The Elites of the World and Their Enablers

"Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population.  Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful (though sometimes badly mismanaged) industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy.  These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, [corporate media], and lobbying industry."

Charles Ferguson

The establishment media loves to play the red-blue game that has been set up by the corporate oligarchs.   The left has their watering holes, and the right has their testosterone pits.  And those who find comfort in black and white red-blue treatments of political and social issues will tend to migrate to one or the other, to find comfort among liars and hypocrites who 'say for pay.'

At the highest levels it is really not a red-blue game at all, except when it manifests as a power struggle between what may seem like competing crime families.

We are in a period of historically extreme economic inequality. And it is not some accident, or some act of God, or innocent mistake in economic theories by well intentioned philosopher kings.

Society has been divided into the have-little-or-nothings and the have-most-and-want-all-the-rests.  This is both a side effect and a feature of a kleptocracy.

The leading figures of both sides of the aisle and their enablers in the press and the universities are also very aware of their positions in this great divide, where they wish to be, and whom they serve.  And they guard their positions quite jealously.   We are in a virtualized society managed around positions, connections, and credentials—  it's all about access and license.

I get it.  One can be led, slowly but surely, to the top of a very high mountain.  And from there you are shown the vast material splendours of the world.   And you are flattered, and congratulated on having 'made it.'  You are special, and not like all the rest.

And you are subtly instructed on what you must do going forward to maintain your special status, your access to power, and your collection of toys, and hosts of flatterers and admirers.  I am not speaking figuratively here, but in some cases literally.  This happens.

And if you go forward they entangle you, and you come to believe that you deserve it, all of it.  And they teach you to secretly despise the good and the innocent and the weak as being naive or bitter, and a drain on your resources—  and you are theirs.

Each of us in our own way will have experience some such encounter between good and evil.  Some moreso than others. But in every case, the presence of good and evil in this world are not imaginary, or the result of some stomach upset or poor choice in base case economic assumptions.

And the choice of whom to serve, generally made over time, is also real.  Most of the time people make it but don't think about it.   They find their comfort in illusions and distractions.

 Only by the grace of God are we saved from the lion's mouth.  I can work for free for the rest of my life, always falling in fear and trembling as a poor servant but always rising, to repay that tender mercy and never really be worthy, but obligated nonetheless. 

We know what we must do.  His yoke is easy and his burden light.  Need little, want less, love more.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Apple After the Bell - FOMC Tomorrow

Mammon and His Slave

"The devil led him to the top of a very high mountain, and revealed to him all the kingdoms of the world, arrayed throughout in their vast material splendors. And the devil said to him, 'All of these, with their mighty power and awesome wealth, I will give to you, if you will only fall down and worship me.' And Jesus said, 'Get behind me, Satan, for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and him only will you serve.’ Then the devil left, and angels came to comfort him."

Matthew 4:8-11

Apple is reporting its numbers after the bell, along with a few other tech stocks like Snapchat. Apple has apparently beaten its numbers, and is offering some additional monies for stock buybacks and dividends. Snapchat was getting spanked.

Stocks were weak in the morning, but rallied into the afternoon and the close.

Gold and silver were weak on continuing Dollar strength.

Tomorrow afternoon we will hear the results of the two day FOMC meeting. The Fed is expected to do nothing at this meeting except change some verbage.

There is a record short position in US Treasuries, no doubt from punters betting on the continuing upward push in interest rates, and the corresponding decline in Treasuries prices.

When that many punters lean into one side of a trade you might expect the insiders to give them a gut check, with two for flinching.

Short term the US Dollar is very overbought. Depending on what the Fed says and does tomorrow that could become the basis for some retrenchment.

I spent a pleasant afternoon checking out the new E series of John Deere Lawn Tractors and finally bought one.  I am too knackered to keep mowing the yard with the walk behind.  My knee is going to take another couple of months to finally heal from the wrestling match I had this past winter with a fallen tree.

