Will God Dwell With His Creatures on Earth

 

"Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveler, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home.”

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

“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 broken. The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come.

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

"He became what we are, that he might make us what he is."

Athanasius of Alexandria

"Our Lord has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which He looks with compassion on this world, yours are the feet with which He walks to do good. Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world."

Teresa of Avila

"Those of us who are no longer present in body at the Christmas hearth may still be there in spirit with us, as we will some day be with them.  Not bound up in crippling self-pity, not immobilized by faceless fear, not fleeting as a merely morose remembrance, but to be there vitally in our lives as our good angels.

What greater gift could we possibly desire to receive, than the ability to do good, to persevere in love, and to thereby live in the love of those for whom we care and who care for us, always?  That gift is there, if only we will not shut the door of our hearts, and be open to it. 

Christmas is a time of life, remembrance, forgiveness, tolerance, and love. And so God bless us, everyone."

Jesse, 16 December 2015

May God open our hardened hearts, that He may dwell among us.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - $4 Trillion Triple Witch Option Expiration - Caught in a Credibility Trap

 

"Hot money seeks out the conscious mispricing of risk.  Capital, in the form of both money and personal talent, increasingly flows into malinvestment and the gaming of markets.  

The productive economy languishes, left wanting for the lack of creative resources and attention.  The bubble rises to unsustainable valuations— and fails, and a nation's capital is consumed.   The next five years are not about winning, but surviving."

Jesse, The Men Who Sold the World,  5 August 2019

"When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself.  To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality.   It is to disguise the reality."

John Kenneth Galbraith

“Reality denied comes back to haunt.”

Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

"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.   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

"The banks engage in fraud for two reasons. First, they profit from swindling the public. Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique. They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions."

Laurence Kotlikoff, When Banksters Buy Regulators and Prosecutors, Forbes, October 21, 2014



And so the last and one of the biggest quarterly option expirations for 2022 comes to an end.

It was, all in all, a wonderfully obvious and heavy-handed wash and rinse of the nation's capital markets.

Stocks slumped and went out on the lows, totally negating the phony CPI headfake rally from early in the week. 

Gold and silver bounced off the drubbing they took yesterday in honor of the expiration.

The Dollar edged a bit higher.

The VIX fell.

And now we slide out to the end of this year on holiday volumes, but with plenty of room for lightly regulated shark tanks to move prices around as they will.

Are you not entertained?

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Cycles of Folly: Bubble and Bust, Wash and Rinse - Spin Cycle

 

"That the rate of interest will be lower when commerce languishes and when there is little demand for money, than when the energies of commerce are in full play and there is an active demand for money, is indisputable; but it is equally beyond doubt, that every speculative mania which has run its course of folly and disaster in this country has derived its original impulse from cheap money." 

The Economist, 1858


"In their heavily self-biased opinion, if they want something, by rights it should be theirs.  So, nothing if not opportunistic, they take from public and private coffers alike whatever they think they can get away with.  And given their grandiose sense of self, they're inclined to believe they can get away with most anything."

Leon F. Seltzer


"The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal."

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Capitalist Fools, January 2009


"Folly is found in every age we know,
Even the most careful fools differ, but only in their ebb and flow."

Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Satires, 1666 tr. by Jesse


The spokesmodels were agape with wonder as the markets tanked hard today.

"Could this be a delayed reaction to the FOMC?"   

LOL

Stocks got hit hard and went out on the lows.

Gold and silver were body-slammed back down to support.

The VIX rose.

The Dollar DX rallied back from its recent low.

Tomorrow is the last big index option expiration of the year.

Duh.

The oligarchy is audacious.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Malevolent Mediocrity - And There's the Rinse

 

"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.

Have a pleasant evening.