"You are the very cause of your ignorance, yourselves. You put away the light, yourselves; you first pluck out both your own eyes, yourselves; and after that other men’s too, so that the blind may lead the blind, until you both fall into the pit.”
Thomas More, The Sadness of Christ (Gethsemane), Tower of London, 1535
"The problem with movies and books is they make evil look glamorous, exciting, when it's no such thing. It's boring and it's depressing and it's stupid. Criminals are all after cheap thrills and easy money, and when they get them, all they want is more of the same, over and over.
They're shallow, empty, boring people who couldn't give you five minutes of interesting conversation if you had the poor luck to be at a party full of them. Maybe some can be monkey-clever, some of the time, but they aren't hardly ever smart."
Dean Koontz
"The secret of great returns which are difficult to explain is a crime that has not yet been discovered because it has been carefully executed."
Honoré de Balzac, Pere Goriot
"At worst perhaps it was malevolent mediocrity."
John Ralson Saul, The Unconscious Civilization
"The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. vOne of the most alarming, says a chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government - a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation; recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform."
Simon Johnson, Quiet Coup, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2009
Dollar moved lower.
VIX fell back down to the start of this latest wash-rinse cycle.
Gold and silver took a hit.
Stocks swung up and then fell down, bouncing off the lows.
Option expiration on Friday.
Big wheel keep on churning, main street keep on burning.
"I thought of this upside down debt pyramid when I was at Citibank in the early ‘60s. I first gave talks on it inside the bank, trying to influence the bank because I saw too much borrowing short term and lending long term. It was just awful! I kept on warning the bank, but was just brushed aside. When Nixon closed the gold window I said, 'This is my chance to get out,' so I took it. It was a great move on my part because I could buy gold and gold mining shares when gold was $50 an ounce or less."
John Exter, 1991
(As late as 2001 gold was trading between $272-$292. The sea change came in 2008 when central banks became net buyers of bullion, although the signs of change were there in 2006.)
"Moral hazard is the probability that a party insulated from risk will behave differently from the way they would behave if fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act with increasing recklessness, literally 'without reckoning.' It also encourages the rise to power of the sociopaths in the affected organizations.
It is difficult to explain moral hazard to tenured professors or the pampered princes of bureaucracy, who beat the drum with their silver spoons in support of shifting the risk of loss to the public every time that Wall Street falls into one of its own schemes and blows itself up."
Jesse, Moral Hazard, 22 March 2008
"Over and over we fall into the same trap. Ten years from now we will have forgotten."
Eliot Spitzer, July 14, 2009
“One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgement, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding.”
Tim Kreider
“We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to dominate us. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”
Gore Vidal
Most of us learn nothing because we are disinclined and even encouraged to forget things, and instead burn with borrowed rage. It is not that we are incapable of thinking, but are generally more inclined towards self-indulgent and complacent behaviour. Our values are shallow and selfish.
Many forget or even dismiss and distort the facts willingly, since it is the easiest way to get along without the effort and risk of thinking independently, choosing instead to mouth slogans and half truths.
And then there are those 'very serious people' from among the self-appointed elite, whose forgetfulness though carefully rationalized is conscious, mandated by their paychecks, positions and pride.
We deal away our sovereign souls for trifles and vanities.
Stocks delivered an express wash and rinse, as a slightly better than expected CPI number triggered a s rocket rally.
This was the shenanigan that I had been expecting, although it happened more quickly than the usual CPI headfake wash and rinse.
I thought the rinse cycle would be coming with the FOMC tomorrow.
But we had a change of pace. The wiseguys have no shame or fear of consequences.
Gold and silver also rocketed higher and both managed to hold on to some of those gains, short of a real breakout.
The Dollar dumped.
More opportunities for hijinks in the rest of the week.
"Why is surprise the permanent condition of the U.S. political and economic elite? In 2007-8, when the global financial system imploded, the cry that no one could have seen this coming was heard everywhere, despite the existence of numerous analyses showing that a crisis was unavoidable.
Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks. In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface.
Although the stated intention of political leaders and economic policymakers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite. These artificially constrained systems become prone to 'Black Swans' — that is, they become extremely vulnerable to large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set of observers.
Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off-guard and undoing years of stability or, in some cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems."
Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan of Cairo, Foreign Affairs, May 2011
Stocks rallied today, on surprisingly light volume
The VIX rose sharply.
The Dollar chopped sideways.
Gold and silver declined.
This is an interesting week.
Tomorrow we get the CPI reading.
Wednesday there will be an FOMC rate decision.
And Friday there will be the last index option expiration of the year.
Wash-rinse-repeat.
The stars of financial shenaniganza are in alignment.
"We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen. Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness."
Thomas Merton
"Be patient, brothers and sisters,
until the coming of the Lord.
See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth,
being patient with it
until it receives the early and the late rains.
You too must be patient. Make your hearts firm,
because the coming of the Lord is at hand. Do not complain, brothers and sisters, about one another,
that you may not be judged."
James 5:7-9
"Strengthen the hands that are feeble,
make firm the knees that are weak. Say to those whose hearts are frightened: be strong, fear not!
Here is your God,
he comes with vindication. With divine justice
he comes to save you."
Isaiah 35:3-4
"Do all without constant arguing and complaining, so that you may be blameless and righteous as children of God, unlike those of this contentious and perverse generation, among whom you may shine like lights to the world, as you hold firmly to the word of life."
Philippians 2:14-15
"Let us rejoice while we mourn. Let us look up to our Lord and Saviour. Let us, in our penitence, not substitute the Law for the Gospel, but add the Law to the Gospel. As they must not defraud themselves of Christian privileges, neither need they give up God's temporal blessings. All the beauty of nature, the kind influences of the seasons, the gifts of sun and moon, and the fruits of the earth, the advantages of civilized life, and the presence of friends and intimates; all these good things are but one extended and wonderful type of God's benefits in the Gospel. Those who aim at perfection will not reject the gift, but add a corrective; they will add the bitter herbs to the fatted calf and the music and dancing; they will not refuse the flowers of earth, but they will toil in plucking up the weeds.
Or if they refrain from one temporal blessing, it will be to reserve another; for this is one great mercy of God, that while He allows us a discretionary use of His temporal gifts, He allows a discretionary abstinence also; and He almost enjoins upon us the use of some, lest we should forget that this earth is His creation, and not of the evil one.
May God give us grace to walk thus humbly, thus soberly, thus without censoriousness in this day of confusion; enjoying His blessings, yet taking them with fear and trembling; and disciplining ourselves without gloom, yet not judging or slandering those who are more rigid or less secular than ourselves.
John Henry Newman
“This great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, compassion, historical necessity or even social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Word, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior. Christians are called to compassion and to action.
Only the humble believe in Him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that He does wonders where people despair, that He takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous.
And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs His wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; He loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak, and the broken.
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
"I am speaking now, more directly, to those who embrace hatred and spread thoughts of violence and repression, often in the name of God, giving scandal to His faithful on earth.
I am speaking to those who stoke the fires of hatefulness, and violent words, gossip and name calling, insults and hardness towards their brothers and sisters in this world, while cynically asking, 'Who is my neighbor? Surely not them.'
May God have mercy on any who provide provocation and false teachings to others, and scandalous examples to their brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren. Especially because of their willful selfishness, stubborn greed, and foolish pride. And you know who you are, if you are not already completely dead to the life of the Spirit."
Jesse, 19 January 2015
O Lord,help us to understand that it is not only the afflicted who are in danger, but those of us who comfortably look on and at best do nothing, and worse spread controversy, fear, mistrust and hatred. Pierce our hardened hearts, enlighten our blindness, and break the chains of our pride and self-deception, so that we may choose life.
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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