"I was being called to surrender the very citadel of my self. I was completely in the dark. I did not really know what repentance was or what I was required to repent of. It was indeed the turning point of my life. God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn. I was no longer the centre of my life, and therefore I could see God in everything." Bede Griffiths
"Do you think he is so unskillful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the truth? No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform.
This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind. He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them.
He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."
J. H. Newman
Things are getting stretched out quite a bit. We are in what can modestly be called pivotal times.
The market for equities is now pricing in expectations of both a corporate tax cut and a repatriation deal for the transfer priced cash that US corporations have been hoarding in tax havens overseas.
The Deep State, formerly known as the Military/Industrial Complex, is showing more of its ugly face than it has since Vietnam and the untimely death of John F. Kennedy.
What really matters is not what they do— it is whom you choose to serve, and what you do, for that is what you will be asked about, and answered.
No matter how attractive the glamours of the world may seem, there is only one thing in the end that has value, that is worth it all.
In the end, there is only one real tragedy. Keep your eye on the prize.
“Christ 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 among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth, but yours.”
Teresa of Ávila
"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all that I possess to the poor, and surrender my body over to hardships that I may boast of them, but do not have love, I achieve nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails"
"And I'll leave you with one set of numbers that I found today, which is just an absolute for this whole thing. In 2015, Wall Street Bonuses, not regular compensation, bonuses, seven years after they were bailed out with the public purse, totaled $29.4 billion dollars. Total compensation paid to every single person in this country who makes minimum wage totaled $14 billion...
The era of neo-liberalism is over. The era of neo-nationalism has just begun."
Mark Blyth
"Caesar was swimming in blood, Rome and the whole pagan world was mad. But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins.
When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one— happiness and love."
Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis: The Time of Nero
When historians look back on this period of the last forty years and diagnose what went wrong, they might do worse than to conclude that at the root of it was a general failure of character, from the top down.
The replacing of honor and duty with egoism and greed as the most honored of civic virtues was a long and slow process. It took root and was nurtured in a portion of the population that was served by it during the Reaganomics revolution, but eventually spread to those institutions and groups that had generally provided a bulwark for freedom and justice against the perennial amorality of the greedy.
Although they were certainly not the root cause of it, the Clintons played a prominent role in sealing the deal between the political and the financial class, and throwing the whole thing into a higher gear. They made political corruption, which heretofore had been hidden in the closets, fashionable.
Indeed, it may not be too much to say that they were to soft corruption in politics what Henry Ford was to automobile production. They certainly did not invent it, and were probably not the worst compared to some of their colleagues across the aisle, but they industrialized it, and knocked down the last bastions of public conscience in the process by showing how well greed could pay off while still maintaining some semblance of public respectability.
There will be a three day weekend in the US markets because of President's Day on Monday.
There was some surprisingly good 'soft' data this week in the Philly Fed and Empire Manufacturing reports. Let us see if those translate into good, hard economic numbers.
The crux of the problem is the huge imbalance between corporate power and the ability of worker's to achieve increasing wages. Without increasing wages, broader aggregate demand in the form of consumption cannot be sustained.
It was sustained during a long period of wage stagnation by innovative debt instruments associated with the housing bubble that was greatly encouraged by the financial sector and their servants in the political and professional classes. The fraud which they helped to perpetuate was conscious and pre-meditated. The crafted specific financial offerings towards that purpose.
However, in the aftermath of the housing bubble collapse, the ability and willingness of the average American to go into debt for ordinary consumption is reluctant to say the least. At least half the nation is living paycheck to paycheck with little to no savings.
This is not going to end well or easily as you might expect. However, the elites have been winning for so long, and are so full of themselves, and so firmly committed to their schemes that I think they will finally let the whole thing hit the wall in some way, and then make the people another deal that they cannot refuse, as they had done with the bank bailouts in 2008.
And that is where the right preparations and the willingness to do what is required of this generation will be most important.
No one ever said that it would be easy, or that we would be going to heaven on featherbeds.
I find the current political situation to be as bad as I thought it would be when I forecasted it about ten years ago. The worst is yet to come.
The corruption in the system is becoming much more apparent. The extreme biases in the mainstream media in favor of their particular owner's faction is fairly obvious.
The liberal establishment, in their zeal to excuse themselves and their failure to support the working class, is embracing a kind of McCarthyism with an ease that is almost astonishing in its hypocrisy. The hypocrisy on display at MSNBC is almost as embarrassing as that on Fox News.
That the Wall Street Democrats brought their own political failure on themselves by their strong and enduring pivot to the wealthier urban professionals is something that escapes their consciousness.
And on the other hand, the Republican establishment is gone bananas in their service to greed. I figure if they are able to beat down Trump like the Democrats beat down Bernie, then we are in for a real reckoning.
This is nothing new. Indeed, this resembles the America of the past more than most people realize. Our education is slanted and poor, and our national self-image is a masterpiece of public relations.
The discussing of politics is 'fun' and avoids having to make comments on what is certainly a confusing period in American economics. I try to stay on that topic, especially since so few are actually shedding light on it these days. But truth be told, money and politics are often about power, and nevermore as in times of general corruption, when might makes right. Or at least policy that they call right.
This is the worst, most sluggish 'recovery' we have seen in modern times here. But since it has a bipartisan stamp, it is difficult for some to wrap their politically black and white heads around it.
And I hate to resort to it, but in historical terms what we are seeing is more like a 'class war' from ages long ago than any kind of financial new era. The moneyed class turned the law and the thought leaders framing to their own benefit, and would now do anything they can to keep their ill-gotten gains.
Wrap it up in a credibility trap and tie a bow around it, and here we are.
The dollar took a dive today, and the metals priced in dollars managed a bounce off of that.
Stocks bobbled a bit, but managed to hold on to their recent nearly vertical rally gains. The three major indices, the Dow, the SP 500 and the Nasdaq 100 are all at new highs. Oh my mistake. The Russell 2000 makes it four.
I doubt the market will sell off, unless there is an 'event' to drive real selling, until the SNAP IPO gets squeezed out. The valuation has been reduced somewhat, from the outrageous to the merely absurd.
"Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases.
They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."
Henry Wallace, 9 April 1944
"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich."
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty
“It appeared as if the whole world was one elaborate system, opposed to justice and kindness, and set to making cruelty and pain.”
Upton Sinclair, Oil!
There was intraday commentary on the EU and rising populism here.
After a brief bobble while the lady Yellen reslung her jawbone, stocks and precious metals went on a tear higher as the dollar slumped.
Smells like dovishness and a short squeeze all rolled into one happy package.
Stocks are so overextended that even the VIX had to reflect the increased sense of risk.
When is that SNAP IPO going to be squeezed out to the market? Maybe not soon enough to be a correction.
My laptop screen failed on Sunday evening. Since it is only seven months old the new screen and connector will be free, but the inconvenience of not having it this week is particularly annoying because I am keeping an eye on the queen and helping her out quite a bit. I cannot do that from my study downstairs. It should be back by the end of this week.
We have a three day weekend coming up with President's Day on the 20th.
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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