Retrospective: Moral Hazard

 

Here is a reprint of one of the earliest entries on this platform from March 2008.

Widely ignored at the time, looking back now perhaps we will see the truth in it, and have a mind to breaking the cycle of recklessness and pillaging.   How many financial institutions have we bailed out since 2008?  Has wealth become more or less concentrated in fewer hands.  Has rampant risk-taking and speculation been reined in and reformed?  Is our financial system safer and more secure now?  Is the real economy flourishing or being starved of organic growth and productive capital formation? 

 

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 sociopaths in society as a whole.

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.

It is a lesson that the average person learns by the age of twelve and relearns, sometimes spectacularly, at least once in young adulthood.  If you do something wrong there can be bad outcomes, and you will pay the price and penalty.  Unfortunately there is a small but powerful oligarchy of privilege that is trying to project themselves onto the global stage while believing that they are immune to ordinary consequence, and have become addicted to the notion that 'others must pay' for their failures.

Moral hazard comes from rewarding bad behaviour in markets with wristslaps and bailouts. It is a danger to the economy and to the public.

Now we might expect even more brazen attempts to game the system. This inevitably leads to wild gyrations in stocks and bonds and commodities.  History suggests ever more brazen price manipulation so disconnected from reality that actual physical shortages result because of the corruption of the market pricing mechanism.

The wristslaps and bailouts will continue until these modern maestros kill themselves or someone else, and create damage too great to be bought off in the backrooms of the county courthouse.

At least their descent from the heights will be impressive, if you can avoid the impact crater.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Into the Valley of Death

 

"Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers.

That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents."

Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism, 2003

"We are still under the sway of the destructive and thoroughly vain belief that man is the pinnacle of creation and not just a part of it, and that therefore everything is permitted to him.  People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies.  We still close our eyes to the growing social, ethnic, and cultural conflicts in the world. We are still destroying the planet that was entrusted to us.

I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.

We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine core of all our actions – if they are to be moral – is responsibility.  Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success.  Responsibility to the order of Spirit, where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where, and only where, they will be properly judged.  Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred.”

Václav Havel, Speech to the US Congress, , February 21, 1990

“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me. Weep for yourselves and your children."

Luke 23:28

 

Stocks dropped decidedly today, going out on their lows, and giving up most of the rally that was Trump's phony announcement of a 'truce' that was used by insiders to game the markets.

Gold and silver were hit hard because it is an option expiration on the Comex for the April futures contracts.

The Dollar moved to the top of the 99 handle.   

Bitcoin gave up its recent push higher and slipped back down into the trading range it has been held in since the beginning of February.

VIX crept higher.

Israel and the US bases in the Mideast are largely exposed to Iranian missile attacks now, as the 'Iron Dome' has become depleted of effective interceptors.

The US seems to be preparing for some sort of ground action with light infantry.  And of course there is the chance of a targeted strike as we had seen in Venezuela against the Iranian leadership and nuclear or missile facilities.

And so we continue on into the valley of tears and death, pulled forward by the vanity of madness.

They will never learn, but can we? 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Nothing Stands Between Them and Tears

 

"Such unsustainable arrangements are backed by force and fraud.  And as the fraud loses its power over time, force must increase, until there is an end in genuine reform, or eventual self-destruction."

Jesse, Credibility Trap, 24 August 2012

"Those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.  But at the time their own destruction seems impossible to them.  For they do not see that the force in their possession is only a limited quantity; nor do they see their relations with other human beings as a kind of balance between unequal amounts of force.

Since other people do not impose on their movements that halt, that interval of hesitation, wherein lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity, they conclude that destiny has given complete license to them, and none at all to their inferiors.

And at this point they exceed the measure of the force that is actually at their disposal.  Inevitably they exceed it, since they are not aware that it is limited.  And now we see them committed irretrievably to chance; suddenly things cease to obey them.  Sometimes chance is kind to them, sometimes cruel.  But in any case there they are, exposed, open to misfortune; gone is the armor of power that formerly protected their naked souls; nothing, no shield, stands between them and tears."

Simone Weil, L'Iliade ou le poème de la force, 1939

"The lie is comfortable, an illusion easy to live with, familiar, and safe."

Jesse, Elite in the Grip of Fear, Fraud, and Denial, 16 May 2010

“Prepare for great battles.  Know that you are now on a great stage where all heaven and earth are watching you.  Before I come as a just Judge, I will first open wide the door of My mercy.”

Maria Faustina Kowalska, Divine Mercy in My Soul, Kraków 1938


Stock futures were jammed higher in the quiet overnight trading once again. 

This is all a part of the 'public relations' campaign being spun by the Trump Administration.

His minions have pointed to the "50,000 Dow" often enough to know this is one of their fig leafs covering a failing economy and administration.

Gold and silver  bounced around, gaining quite a bit in the overseas, overnight trading, and then being whittled down in the NY trading hours.

All is well, don't you know.

The economic data was inflationary.

VIX ticked lower, because all is well, you know.

Bitcoin is stuck on the wash and rinse cycle.

If the smart money is not slowly exiting from this 'asset' I will be surprised. 

Despite the circuses and illusions, nothing has changed in the fundamentals of risk and the markets.  