Owning a small plot of land and caring for it, maintaining it as a place of tranquil order and peaceful beauty, is one of life's simple but finer pleasures. 

The world of the fallen will not love you, or sustain your heart.  It will strip your soul bare of happiness and contentment, and devour you.  But God resides in an ordered garden, and delights there with the simplest and most humble of His creatures.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Acoustic Shadows Within the Credibility Trap - FOMC, NFP Antics

"A good parson once said that where mystery begins, religion ends.  Cannot I say, as truly at least, of human laws, that where mystery begins, justice ends?"

Edmund Burke


"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says.  "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"

PBS Frontine, The Warning


"The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true.  It really happened.  These suspicions are valid.”

Neil Barofsky, TARP Inspector General


"After dinner, Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule:  they don’t criticize other insiders."

Elizabeth Warren

Welcome, fun-seekers, to a new week, romping through our empire's great markets of freedom for all, and an ever-expanding series of financial asset bubbles and moral hazards since the mid 1990's.

But fear not, it is surely different this time.  All the finest people tell you so.

Today the financial channels were busy presenting the thoughts of the financial elites who were attending the annual Milk'em Conference in Beverly Hills.   Most of that they had to say was self-serving nonsense, but that is essentially what they are paid the big bucks to do.

Stocks were showing a bit of strength today, until Benjamin Netanyahu, the PM of Israel, delivered a national address bombshell saying that he had literally tons of proof that Iran had based its nuclear arms deal on a pack of lies. Trumpolini, who presumably had been given a 'heads up' on this, was quick to add, 'see just like I said.'

And so geopolitical risk tumbled back into the markets, at least for the moment. Stocks slumped and gold and silver took back part of the jamjob they had been undergoing from the open in honor of an FOMC/NFP week.

I think it is reasonable to take a highly skeptical stance on quite a few things that we are told these days. The scolding voice of the very important media poobah may say, 'You little upstart, how dare you question our faithful public servants?'

You dare not question them, and they dare not allow it, because they have so much to hide.

To be caught lying used to be a career-ending behaviour among the privileged, but now it seems to be the rule, almost a right of passage.   Lying has no consequences.  Indeed, it is de rigueur, almost expected, of a public figure.  How else could their fellows trust them to be complacent, to do the corrupt thing?

And these days cleverness is passe—  the more blatant the lie the better, especially if it is punctuated with some vulgar personal insult to show that you mean business, and are not to be trifled with.

But publicly telling the liars that they are liars is considered highly impolite, and 'not unifying.'   Any outsider who dares to tell the elite that they are full of it will provoke alarmed reproaches from their colleagues in the established and the privileged. 

After all, the elite are caught in a terrible credibility trap, and the least amount of truth telling sounds like a gunshot in the room. Our established thought leaders in the media will not continue to be insiders, with access to power and big paychecks, if they openly question or allow impertinent questions to be asked of their fellow insiders.

This uneven distribution of power and lack of moral principles is going to end badly. It always does. And that fear of the consequences of justice is shamelessly deployed to cause reform to lose its nerve.  Do you recall the arguments that were made to justify the last financial bailout?

Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall.   Life will go on.

That will not be the heavens falling, but those who elevate themselves, as if they were our angels, but inside have the very hearts of devils.  And the scales of justice will at long last be rebalanced.

Are we not exceptional? Are you not entertained?

Have a pleasant evening.

Listen, And I Will Tell You a Mystery

O Lord, pierce our hardened hearts, enlighten our blindness, and break the chains of our pride and self-deception, so that we may choose life.

“We are slow to master the great truth that even now Christ is, as it were, walking among us, and by His hand, or eye, or voice, bidding us to follow Him. We do not understand that His call is a thing that takes place now. We think it took place in the Apostles' days, but we do not believe in it; we do not look for it in our own case.

God beholds you. He calls you by your name. He sees you and understands you as He made you. He knows what is in you, all your peculiar feelings and thoughts, your dispositions and likings, your strengths and your weaknesses. He views you in your day of rejoicing and in your day of sorrow. He sympathizes in your hopes and your temptations. He interests Himself in all your anxieties and remembrances, all the risings and fallings of your spirit.

