Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Shaken, But Not Stirred - Credibility Trap

"This strange, weak obstinacy, this persistence in the wrong path of progress, grows weaker and worse, as do all such weak things. And by the time in which I write its moral attitude has taken on something of the sinister and even the horrible.

Our mistakes have become our secrets. Editors and journalists tear up with a guilty air all that reminds them of the party promises unfulfilled, or the party ideals reproaching them. It is true of our statesmen that socially in evidence they are intellectually in hiding. The society is heavy with unconfessed sins; its mind is sore and silent with painful subjects; it has a constipation of conscience.

There are many things it has done and allowed to be done which it does not really dare to think about; it calls them by other names and tries to talk itself into faith in a false past, as men make up the things they would have said in a quarrel. Of these sins one lies buried deepest but most noisome, and though it is stifled, stinks: the true story of the relations of the rich man and the poor in England. The half-starved English proletarian is not only nearly a skeleton but he is a skeleton in a cupboard."

G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

That is a very good description of the credibility trap.

The ruling elite find themselves temporarily embarrassed, even shaken, by their repeated failures in economic and public policy over the past twenty years or so.

However, since they themselves are doing so well, they have not yet stirred themselves to do anything yet about it.

And so they continue to repeat their failures, from bubble to crash to bubble, stretching the fabric of society to hide their terrible errors, to blind themselves as they teeter towards the abyss.

Have a pleasant weekend.

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Labor Games

Some days I just do not have the words.

I would like to point out just one anomaly in the Jobs Report.

The 'plug' that the BLS puts in for jobs that were added and subtracted by small business being created and failing is called 'the Birth/Death Model.' It is a fairly substantial number in some months. I refer to it as the 'imaginary jobs number.'

This number is added to the unseasonalized, unadjusted raw jobs number, and then is seasonalized and adjusted to form the basis for the 'headline number.'   You can think of this BLS Birth/Death model as one part of a 'double adjustment' on the jobs.

One thing that stood out on this report was that the imaginary jobs added were exactly 213,000 for both April and May.

I cannot recall seeing a number repeat so exactly like this in all the years I have been watching these reports.  I just thought that it was interesting.  Normally the numbers are much more volatile.

 

If you back out the imaginary jobs with the second layer of seasonality the economy added about 64,000 jobs.  I tend to watch this each month.  

 

I am sure that there are a number of jobs being added by companies being created and going out of business.  But I think what the BLS comes up with is best looked at over a long period of time, and is inappropriate as a monthly indicator of just about anything. 

 

The 'jobs' in the US tend to be growing, slower than the increasing workforce, and also tend to be low paid.   The Administration was quick to say that this is why we should be cheering for the TPP, because any export jobs it might create are likely to be higher-paying.

 

And except for media drones and politicians, no one over the age of seven is likely to have found any of that to be credible.

 

Have a pleasant weekend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Financialization: Reaping Profits Without Prosperity

“Corporate profitability is not translating into widespread economic prosperity. Five years after the official end of the Great Recession, corporate profits are high, and the stock market is booming. Yet most Americans are not sharing in the recovery.

While the top 0.1% of income recipients—which include most of the highest-ranking corporate executives—reap almost all the income gains, good jobs keep disappearing, and new employment opportunities tend to be insecure and underpaid. The allocation of corporate profits to stock buybacks deserves much of the blame.”

Harvard Business Review, Profits Without Prosperity

Non-Farm Payrolls tomorrow.

 

Fundamentals do not matter to The Bucket Shop, in either direction. 

 

It is all about the game, and keeping it going, while placating the money masters.

 

The game is the thing.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Non-Farm Payrolls Tomorrow

"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

They kill us for their sport."

William Shakespeare, King Lear

It is easier for those who would be as a god to display their godly powers by crafting the simulacrums of life without vitality, such as asset bubbles. 

 

They lack that which is essential to create organic life and growth, which is the wisdom of love.

 

I suspect that we will see a fairly painful reckoning in the markets, probably within the next twelve months, but maybe not just yet.

While the lines of 'support' hold, the Fed has the wind at the back of the financial paper markets.

