a lack of critical assessment of the past.  But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite.  So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.”

Ryszard Kapuściński, Writing About Suffering


“Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love.  In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find."

Julian Assange, Witnessing

The Third Reich did not come to power on the backs of their brutish stormtroopers alone. No, their rise to power was with the active participation of the educated and professional classes: the lawyers, doctors, financiers, teachers, and businessmen, who sought to use that abusive power for their own benefits and careers, and were then consumed in the madness that followed.

The devotion to pride, and the love of self, provokes at first the pettest of actions, and then anger, and self-deceiving lies, and sickly sweet opiate of self-righteous outrage in our society.   It provides an esacape from thought, from the grey areas, from the obligations of conscience, and from the fear of being human.

So the harsh words and narrow judgements of the worldly and those driven mad by worldly desire are to be expected for those who do not participate in their narrative.

But it is the falling off the faithful, and the petty slights and silent betrayals of friends, that stings the conscious hearts most deeply.

One sees this and ask themselves, 'Lord, who then can stand?'   But what they are really asking is, Lord, how long can I remain standing?'


In the faithful there is a love of love itself, still smoldering in their hearts, and its effects on their life and on their actions are unmistakable.

Even though sorely tempted, they remain apart from the anger and the madness, and abide with thei light that calls them.

The night approaches, and it is almost time to come home.  So we must allow ourselves to become lost in the dark.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Risk On - US Markets Closed on Monday

"For what does it profit a man, if he would gain the whole world, but lose his soul?"

Mark 8:36


"The word of God is a living thing, and works among us. It is sharper than a double-edged sword, and penetrates even to the dividing of soul and spirit, the joints and the marrow; it judges the innermost thoughts and inclinations of every heart.   Nothing in all of creation is hidden from the sight of the Lord.  Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we will some day give an account."

Hebrews 4:12-13


"And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.   We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak."

Martin Luther King, A Time to Break the Silence, Riverside Church, 4 April 1967


"But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow, before the gods of evil."

Martin Luther King, But If Not, Ebenezer Baptist Church, 5 November 1967


“Now the problem is not only unemployment.  Do you know that most of the poor people in our country are working every day?   And they are making wages so low that they cannot begin to function in the mainstream of the economic life of our nation.  These are facts which must be seen, and it is criminal to have people working on a full-time basis and a full-time job getting part-time income.”

Martin Luther King, 18 March 1968


"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

Ephesians 6:12

We murder the prophets and persecute those of good will, while paying lip service to their memories, and dishonoring their words, and our own solemn oaths and responsibilities.  

Are we not exceptional?  Are you not entertained?

There were stories in the financial media, increasingly upbeat stories about the US-China trade talks, both yesterday and today. Interestingly enough the story tellers were deliberate in having their 'sources' as considering the stories well worthy of skepticism. Supposedly China will be promising to buy 1.5$ trillion in US goods over the next six years to correct the trade deficit.

The market could use the boost I would imagine, and Trumpolini likes the spectacle of big numbers. Let us see if there is any substance in this going forward, or is this just a further spray of mist in the fog of currency war.

Nevertheless it was fully risk on into the stock market option expiration and a three day weekend.  As you know US markets will be closed on Monday in observance of Martin Luther King day, a martyr to conscience whose principles are given lip service, but not observed, in the official conduct of our credentialed class and ruling elite.

Gold and silver were down a bit sharply and the Dollar was higher.

Stocks soared on an obvious short squeeze, but finished off the highs.

Trumpolini says he will make a ‘major’ announcement on Saturday about border and shutdown.

There will be some rough winter weather heading into the Eastern US over the weekend.

Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and abuse those whom God has sent as messengers to you.  How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings.  But you would not let me. As you willed, your house is now yours— but is made desolate.’”

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Who Could See It Coming? - Dead Reckoning the Minsky Moment

"In particular, over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance."

Hyman Minsky, The Financial Instability Hypothesis


"Twenty-five years ago, when most economists were extolling the virtues of financial deregulation and innovation, a maverick named Hyman P. Minsky maintained a more negative view of Wall Street; in fact, he noted that bankers, traders, and other financiers periodically played the role of arsonists, setting the entire economy ablaze. Wall Street encouraged businesses and individuals to take on too much risk, he believed, generating ruinous boom-and-bust cycles. The only way to break this pattern was for the government to step in and regulate the moneymen.