Not one thing.  Stocks and the economy are cooked, and the rest of the world is finding a refuge in non-Dollar dependent assets. 

Trump is moving troops towards Iran every day.   This talk of peace seems to be the usual scam.  

Netanyahu will not countenance anything but the reduction of Iran to a broken state.  And Iran is rather keen for eliminating what they now perceive as an existential threat.

And everyone has forgotten all about Ukraine, and the horrendous Epstein scandals.

We are coming up on an option expiration on the Comex this Thursday, more for gold than silver.

And next week is Holy Week.

I still remember a Palm Sunday, many years ago in Zermatt.  We woke up early, as the low hanging, dense cloud cover from the night we arrived had dissipated.  And we watched the sun lighting the top of the Matterhorn.

The air was crisp and very cold, and there was singing as people were exiting the local church, carrying the branches of evergreens.

Some are happy that Trump's approval rating is 'down' to only 35%.   All things considered, after all that has been revealed, I am shocked that it is so high.

There is a sickness in the body politic that has been growing steadily for some time.

"Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”    C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

What are we becoming. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Dead Money Devoid of Greatness

 

"The truly savage and frenetic part of New York, the terrible, cold, cruel part, is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills this street believes that the world will always be the same, that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.

I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several billion dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea.  Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness.  I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings."

Federico Garcia Lorca, A Poet In New York, October 1929

"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people. What is called 'fellow traveling' (enabling and collaboration) was primarily a commercial interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much. That is a general law of the status quo.

The coldness of a society of the isolated competitor was the precondition as indifference to the fate of others. Regressive tendencies, that is, people with repressed sadistic traits, are produced everywhere today by the global evolution of society. Everywhere where it is mutilated, consciousness is reflected back in an unfree form that tends toward violence. One of the greatest impulses of Christianity, not immediately identical with its dogma, was to eradicate the coldness that permeates everything. But this attempt failed; surely because it did not reach into the societal order that produces and reproduces that coldness."

Theodore Adorno, neo-Marxist philosopher, Erziehung nach Auschwitz, 1966

"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but it was wrong in thinking that we can get them for ourselves without grace."

Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la grâce, posthume 1947


In trying to follow God's will, we all overcomplicate our part. It is not a bad thing, just a thing that we do in day to day life as 'problem solvers' that gets in the way of serving a higher power. It is a matter shifting gears from one thing to another. The mix between faith and free will is a life long study.

Don't get discouraged about the 'what' and think more about the 'how.' Start with doing little things, but with great love for His sake in faith and gratitude, and keep going.

As the apostle John himself said around 100 AD, as related by the father of the church Origen of Alexandria in the second century and picked up by Jerome in the 4th century:

The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, 'Little children, love one another.'

The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, 'Teacher, why do you always say this?' He replied with a line worthy of John: 'Because it is the Lord's commandment, and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.'"

Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, 4th century

Could this be any more simple and clear? You are most likely not here to build a monument, or a lead a great crusade, or gain and acclaim. Not a Saint with a capital 'S'. If you are then God will let you know. But you are commanded to live each moment with God's grace, and do ordinary, simple things but with great love.

I have been at this for about thirty years now in a focused way.  I asked God to show me all my sins so I may be sorry for them now, and not later on. And he is still at it, feeding them to me little by little as I can accept the knowledge and learn from it. 

A notable 'Someone', whom I admire very much, read my work that had been shared by a friend, and recently asked me 'what have you done, that I must be someone.'  And I said no, I am just a man, and not a particularly good one.  And that was it.  

I am obscure, by God's great kindness and tender mercy. I have had my fifteen minutes, and it is hollow and a snare.  If I do any good it is hidden from me.  I struggle, every day, to have ill will towards no one, to perform little acts of kindness for all God's creatures with little thanks, and pray for the salvation of even the most vexing and offensive of sinners to extinguish any anger that creeps in the heart.

I am just one among many.  I diminish with age. And I accept it.  And I am grateful for all I have.  Having lost much, now I can see them more clearly.  

And I am slowly beginning to understand His mercy.  Little things, but with great love. And that is enough. 

Stocks flopped today after the insider trading exercise yesterday announcing a phony truce.

Iran is not going to settle, except for strong internationally backed guarantees.  Why would they?  Would you?

Gold and silver were smacked around a little more, with gold taking the brunt of it with its April contract options coming due on the 26th.

The Dollar is hanging around the mid 99 handle.  The DXY index is so heavily weighted to the Euro that the failing leadership of the European Union is making it look better than it is.

VIX looks like it might be coiling here.

Bitcoin is obviously locked into a trading range since the beginning of February.   Take a look at the chart below if you don't know this.  They are just moving Bitcoin around the plate trying to skin specs and daytraders.

If the market crashes, Bitcoin is going down for the count, and unlike gold and silver I don't see how it is going to come back without official help.

Trump's 'Five Day Pause' expires after the market close on Friday.  US has troops moving into position. 

Draw your own conclusions and take it from there

The Trump Administration is dancing on a volcano.   One leg is on Iran, and the other leg is on the Ukraine.

Madness. 

Have a pleasant evening.