 

If you wish to know why there is no organic, broad-based recovery in the US, and probably the UK and Europe, listen to this short explanation from Elizabeth Warren here.

As you might have gathered from some of the quotes, I was rereading portions of Chesterton's book  Eugenics and Other Evils, what was then called 'scientific government.'    

I was particularly struck by one of his observations. 

“Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.”

 

What Chesterton refers to as 'abnormal innocence' is the willing naïveté of an ideology or theorists who suspend their experience and common sense to promote a particular ideal as the basis of a solution.  And of course the abnormal sin is evil, and not of the ordinary kind.  And the dupes are its deceptions.

 

In retrospect it is remarkable that he so deftly gets to the bottom of the social movements of his day, and almost predicts with stunning accuracy the adoption of mass sterilization and eventually mass euthanasia of 1930s and 1940s.

 

But we see similar examples even in our own time, if not of the same degree.  

 

The notion that people will act in perfectly good and rational ways is absurd when you say it that way.   But it is at the heart of so many of the economic theories that have plagued us in the deification of the modern markets and money in the past twenty to thirty years. 

 

This includes the massive confiscation and transfers of wealth through the abuse of financial paper, and the persecution and abuse of whole peoples and even nations through the tyranny of debts.

 

Dangerously willful delusions often open the door for great suffering and injustice.  And the irony is that they are so often enabled by the well-meaning sophistry of idealists, who would crush reality into meaningless to enable their models to roll forward with the greatest expediency.  

“I had thought of calling the next sort of superficial people the Idealists; but I think this implies a humility towards impersonal good they hardly show; so I call them the Autocrats. They are those who give us generally to understand that every modern reform will 'work' all right, because they will be there to see... And these people most certainly propose to be responsible for a whole movement after it has left their hands. Each man promises to be about a thousand policemen. If you ask them how this or that will work, they will answer, “Oh, I would certainly insist on this”; or “I would never go so far as that”; as if they could return to this earth and do what no ghost has ever done quite successfully—force men to forsake their sins. Of these it is enough to say that they do not understand the nature of a law any more than the nature of a dog. If you let loose a law, it will do as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Such sense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled. But you will not be able to fulfil a fragment of anything you have forgotten to put into it.”  

G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

Elizabeth Warren On Corrosive Effects Of Big Money Politics on Public Policy

"The powers that ruled him had not fitted him with a knapsack, any more than they had fitted him with a future—or even a present. The destitute Englishman, so far from hoping to become anything, had never been allowed even to be anything.

...for the English it was the bottom rungs that were knocked out, so that they could not even begin to climb. And sooner or later, in exact proportion to his intelligence, the English plutocrat began to understand not only that the poor were impotent, but that their impotence had been his only power.

The truth was not merely that his riches had left them poor; it was that nothing but their poverty could have been strong enough to make him rich. It is this paradox, as we shall see, that creates the curious difference between him and every other kind of robber."

G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

This is the heart of the problem, why there has been no significant reform, no meaningful programs of infrastructure rebuilding, and why the US is suffering this mysterious, secular stagnation.

 

Part of it is the credibility trap.  How can long time insiders talk meaningfully about reform, when they were very much a part of the things, the changes, the repeal of long time safeguards and reforms from the past that created the problems?

 

They thought they were voting for change, and instead the two party system gave them another stooge of Big money.  And the Congress, despite record low approval ratings, does not seem all that concerned.  How can this be?

Big money owns Washington, and they like things exactly the way that they are.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Shaking Down that Open Interest

This is certainly an 'active month' for gold, at least on the Comex.

Quite a few punters are standing for delivery, or at least, what passes for delivery at The Bucket Shop.

Since supply is tight, better to try and reduce demand, and open interest with the usual tired bag of price rigging shenanigans.

How strong are those hands. What a drama. Not.

 

What happens in New York and London these days is a carney side show. 

 

The real markets are primarily in Asia.  

 

And they remain stubbornly physical, even though the Bucket Shop's sahibs in India are beside themselves in trying to find an effective way to paperize their precious metals.

 

I don't think that Mrs. Das will be handing over her jewelry for a bunch of paper claim tickets any time soon.

 

Have a pleasant evening.