"Money is not humanity’s best subject. And although our body of scientific knowledge grows with each passing year, when it comes to financial matters, we somehow keep stepping on the same rake — that inescapable pattern of financial boom and bust."
James Grant
"There’s a verbal tic particular to a certain kind of response to a certain kind of story about the thinness and desperation of American society; about the person who died of preventable illness or the Kickstarter campaign to help another who can’t afford cancer treatment even with 'good' insurance; about the plight of the homeless or the lack of resources for the rural poor; about underpaid teachers spending thousands of dollars of their own money for the most basic classroom supplies; about train derailments, the ruination of the New York subway system and the decrepit states of our airports and ports of entry...
'I can’t believe this in the richest country in the world. …'
The social wealth of a society is better measured by the quality of its common lived environment than by a consolidated statistical approximation like GDP, or even an attempt at weighted comparisons like so-called purchasing power parity. There is a reason why our great American cities, for all of our supposed wealth, often feel and look so shabby. The money goes elsewhere...
Poverty—both individual and social—is a policy, not an accident, and not some kind of natural law. These are deliberate choices about the allocation of resources. They are eminently undoable by modest exercises of political power, although if the state- and city-level Democratic leaders of New York and northern Virginia are the national mold, then our nominally left-wing party is utterly, hopelessly beholden to the upward transfer of social wealth to an extremely narrow cadre of already extremely rich men and women."
Jacob Bacharach, The Egregious Lie Americans Tell Themselves
"Today, the first and perhaps the only duty of the philosopher is to defend man against himself: to defend man against that extraordinary temptation toward inhumanity to which - almost without being aware of it - so many human beings today have yielded."
Gabriel Marcel
Stocks were swooning today, perturbed by Brexit and Trexit: Britain's proposed exit from the EU and the Sino-American Trade Dispute and disengagement from 'free trade.'
Gold and silver were higher on a slightly weaker dollar.
There will be a precious metals option expiration next Tuesday.
This will be a holiday-shortened trading week due to the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday.
The highly volatile NDX futures are in a cautionary state due to their renewed decline. The SP 500 has not yet followed and confirmed.
If life seems particularly confusing, perhaps you might consider the sources of information with which you are feeding your mind. Some sites have become cornucopias of thinly disguised propaganda written by hawkers of hyperbolic hoo-haw. They trade in false outrage, pander to prejudice, and will say almost anything for clicks. They have chosen to serve mammon.
Alas, their commercial 'success' provides a bad example and rationale for many others to do the same, to succumb to the temptation to give themselves over to the glamours of death and deceit.
There should be little surprise that feeding your mind all day on such junk gives you a headache.
The young man is in London for the next two weeks, visiting his girlfriend who is finishing her studies there. He is still doing his degree work at NYU. The out-of-town in-laws start arriving tonight.
Dolly and I abide.
Have a pleasant evening.