Many of Minsky’s colleagues regarded his 'financial-instability hypothesis,' which he first developed in the nineteen-sixties, as radical, if not crackpot. Today, with the subprime crisis seemingly on the verge of metamorphosing into a recession, references to it have become commonplace on financial web sites and in the reports of Wall Street analysts. Minsky’s hypothesis is well worth revisiting."

John Cassidy, The Minsky Moment, The New Yorker, 4 February 2008.


"The period of financial distress is a gradual decline after the peak of a speculative bubble that precedes the final and massive panic and crash, driven by the insiders having exited but the sucker outsiders hanging on hoping for a revival, but finally giving up in the final collapse."

Charles Kindelberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises


"The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small.  It is nearly nil.  Perhaps this is inherent.  In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live.  To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it.  So the wise in Wall Street [and in the professional and credentialed class] are nearly always silent."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929


"People who lost jobs — and those are in the millions in 2008, 2009, and 2010 — have now gotten jobs, that’s true, but the jobs they’ve gotten have lower wages, have less security and fewer benefits than the ones they lost, which means they can’t spend money like we might have hoped they would if they had got the kinds of jobs they lost, but they didn’t...

The big tax cut last December, 2017, gave an awful lot of money to the richest Americans and to big corporations.  They had no incentive to plow that into their businesses, because Americans can’t buy any more than they already do.  They’re up to their necks in debt and all the rest.

So what they did was to take the money they saved from taxes and speculate in the stock market, driving up the shares and so forth.  Naive people thought that was a sign of economic health.  It wasn’t.  It was money bidding up the price of stock until the underlying economy was so far out of whack with the stock market that now everybody realizes that and there’s a rush to get out and boom, the thing goes down."

Richard Wolff, The Next Economic Crisis Is Coming

Bubbles most often resolve their imbalances irresponsibly and jarringly, with a correction that is sharp and destructive.  It is often triggered by some seemingly trivial event, especially if its predatory mispricing of risk has been allowed to fester for an extended period of time..  How can this be?

Credit cycles explain bubbles in modern finance, but the elite protect themselves and their banks from the effects. Hence, only the middle and working class loses. And this has been the case for many years now. Hence the growing unrest abroad, and the decisions by the electorate at home that seem to puzzle and provoke the very comfortable 'credentialed' class.

The reason for this is quite easy to understand. Those who benefit the most from the bubble both actively and passively help sustain it.   They are reluctant to surrender any potion of their enormous advantage and personal gains, even if it might be better for them in the long term.

They do not consider the damage that may be done to the underlying social fabric that supports and protects their wealth.  Contrary to all of the familiar assumptions, they are not acting rationally or prudently, even for themselves.  Their focus is short term and short-sighted.  They are drunk on their own success.

The interpreters and creators of the prevailing narrative are themselves beneficiaries of the bubble economy, and will go to great lengths to misdirect the public discussion from any root causes, and often from its very existence.  They will distract the public with inflammatory issues, economic fear,  stage-managed spectacles, and manufactured complexity.   And finally, in the extremes of their shamelessness, they will seek to blame the victims for their lack of sophistication and the government for its efforts to restrain their predatory frauds.

This enables the cycle of boom and bust to repeat and worsen beyond all reasonable expectations.

The lesson from history is that a system based on the ascendant greed of powerful insiders is rarely rational and self-correcting, and is often spectacularly self-destructive.  And those with the most power, in their wonderful self-delusion, simply do not care until it is too late.  They are blinded by the moment, in their competition with each other, and the insatiable nature of greed itself.  'Enough' is not in their reckoning.

To this end governments are fashioned, and people organize themselves from the damage that can be done to society as a whole by a few.   Unfortunately people forget, and it seems that at least once every generation or so the madness slips loose its restraints, and this sad lesson from history repeats.

And so once again the world must face its rendezvous with destiny.

The box scores for today's market action are shown in the graphs below.

Apparently rough weather is heading towards the east coast. The local grocery store was a nuthouse even in the early afternoon. I am making some chicken soup for myself and Dolly. Even if I could coax her out of her fuzzy blanket and pillows, Dolly would offer limited assistance.  She is clearly just in it for the chicken.

Have a pleasant evening.