Stocks Rally on Geopolitical Risk and Worse Than Expected Economic News

"We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us!"

Abraham Lincoln, April 1863

"The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, as charity, as historical necessity, or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone raised on traditional ethical concepts. But for the Christian who builds his life on the word of God, it merely confirms the fundamental perversity of evil."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Stocks managed to eke out some addition gains on increasing geopolitical risks, a government report that shows quite clearly that the financial system remains fragile and vulnerable to collapse from interconnected counterparty risks and reckless speculation, and a worse than expected set of numbers from the real economy.

 

Hi ho!

 

Eventually, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

UK Journalist Calls Out 'Fraud on Readers' in Coverage of HSBC

“An editorial operation that is clearly influenced by advertising is classic appeasement. Once a very powerful body know they can exert influence they know they can come back and threaten you. It totally changes the relationship you have with them. You know that even if you are robust you won’t be supported and will be undermined...

The coverage of HSBC in Britain's Daily Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril.”

A 'principled resignation' is a phenomenon somewhat unfamiliar to US readers.  Rarely does a public figure or a politician resign because they is something they won't do to get along.  They resign because they get caught doing something that is so repugnant to public sentiment that they are finished, at least for a while.  We have a marvelous way of excusing and ignoring behavior in the selected elite that would shame a garbageman into changing their name and moving.

And so a decline in journalistic standards is not as great of an issue in the States, because the major media was captured by a handful of corporations in the 1990's, in part thanks to Bill Clinton's change in ownership rules.

So one might ask, what standards?  What were the standards that allowed the lies that have led to war, that covered up mass spying and torture, and that allowed one of the greatest thefts of the public trust in history to occur in the 'bank bailouts,' with a coordinated suppression of any meaningful protest?

In the recent World Press Freedom Index, the US ranked 49th, in same tier as Romania, El Salvador, and Niger.

Their standards have long been so low that journalist may be more of a hollow title on a business card than a calling to a profession with time-honored standards.

 

In the States, journalistic independence and integrity were some years ago led down a blind alley, and quietly strangled. 

The capture of key institutions of democracy are already well underway or in place.  Where this leads, one cannot say.   But it does not bode well.

Even television spokesmodels and serial liars are considered 'credentialed journalists' in good standing as long as they remain within the well defined bounds of the corporatist credibility trap.

 

Related:  JP Morgan Tops New List of Risky Banks

 

Why I Have Resigned From the Telegraph

Peter Osborne

17 February 2015

...With the collapse in standards has come a most sinister development. It has long been axiomatic in quality British journalism that the advertising department and editorial should be kept rigorously apart. There is a great deal of evidence that, at the Telegraph, this distinction has collapsed...

This brings me to a second and even more important point that bears not just on the fate of one newspaper but on public life as a whole. A free press is essential to a healthy democracy. There is a purpose to journalism, and it is not just to entertain. It is not to pander to political power, big corporations and rich men. Newspapers have what amounts in the end to a constitutional duty to tell their readers the truth.

It is not only the Telegraph that is at fault here. The past few years have seen the rise of shadowy executives who determine what truths can and what truths can’t be conveyed across the mainstream media. The criminality of News International newspapers during the phone hacking years was a particularly grotesque example of this wholly malign phenomenon. All the newspaper groups, bar the magnificent exception of the Guardian, maintained a culture of omerta around phone-hacking, even if (like the Telegraph) they had not themselves been involved. One of the consequences of this conspiracy of silence was the appointment of Andy Coulson, who has since been jailed and now faces further charges of perjury, as director of communications in 10 Downing Street...

This was the pivotal moment. From the start of 2013 onwards stories critical of HSBC were discouraged. HSBC suspended its advertising with the Telegraph. Its account, I have been told by an extremely well informed insider, was extremely valuable. HSBC, as one former Telegraph executive told me, is “the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend”. HSBC today refused to comment when I asked whether the bank's decision to stop advertising with the Telegraph was connected in any way with the paper's investigation into the Jersey accounts.

Read the entire article at OpenDemocracy here.

 

 

 Here are some selections from financial television.  I do not mean to pick on CNBC.  Bloomberg and Fox are certainly no better, and in many ways probably worse. 

And the mainstream media now pretty much follows the same patterns on its high gloss coverage whether it be on television or in print.

 

But if you watch the shows on Sunday morning where very serious people come to discuss important public and foreign policy issues of war and peace, basic freedoms, the economy, what you find is a pre-sorted selection of talking heads hurling the latest ying and yang of corporatist spin at each other, with the occasional honest individual, never to be invited again, who is harangued by the network 'journalist.'

 

The Financial System Remains Fragile and At Risk Due To Lack of Meaningful Reform

Read this, and remember when the next financial crisis comes, and the officials and academics say, 'who could have seen it coming?'

