Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Financial Dreadnoughts

 

BILL MOYERS: And you say that this oligarchy consists of six megabanks.   What are the six banks?

JAMES KWAK: They are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo.

BILL MOYERS: And you write that they control 60 percent of our gross national product?

JAMES KWAK: They have assets equivalent to 60 percent of our gross national product. And to put this in perspective, in the mid-1990s, these six banks or their predecessors, since there have been a lot of mergers, had less than 20 percent. Their assets were less than 20 percent of the gross national product.

BILL MOYERS: And what's the threat from an oligarchy of this size and scale?

SIMON JOHNSON: They can distort the system, Bill. They can change the rules of the game to favor themselves. And unfortunately, the way it works in modern finance is when the rules favor you, you go out and you take a lot of risk. And you blow up from time to time, because it's not your problem. When it blows up, it's the taxpayer and it's the government that has to sort it out.

BILL MOYERS: So, you're not kidding when you say it's an oligarchy?

JAMES KWAK: Exactly. I think that in particular, we can see how the oligarchy has actually become more powerful in the last since the financial crisis.  If we look at the way they've behaved in Washington. 

For example, they've been spending more than $1 million per day lobbying Congress and fighting financial reform.  I think that's for some time, the financial sector got its way in Washington through the power of ideology, through the power of persuasion. 

And in the last year and a half, we've seen the gloves come off.  They are fighting as hard as they can to stop reform.

Bill Moyer's Journal, The Financial Oligarchy in the US, April 16, 2010

It was risk on today, as stocks rallied pretty much until the end of the day, going out on the highs.

VIX dropped as one might expect.

The Dollar gave up the 110 handle and more.

Gold and especially silver rallied hard off the recent price suppression.

Silver was kicking butt with both legs.

Let's see is this was just a flash-in-the-pan bear market relief rally or the beginning of a genuine bottom.

There was intraday commentary Authoritarianism of the Utopias.

Have a pleasant evening.

Authoritarianism of the Utopias: The Singularity of the Will to Power

 

"The two most important words in this excerpt from Biden’s remarks are the words 'not normal.'  But isolating the not normal events to the growth in the MAGA movement severely circumscribes the public debate that needs to be happening around why American democracy is under such a serious threat.  The MAGA movement is merely a symptom of the real disease: billionaire money funneled as dark money to front groups that are fueling authoritarianism to further their own agenda.

Since 2001, long before MAGA emerged, life in the United States has been like living through an endless streaming of a badly-scripted sci-fi series.  The failure of the U.S. government to come clean with the American people about unprecedented events has created a petri dish lab of paranoia that has been molded and shaped to their advantage by dark money front groups.

The threat to our democracy is real and growing.  But it didn’t start with the MAGA crowd.  It started with the dark money crowd — which won’t be satisfied until it owns every member of Congress, every lifetime-appointed federal judge, and every key politician in every swing state.  Until there is a groundswell in America demanding serious campaign finance reform, this is the best democracy that money can buy."

Pam and Russ Martens, American Democracy Is Under Grave Threat, 7 September 2022


“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whip their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy— then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.”

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72


"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.  .

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence.  His method is to poison the channels of public information.  With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

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


"We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life."

Jimmy Carter, Sept. 27, 2015


"The party defined what was legal and what was not. Just as in Hitler's Germany where the heinous 1936 Nuremberg Laws were a legal fiction dictated by racial obsessions, from the outset, Bolshevism subordinated justice to party interests. For Lenin, dictatorship of the proletariat was rule by force and unrestricted by any law. The presumption of innocence was replaced by a universalized presumption of guilt. Utopian ideals were used to legitimize abuses against political enemies defined only in connection with the interests of a self-appointed revolutionary vanguard.

Extreme radical systems had unique features, including rationalization of power, definition of the enemy, and designated goals. They represented efforts to establish total control over society through systematic aggressions against any form of autonomous associations and initiatives, as well as the persecution and eventual extermination of ideologically defined adversaries.  The ideology behind the tragedy of Communism and Nazism is aptly summarized in this apocalyptic statement as the vision of a superior elite whose utopian goals sanctify the most barbaric methods - the denial of the right to life to those who are defined as 'degenerate parasites and predators,' the deliberate de-humanization of the victims."

Vladimir Tismaneanu, Understanding Radical Evil


"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy.  I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our American ruling families are to the Nazi regime.  Certain American industrialists had a great deal to do with bringing fascist regimes into being in both Germany and Italy.  They extend aid to help Fascism occupy the seat of power, and they are helping to keep it there.  Propagandists for fascist groups try to dismiss the fascist scare.  We should be aware of the symptoms."

