SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Slouching Towards Year End

Mr. Market 2014 takes a final bow

Hard to believe that this is the second to last day of the year.

Stocks sold off in a very quiet trade, most likely a little cash raising in advance of a light spray on the tape tomorrow.

Most of the adults are off for the year now, and the juniors are executing their pat instructions for the most part.

The first week of January might very well see a rehearsed rally with any new money coming in, again depending on what else happens and the temper of the volumes if any.

Risks are obviously mispriced, but the bill may not arrive at the table for a little while yet, and timing is everything.

Have a pleasant evening.

US Power Elite: An Echo Chamber of Illusions, Delusions, and Subsequent Policy Errors

"A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production."

Robert Anton Wilson

I watched the latter part of a televised discussion called Surveillance 2015 which included Sallie Krawchek, Mohamed El-Erian, Sheila Bair, and Mario Gabelli with Tom Keane as host at the high-toned, dark-wooded drinking salon in the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City.

 

There is no one in the discussion that you could dislike, as they are all affable and intelligent people who are most likely very good company at a cocktail party and acknowledged as subject matter experts in their own areas.

 

I may have missed the first part where hopefully they discussed some things that they understand, like the workings of the US markets, although that is no guarantee of a frank and open discussion. Or maybe I was spared the usual self-congratulatory success fest.  Mission accomplished, and all that.

 

But the groupthink when it came to discussing global events was absolutely stunning in its glib triumphalism and selective shallowness.

 

Their read on Putin and the situation with Russia was almost sad in its cartoon like shallowness.  Russia is on the ropes, and it is just a question whether Putin folds now, or does something stupid to distract his people, like cutting off the energy to Europe and driving them into recession. The odds are fifty- fifty.

 

But the US is pristine, above it all, the global puppet master.   Exceptional and winning!

 

I think that pat description of Russia with an economy that is on the edge, with the option to do something stupid to take the peoples' minds off their misery, fits Obama and the new Congress just as well as Russia.  The difference is that we are seeing things from within the dollarsphere of wealth illusion.

 

How can one discussion the global situation without getting around to including China until at the very end, almost as an afterthought?   And to discuss Russia's options without including China and a few other emerging countries which is still where the growth remains?  At least real growth in building infrastructure and actual products, instead of just overcharging each other for healthcare and financial services and calling it growth?

 

Part of the problem I am sure is that we are given to the phenomenon of mistaking wealth for intelligence, and on subjects in which the person has little to no expertise beyond that which an intelligent person who read newspapers and magazines might gather.  There is quite a bit of that going around.  Traders and bureaucrats making policy calls is like watching a fox hunt, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde:  the unspeakable in full pursuit of the indigestible.

 

When the US gets blindsided next year, and I think it is more like 75-25 that they will, it is will be because the power elite in the US is living in an echo chamber of their own thoughts, sharing a distorted vision of their own country, not to mention the world, from the cocoons of Washington and New York City.

 

When they do the wrong things, and respond clumsily and ineffectively again and again, we should have no confusion about why they are doing so.   They are marching to the beat of a very different drummer. 

 

What a brave new world, that is so dangerously out of touch with the shared reality of their fellows, and the rest of the world. 

 

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - We Steal, Therefore We Are



Jamie Dimonimus, Imperial Banker

"Plunderers of the world, when nothing remains on the lands to which they have laid waste by wanton thievery, they search out across the seas. The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well.

Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them. Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Robbery, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus

 

Auferimus ergo sumus.  Nova Roma.

There was intraday commentary on globalization and the failure to resist and reform its most pernicious aspects here.

This is relevant to gold and silver, because the forces for a corporatist world government are gathered under the standard of a financial cartel based on the United States Dollar.

 

Interesting coincidence in the number of letters for each word there by the way.  Sorry could not resist that tease, lol.  You know it doesn't really mean anything in this context. But the irony is worth a laugh.



Greenspanus Maxiumus, Imperial Regulator

Today's action in the metals was obvious, and fairly pointless, providing the opportunity for the pigmen to take their egos out for a walk, and to skin a few more nickels and dimes from the short term punters.   Impressive show of force.  Look, we can rig global markets with impunity.

 

Nothing of significance happened in the Comex precious metals.   What a surprise.  

 

I spent most of this slow day watching some movies on Youtube and reading. 

China continues to import some impressive amounts of gold bullion.