He encompasses you round and bears you in His arms. He notes your very countenance, whether smiling or in tears. He looks tenderly upon you. He hears your voice, the beating of your heart, and your very breathing.

You do not love yourself better than He loves you. You cannot shrink from pain more than He dislikes your bearing it; and if He puts it on you, it is as you would put it on yourself, if you would be wise, for a greater good afterwards.

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission -- I may never know it in this life but I shall be told it in the next.

I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught.

I shall do good, I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments.

Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.

He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about.

He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me -- still He knows what He is about.

Let us feel what we really are--sinners attempting great things. Let us simply obey God's will, whatever may come. He can turn all things to our eternal good. Easter day is preceded by the forty days of Lent, to show us that they only who sow in tears shall reap in joy.

The more we do, the more shall we trust in Christ; and that surely is no morose doctrine, that leads us to soothe our selfish restlessness, and forget our fears, in the vision of the Incarnate Son of God.

May the Lord support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done.

Then in His mercy may He give us safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at last.”

John Henry Newman

The mighty rise, are fallen, and forgotten— but the word and the spirit endure.

"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter, any attack even on the least of men is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all.

Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Downward Spiral of Dumbness - FOMC and Non-Farm Payrolls Next Week

“I know not why any one but a schoolboy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another.”

Samuel Johnson


"This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men."

John Perkins


"A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can’t be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship...Once you go down the path of empire, you inevitably start a process of overstretch, of tendencies toward bankruptcy, and, in the rest of the world, a tendency toward the uniting of people who are opposed to your imperialism simply on grounds that it’s yours, but maybe also on the grounds that you’re incompetent at it.

It is time to realize, however, that the real dangers to America today come not from the newly rich people of East Asia but from our own ideological rigidity, our deep-seated belief in our own propaganda."

Chalmers Johnson

Stocks were wobbly today but not dramatically so.

Gold and silver managed to take a little back from their recent losses as the Dollar backed off sharply from its intraday high.

There will be an FOMC meeting next week. There is about a 35% probability of a rate hike at this meeting. We will have to watch the early economic data in the week, especially the PCE, to see if that probability might move a bit.

And on Friday there will be the April Non-Farm Payrolls Report.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Here Come the Big Cap Tech Numbers - King Dollar

"Rising prices and collapsing confidence could portend that both inflation and slowing growth are looming, a sure recipe for stagflation."

Bloomberg, Markets Better Prepare For Stagflation


"Are you satisfied?"

James Butler Hickok, after the shootout with Davis Tutt 

If the US does fall into stagflation then it is clearly a time for systemic change in our decision and policy making, and the mass turnover of the old leadership and their elites.

Stagflation is a policy error de luxe, when not precipitated by a major exogenous supply shock like the oil embargo of the 1970s. Up until that point most economists did not even believe that stagflation was possible. 

It takes an extraordinary combination of almost purposefully bad decisions to create stagflation from within the policy choices of the economic system itself. Something like strangling economic demand by severely curbing income growth for the broad public while generously supplying easy money and selective asset inflation to the top one percent over a period of years might do it.

And it is a hell for the working public, that sees their income opportunities continue to stagnate while the prices of essentials continue to increase.

Alas, if there is stagflation I am sure the credibility trap will compel the propeller heads and their paymasters to find some scapegoat, or some elite friendly cause like a 'global trade war,' to carry the blame, rather than their own distorted, self-serving decision making.

I am posting the charts shortly after the close. I will most likely have to update them tomorrow.

Big cap tech is coming out after the bell, with Amazon, Microsoft, and Intel reporting their numbers. And the reaction so far in the stock futures has been 'enthusiastic' to say the least.

Gold and silver were off again today on further US Dollar strength. The lack of activity in the Comex gold warehouses, including Hong Kong, is remarkable.

Have a pleasant evening.