William E. Dodd, US Ambassador to Germany, Letter to President Roosevelt, 1936


"But there is a sort of 'Ok guys, you're mad, but how are you going to stop me' mentality at the top."

Robert Johnson, Audacious Oligarchy

US Dollar DX Index Very Long Term Chart

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Where Angels Fear to Tread

 

"It would be rash indeed to discount the terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count among its sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and inscribed party members."

Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism


"The paper system being founded on public confidence and having of itself no intrinsic value, is liable to great and sudden fluctuations, thereby rendering property insecure and the wages of labor unsteady and uncertain.

The corporations which create the paper money cannot be relied upon to keep the circulating medium uniform in amount. In times of prosperity, when confidence is high, they are tempted by the prospect of gain or by the influence of those who hope to profit by it to extend their issues of paper beyond the bounds of discretion and the reasonable demands of business.

And when these issues have been pushed on from day to day until the public confidence is at length shaken, then a reaction takes place, and they immediately withdraw the credits they have given; suddenly curtail their issues; and produce an unexpected and ruinous contraction of the circulating medium which is felt by the whole community.   The banks, by this means, save themselves, and the mischievous consequences of their imprudence or cupidity are visited upon the public.

Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, March 4, 1837


Stocks slumped once again today, after putting in their customary early morning rally attempt.

Gold and silver also slumped as the Dollar took a solid hold on the 110 handle. 

Thanks to the declining yen and to a lesser extent the euro. 

The yen and euro are the two largest DXY components. 

Overall the economic outlook for most of the developed nations looks lethargic to gloomy.

No surprise that faithful retainer-to-empire Boris Johnson thwarted an early attempt to resolve the conflict in the Ukraine.

The Anglo-Americans seem determined to have a protracted economic proxy confrontation with Russia—  to the last frostbit and impoverished European.

The VIX slid higher.

I almost spit my coffee out this morning when a talking head on bubblevision posited the new British PM Liz Truss as another Franklin Roosevelt.  

As if.

The high ground still looks like a good place today, with the occasional foray into shallow waters.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Pictures From a Babylonian Captivity

 

"A multibillion-dollar bailout and Wall Street’s swift, subsequent reinstatement of gargantuan bonuses have inspired a narrative of parasitic bankers and other elites rigging the game for their own benefit. And this, in turn, has led to wider—and not unreasonable—fears that we are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble."

Chrystia Freeland, The Rise of the New Global Elite, January 2011

"The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."

Alex Carey

"In the 1970s, a wave of young liberals, Bill Clinton among them, destroyed the populist Democratic Party they had inherited from the New Dealers of the 1930s. The contours of this ideological fight were complex, but the gist was: Before the ’70s, Democrats were suspicious of big business. They used anti-monopoly policies to fight oligarchy and financial manipulation. 

Bill Clinton’s generation, however, believed that concentration of financial power could be virtuous, as long as that power was in the hands of experts. They largely dismissed the white working class as a bastion of reactionary racism.  Obama is simply the latest in a long line of party leaders who have bought into the ideology of these 'new' Democrats, and he has governed likewise, with commercial policies that ravaged the heartland."

Matt Stoller, How Bad Obama’s Financial Policies, Washington Post, 12 January 2017

"Act up to your light, though in the midst of difficulties, and you will be carried on, you do not know how far. This is His gracious way with us: He gives, not all at once, but by measure and season, wisely.

We must begin at the beginning.  Each truth has its own order; we cannot join the way of life at any point of the course we please; we cannot learn advanced truths before we have learned primary ones.   I know we shall find it very hard to rouse ourselves, to break the force of habit, to resolve to serve God, and persevere in doing so. 

And assuredly we must expect, even at best, and with all our efforts, perhaps backslidings, and certainly much continual imperfection all through our lives, in all we do.   We live here to struggle and to endure: the time of eternal rest will come hereafter.

John Henry Newman


Stocks were on a rally track this morning as the Non-Farm Payrolls Report came in with a 'Goldilocks' flavor.

But alas, during the day Russia decided to shut off the gas to Europe and so markets reversed, and hard.

It's the exogenous events that get you.  Bet the masters of the universe didn't see they usual setup falling apart.

Well, it's a three day weekend, and when unforeseen risk rears its head, you hit the exits.

Gold and silver were rallying along with everything else, but gave up much of their gains.

The US Dollar, which dumped in the morning, did a snappy rallyback on the plight of the Europeans.

"The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about."

Fulton J. Sheen

Monday will be a national holiday in the US.  So see you Tuesday.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - What Time's the Next Wash and Rinse? - Jobs Tomorrow

 

Just charts tonight. 

Let's see what the Jobs Report says tomorrow and how the market reacts.

Have a pleasant evening.