 

And so it goes.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts

Stocks popped on the open to the upside, but then it was pretty much a Brownian motion for the rest of the day, with stocks same or lower to the open on low volumes.

Pleasant evening.

The Pursuit of Global Corporatism

The need for a third party in the US becomes more compelling every day.  Or a bipartisan effort to stem the corrosive, anti-democratic influence of Big Money.

 

But I do not see the forces for reform cohering yet.  The attraction and example of power politics and money is too embedded in the mindsets of those whose thinking flows from the status quo. 

Even the reformers can fall quickly into a model of force and compulsion, and heavy handed techniques in pursuing a 'freedom' which they seek to define and control, too often ignoring history and reason.

 

The sign of this is the attitude that there is an elite who, operating in secret and with autonomy, can best decide the meaning of value, and the course of economic events.  It is ironic to see 'reformers' eager to replace one form of oligarchic rule with another that they believe will be more friendly to their own policy decisions, but somehow more benign and resistant to corruption without firm checks and balances on power. 

Sustainable good does not flow from more effective rules but from a better choice of and commitment to a priori values.  Honesty, openness, toleration, justice and kindness are values.   Right over might is an enduring act of balance in human affairs. 

Watch what they do, and not what they say.   If a 'reform movement' is quick to engage in censorship and deception, intolerance and harshness, creating more and cleverer rules and complex theories to achieve their ends, it is most likely another face of the same underlying problem of injustice, no matter what self-delusions they may choose to promote. 

 

As historian Christopher Dawson noted, 'As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.'

In point of fact, complexity and 'cleverness' are often the very models of a false premise as much as the repetitive simplicity of the Big Lie.  What is presented as new and modern is too often the same old thing wrapped differently.  The truth is often hidden in between, but actions speak loudly.

It will be interesting to see how this situation develops.

TPP Is Not a Free-Trade Agreement

Dean Baker

27 December 2014

People in places like rural Kansas and downtown Washington, DC often have a misplaced trust in authority and elected officials. They are inclined to take their comments at face value, not realizing that these people often have ulterior motives.

The Washington Post gave us an example of this confusion in a front page article on President Obama's effort to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which it repeatedly refers to as a "free-trade" pact. The piece follows the administration's line in telling readers that:

"the president threw his full support behind the pact as part of a broader effort to rebalance U.S. foreign policy to the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region."

This assertion makes little sense since the administration is simultaneously pursuing a similar trade pact, the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Pact, with Europe. What both deals have in common is that they are primarily about imposing a business-friendly structure of regulation on both our trading partners and the United States. The more plausible explanation is that President Obama is trying to get more business support for the Democratic Party...

Read the entire article here.

China Takes 60.657 Tonnes of Gold in Week Ending December 19th

China took 60.657 tonnes of gold through the Shanghai Gold Exchange in the week ending December 19th.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - At the Last

"Praise to the Holiest in the height,

and in the depth be praised;

in all His words most wonderful,

most sure in all His ways!"

John Henry Newman

 

Gold and silver moved back to about where they had started things out this week.   The wash and rinse reached the end of at least one cycle, and a particularly blatant one.

 

I particularly enjoyed the trade today, because I barely looked at it, as was its due.

 

I spent most of the day listening to lectures on some subjects of particular interest to me, the lives of a few historical figures, including More and Newman, and an interesting fellow from the 4th century called Athanasius of Alexandria.   I had read extensively in the 'ante-Nicene fathers and doctors' at a younger, more ambitious, age.  Now I have to take things in a more measured pace. 

 

One of the advantages of living for a while is that you can often revisit territory over which you may have tramped, and even extensively so, in your younger days, and while many of the landmarks are familiar, it is like you are doing it with a freshness and a better attention to nuance and details than you were capable at the first. 

 

You know the general lay of the ground, the feel of the paths, and while walking back over them you can see so many new things, because you are bringing 'more to the party' so to speak.  You mind is a slower, but better, instrument.

 

Facts that you have heard before suddenly mean something, and convey an understanding that even a first rate mind, but lacking a depth of experience, might not have obtained.  It is certainly true in my own situation.  There is knowing, which is an achievement, and then there is understanding, which is a joy.

 

It was certainly more enjoyable for me, and quite likely more instructive, than all the nonsense from all the day on the financial news networks, or from every tick of every trade on the markets this day.

 

I have included a list of some of the major economic news events for next week below.

 

Have a very pleasant weekend.