Both JP Morgan and Citigroup are at the top of the list of banks posing a high contagion risk.

Why don't those who have been charged with the task of regulating and reforming this in the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008 fix the system? 

 

Why do the Banks and their courtiers on K Street resist reform so strongly? 

Because short term profits and hot money are trumping public interest, sound reason, and even common sense.

Interconnected Banks Pose Greatest Threat to U.S. Financial System

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

February 17, 2015

Last Thursday, the Office of Financial Research (OFR), part of the Federal boondoggle created under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation in 2010 to foster the illusion that the government was reining in risk on Wall Street, released a new study showing almost unfathomable levels of systemic and interconnected risk among the too-big-to-fail banks that cratered the U.S. financial system in 2008 and has left our economy still struggling to right itself.

Authored by Meraj Allahrakha, Paul Glasserman, and H. Peyton Young, the report reconfirms to Americans that nothing significant has been accomplished in the last six years to prevent casino capitalism on Wall Street from crashing our financial system and the U.S. economy again. The report found that five U.S. banks had high contagion index values — Citigroup, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs...

Read the entire article here.

Modern Economics: Austerity

"In Greek mythology Sisyphus (Greek: Σίσυφος) was the king of Ephyra. He was punished by the gods for his chronic deceitfulness by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a steep hill, only to watch it roll back down, over and over again."

In the modern mythology of bizarre economics, austerity can be described as 'the Reverse Sisyphus.'

The victims of systemic bank fraud and widespread cheating and manipulation of markets and laws are forced to pay the price, in an endless cycle of booms and busts, for the deceitfulness and injustice of the powerful financial interests and their privileged friends.

 

Related:  Bubblenomics

 

 

 

The NeoLiberal Colossus

"Keep, ancient lands, your human dignity!" cries she

With curling lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the weak, the homeless, the victims all to me,

And I will grind their bones, forevermore!"

 

 

C. S. Lewis BBC Broadcast 21 March 1944

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither...

C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

We all want progress.  But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.  If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

During the height of World War II, the BBC carried a series of radio broadcasts by C. S. 'Jack' Lewis, the Oxford don and good friend of fellow author J. R. R. Tolkien.

The broadcasts, which were immensely popular, were later gathered into a book, titled Mere Christianity.

Mere Christianity is a book by C. S. Lewis, adapted from a series of BBC radio talks made between 1942 and 1944. The transcripts originally appeared as three separate pamphlets: The Case for Christianity (1942), Christian Behaviour (1943), and Beyond Personality (1944). 

Below is the broadcast titled Beyond Personality, and it is the only surviving recording which we have.  All the tapes of the other broadcasts were reused during the war effort.

Year To Date Performance of a Few US Asset Classes

“Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”

Edward Bernays
 

Gold Daily And Silver Weekly Charts - New All Time Highs - We're Flying!

 

Nothing else matters now, because We're flying!!

 

This is the combined precious metal and stock market commentary for Friday the 13th.

 

A fresh new bubble in stocks has achieved liftoff.  What could go wrong?

 

Shaking off the very weak economic news from the real economy in the latter part of this week, stocks took the opportunity to break out higher on relatively low volumes ahead of a three day weekend because of President's Day on the 16th.

What sparked this rally is the 'new ceasefire' between the Ukraine and Russia, and perhaps even more importantly, the continuation of talks between the troika and Greece with regard to the debt crisis there.

 

And mostly, because they could.  Motive and opportunity.

This is a hot money bubble. The Wall Street wiseguys had the opportunity for a new high and they have taken it, consequences be damned.  The political animals will look the other way, as long as the campaign handouts keep coming, and justice is especially blind given the right career incentives.

The strong dollar may be painful for the real economy, but the benefit is that it attracts foreign investment in paper, and gives the Banks and the hedge funds the ability to buy up assets on the cheap.  It increased the consolidation in commercial business, especially in the healthcare field which is ripe for the plucking. 

 

It helps to inflate dollar denominated financial assets.  It is a boon to Wall Street.

 

The Fed does not have to tighten interest rates to put some reins on this.  They have always had the discretion to raise margin requirements and a variety of other tools as the primary bank regulator for which they volunteered after the last crisis in which they were instrumental.

The Fed and the regulators and Wall Street are wholly responsible for this.   We are caught in a boom and bust cycle thanks to the distortions from an oversized financial sector and a corrupt political system and the acquiescence of the media and the professional classes.

It will end badly. Make no mistake.  When it does, everyone will be amazed because 'no one saw it coming.'

Serial policy errors. But it is swelling the net worth of the one percent, and so nothing will be said.

 

But in the meantime, we're flying!

 

Have a pleasant weekend. See you on Tuesday.