SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Twitter Spanked After Hours

Stocks were trading weakly most of the day, with a late day push for the green into the close.

After hours Twitter was down about 8% on a lackluster earnings report.

The US equity market is thinly traded and highly driven by technical (up) and any exogenous events which, if negative, could precipitate a violent sell off.

Let's see how they manage the formation of this current bubble, and how soon it will be before it meets El Cliffo. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Chris Hedges: The Myth of a Free Press

The bias in the US media towards corporate and special interests is apparent in some sources more easily and readily than in others, especially if one has access and bothers to look at a broad base of international news sources. 

The great change was institutionalized with the overturn of the Fairness Doctrine under Reagan in 1985 and the revoking of media ownership restrictions from 1934 and 1975 under the Clinton administration's Telecommunications Act of 1996.

What has changed perhaps is the extreme marginalization of independent sources.  For the most part media outlets declare themselves for one group or another.  The bias of the financial media in policy issues has become so obvious and servile to its corporate interests that it is almost embarrassing.  What is even more surprising is the reach of this sort of continuous advocacy journalism into 'mainstream' channels such as Fox and MSNBC that actively re-interpret reality to suit a class of viewers. 

This balkanization of the issues attracts large classes of listeners into group think, and precludes any meaningful debate of the issues, even to the very framing of the questions and the issues, and ultimately their very perception of reality.

This is a brief excerpt.   Read the entire article for free here.

"The mass media blindly support the ideology of corporate capitalism. They laud and promote the myth of American democracy—even as we are stripped of civil liberties and money replaces the vote. They pay deference to the leaders on Wall Street and in Washington, no matter how perfidious their crimes. They slavishly venerate the military and law enforcement in the name of patriotism.

They select the specialists and experts, almost always drawn from the centers of power, to interpret reality and explain policy. They usually rely on press releases, written by corporations, for their news. And they fill most of their news holes with celebrity gossip, lifestyle stories, sports and trivia. The role of the mass media is to entertain or to parrot official propaganda to the masses.

The corporations, which own the press, hire journalists willing to be courtiers to the elites, and they promote them as celebrities. These journalistic courtiers, who can earn millions of dollars, are invited into the inner circles of power. They are, as John Ralston Saul writes, hedonists of power...

The mass media are plagued by the same mediocrity, corporatism and careerism as the academy, labor unions, the arts, the Democratic Party and religious institutions. They cling to the self-serving mantra of impartiality and objectivity to justify their subservience to power.

The press writes and speaks—unlike academics that chatter among themselves in arcane jargon like medieval theologians—to be heard and understood by the public. And for this reason the press is more powerful and more closely controlled by the state.

It plays an essential role in the dissemination of official propaganda. But to effectively disseminate state propaganda the press must maintain the fiction of independence and integrity. It must hide its true intentions."

Chris Hedges, The Myth of a Free Press

Naomi Klein on Global Neoliberalism

Yellen's Trickle Down Dilemma

Why is the economy so sluggish?

Even if real wages are stagnant, and consumers are tapped, the Banks have been saved and stand ready to loan from an abundance of freshly created money (that they can obtain for almost nothing).

Why won't consumers make a leap of faith and borrow more, betting their last assets on an indifferent Congress and an elusive recovery?  

 

It's heads we win and tails you lose for the bailout Banks. 

 

And from a Banker's perspective it probably makes sense.

 

The Reason There Has Been No Sustainable Recovery

“When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done”

John Maynard Keynes  

How can an economy based on printing money and financial repression for a broken financial system achieve self-sustaining organic growth?

Where is the growth in aggregate demand fueled by a growth in employment and an increase in median wages?

Is the great mass of the public thriving, or barely surviving?

Why do we insist on blaming and denigrating the victims of a massive and ongoing financial fraud that after six years is still largely intact?

 

There is only one thesis that needs to be nailed to this door...

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.

Shanghai Posts 51.5 Tonnes of Gold For the Week: How Long Can the Gold Pool Be Sustained

"For 'tis the sport to have the engineer

Hoist with his own petard: and it shall go hard

But I will delve one yard below their mines,

And blow them at the moon."

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

The Shanghai Gold Exchange, where investors actually take their bullion rather than just play liar's poker with multiple paper claims for the same ounces, saw 51.5 tonnes of gold bullion taken in the latest week.

The trend of physical deliveries has been rising the last 12 weeks.

 

To put this in perspective, if there are 32,150.75 troy ounces of gold in a metric tonne, then the Comex has a total of just under 28 tonnes of registered (deliverable) gold in all of its warehouses.  

What is that, about three days supply in Shanghai?  Not to mention the other gold bullion markets around the world.

 

Sounds more symbolic, than practical.  Well, there can be great power in symbols— until long abused belief begins to falter, and confidence frays.  And then one risks the danger of using too much force one too many times, and losing the faithful obedience of the public.  And with it everything that allows a minority to govern.

 

There are another 239 tonnes in storage in all the Comex vaults, in the proper bullion eligible format, but not listed as deliverable at these prices.  Sometimes owners feel comfortable keeping the bullion there for storage, eliminating the need to have the bullion assayed if they ever wish to sell it.

So what does this all mean?    It means that the unsustainable will not be sustained. 

 

Some day the price of gold will likely be whatever China, Russia and like minded bullion markets say it is, the paper pushers in New York and London notwithstanding.   The tangled web of free trade and globalization, ain't it a bitch? 

  

It would already be so, except for the tired efforts of Wall Street's central banking friends and their access to leasing other people's bullion in a misguided effort to influence markets and rig their prices.

 

China and the rest of the world are apparently not yet tired of buying gold on the cheap. 

 

But make no mistake: Shanghai talks, and Wall Street walks.

 

This chart from the data wrangler Nick Laird at Sharelynx.com.

 

 

Related:  How Long Can Phase II of the Gold Pool Be Sustained