"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined. Suddenly it all comes to be, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or more accurately what you haven’t done. For that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair." Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power.
Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
Arundhati Roy
Stocks continued to show weakness today, led lower by the big sled dogs in the Trumpolini Rally, which is big cap tech.
Gold and silver finished largely unchanged despite a weaker dollar.
We will be getting quite a bit of economic data this week in addition to earnings reports.
FOMC on Wednesday, and Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday.
Trumpolini wants to give an extra $100 Billion to the wealthy by unilaterally changing the capital gains tax without involving Congress. What a swell guy. Always thinking about the other guy.
The billionaire class could use a little extra walking around money. And we can always cut meals to the infirm, elderly, and school kids to pay for it. It's a win-win. Enriching the pigmen and culling the herd.
We will be getting rain almost every day this week, and so I spent the morning in the pleasantly less humid prelude finishing up some yardwork and outdoors chores.
Dolly maintained her vigilant watch, and made sure no one bothered the reclining chair while I was otherwise engaged outside. It is what she does best.
"Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create markets for weapons? ...In the privatization of everything, these companies have made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. There’s only one problem – they exploit everything and everyone in its wake. It’s a dream come true for businessmen – to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.”
Arundhati Roy, The Ghost of Capitalism
Thurman Arnold wrote in The Folklore of Capitalism that 'Economic theology is the opiate of the middle class...Law, morals, and economics are always arrayed against new groups which are struggling to secure a place in an institutional hierarchy of prestige."
Arnold goes on to say in an essay in reply to a review of his book that "Philosophies, legal, ethical, and economic appear very different from the outside looking in than from the inside looking out. The inside point of view assumes that if reasoning men get their heads together, they can make the concept of a good life a workable tool. From the outside it is obvious that reasoning men never agree. Their conflicts only create more literature."
What Arnold is going after is the very notion of the meritocracy, and the mythology of philosopher-kings. In the abstract reality is not captured, and therfore cannot be made workable. There is no such thing as a perfect system, one that will solve all problems if you can only tweak it here and there.
A workable system requires practical and talented people, not necessarily the most credentialed and pedigreed, that are working with a genuine dedication and focus to a set of first principles and priorities.
It is a project doomed to failure to allow process to stand over priority, the realization of the perfectly designed system for its own sake, because such a system does not exist, and is almost always a canard to promote some powerful interests for their own sake.
He means ideologically based systems like 'supply side economics.'. It may have failed, miserably and spectacularly at every turn, but it still sounds pretty good on paper. And so here we go again.
Or globalization, free markets and free trade— these are all good examples of a misbegotten first principles, tenets of economic theology that form the foundation of a system designed for process, rather than results.
If you wish to understand Obama, Clinton and the modern Democratic and Republican parties, which are both parties representing different segments of the affluent and the powerful, I urge you to spend the time to watch the latter half of the second video. The Democrats may speak the cause of the dispossessed and the weak, but tend to treat and view them not as constituents but as charges, with the kind of condescension and utility of neo-colonialism and 'the meritocracy's burden.'
Obama is every bit the narcissist as is Trump. The difference is that Obama is more articulate in his expressions of it, in his appeals to those things that will provide him more of what he thinks that he deserves.
It is an analysis of our current situation by Thomas Frank. You may have seen it before, but I urge you to watch it through in light of everything that has occurred. Watch the entire video with the Q&A if you have the time. There are some practical solutions discussed therein. Basically the system is going to be changed from the bottom up, or not at all.
It plays well in the Beltway, and in the deep wells of subjectivity occupied by the establishment and their enablers.
But most Americans seem to think that the Russia scare is just that— a cynical distraction from the real issues that are of their greatest concern. And those tend to be domestic issues.
The liberal elite keep talking past the public and its concerns, while suppressing progressive and grass roots movements in their own base.
They may keep losing elections. But the spice of big donor contributions will flow because of the nature of our corrupt political system.
"A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people. "
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations."
Wendell Berry
GDP came in slightly below expectations but still much higher than we have seen recently.
Inflation remains around 2% at the core and 3% overall.
I suspect that this GDP number is not sustainable, and that continued wage stagnation will continue to provide a damper on aggregate demand, despite the sugar high being provided by tax cuts, mostly to corporations and the wealthiest few.
Stocks shook off the rosy GDP number, albeit in line and short of inflated whisper numbers, preferring to act off real world news coming out in the earnings reports.
Gold and silver marked time within this long trading range.
The dollar was slightly lower.
There will be an FOMC meeting next week.
We will also be seeing the Non-Farm Payrolls Report for July at the end of the week. I have included an economic calendar for next week below.
Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.
"Who is this that obscures my plans
with words lacking depth of knowledge?
Brace yourself bravely as an adult,
and I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
‘Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know.
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set?
Who laid its cornerstone –
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?"
Job 38
"The heavens declare the glory of God,
the sky displays what His hands have made."
Psalm 19:1
"What is man that You are mindful of him,
And the son of man that You dwell with him?
For You have made him a little lower than the angels,
But have crowned him with glory and honor."
Psalm 8
“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."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
How vast the universe, and yet the soul of the least of these will still endure, and be loved by God beyond all else of His creation, as stars wink out, and galaxies crumble into dust.
"And afterwards he went there daily, and gained an increasing number of followers. It seemed that from every tear of a martyr new confessors were born, and every groan in the arena found an echo in thousands of hearts.
Caesar was swimming in blood; Rome and the whole pagan world were 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."
Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz
"And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be, a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, 'You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God.'"
Martin Luther King
Stocks moved sideways today in the aftermath of the Facebook miss.
The Street is chomping at the bit, expecting a strong GDP Advance print for 2Q tomorrow morning.
Silver and gold were quiet for expiration with a small loss easily attributable to a rally in the US Dollar.
Thank you Lord, for your presence and faithful providence towards us all.
Spare us, Lord, from your chastisement. Forgive our blindness, our foolish pride and stubborn selfishness, in failing to see your many consolations, gentle corrections, and tender mercies.
Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.
"This is how Ron Chernow correctly described what was happening for New York Times’ readers on March 15, 2001:
'Let us be clear about the magnitude of the Nasdaq collapse. The tumble has been so steep and so bloody — close to $4 trillion in market value erased in one year — that it amounts to nearly four times the carnage recorded in the October 1987 crash.'
Chernow characterized the Nasdaq stock market as a 'lunatic control tower that directed most incoming planes to a bustling, congested airport known as the New Economy while another, depressed airport, the Old Economy, stagnated with empty runways. The market functioned as a vast, erratic mechanism for misallocating capital across America,' Chernow observed.
Let that sink in for a moment. It wasn’t just that investment bankers on Wall Street were bringing to the public markets companies with the equivalent of a business plan written on the back of a napkin. It was that all of the major investment banks on Wall Street, out of a motive of pure greed, were engaged in a mass conspiracy to misallocate capital across America – which strikes at the very heart of America’s economy and national interests...
Yesterday we got a little taste of what’s in store this time around courtesy of the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, the majority of whom have 'buy' ratings on Facebook."
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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