SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Down In the River To Pray

They'll never learn.

It looks like it will have to be the hard way.

Have a pleasant evening.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Pouting Plutocrats and Their Pampered Professionals

"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.  Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason.  But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right."

John Kenneth Galbraith


"Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people. Political power has been narrowly concentrated, and has been used to create great wealth for those who possess it, such as the $70 billion fortune apparently accumulated by ex-president Mubarak. The losers have been the Egyptian people, as they only too well understand.

We’ll show that this interpretation of Egyptian poverty, the people’s interpretation, turns out to provide a general explanation for why poor countries are poor. Whether it is North Korea, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe, we’ll show that poor countries are poor for the same reason that Egypt is poor.

Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities."

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail

Don't you just love watching the public reaction to Brexit, and the barely concealed contempt in which the professional class, including the liberal establishment, holds the general public?

It will keep getting more and more obvious as the people continue to diverge from an increasingly unsustainable and superannuated status quo.   And she-who-must-not-be-named is its poster child.

Could their designs be any more obvious?   They will certainly continue moreso as the mask of civility drops away and the thuggish side of the will to power rises.

This is an old story, and as always is going to end very badly unless some cooler and wiser heads begin to rein in the pigmen.  And that will not be happening anytime soon judging by the other worldly denial of insiders, the very serious people.

Today was a 'risk on' day with gold and the dollar giving back some of their recent gains.

Let's see how we go into the long weekend.   I had forgotten that the 4th of July was coming up, but was reminded of it by the samples at Costco this afternoon, which were particularly generous and quite good, forgoing any other thoughts of a separate lunch. Samples lunch at Costco with your best girl?   Life is good. lol

Have a pleasant evening.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Risk On! - Gamble, Gamble

It was damn the gloom over Brexit and full speed ahead, led by the SP futures which remain the tool of choice for those who wish to drive the markets here and there, particularly in periods of low volume/genuine commitment to just about anything.

The markets are broken, given over to manipulation and corruption. And those who continually point the finger at manipulation by the government are really missing the whole point of the need for reform, and too often willfully so.

The financialization of the economy has turned 'the markets' into wealth transfer mechanisms from the public to a crooked and corrupted few.

Let's see if this was a real turnaround or merely a dead cat bounce.

Nike was down sharply after hours on real world things like earnings and revenues.

Have a pleasant evening.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Wizard of Finance

The Brexit continues playing out.

The professional elite are, for the most part, talking around the matter, and whistling past the graveyard of their own long coming and well deserved demise.  What has been called 'the placebo syndrome' of mindless pursuit of power and goods.

I think if you look at the charts, particularly the gold chart, you can see the preferred levels of support that must be held to make the bullish case.

I have forecasted for some time that the pressures in the physical bullion markets, particularly in London, would be feeling the pinch this month.  And I think we are seeing that, although for the most part, the response of the official powers that be is denial.

This is the nature of the credibility trap.

Have a pleasant evening.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - The Reckoning

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, and even murders that we are not going to be held to account.”

Czesław Miłosz

Every man and woman on this earth will die.

Now, this is of course a statement of the obvious. And yet very few really think about it, until something happens to bring that cold statement of reality into an unavoidable focus that they must confront. We are all dying, in our own way and time, from the moment that we are born; but we do our utmost not to think about it.

And this is understandable. Going around constantly thinking about your own mortality would be morbid, a misuse of the time and talent that we have been given on this earth to do things, to create, and love, and to be alive.

But we tend to put any thought of our true place in the world, put it off and out of mind so much, that we also start thinking that we are uniquely different, that we are above the common state of humanity. We are so much superior to all the others that we will likely go on forever, immune to the consequences that afflict the greater mass of humanity.

And if only this were true; but it is not. Not true for any one of us. Of this we can be certain.

One thing of which we can be sure of, is that we will draw a last breath, and that the darkness will come over our eyes and hold us in a final embrace. We may fantasize about avoiding death, about living almost forever, of extending our life here on earth indefinitely, and perhaps of leaving a great monument to ourselves that will last forever in this world that will provide us a kind of immortality. But this will not happen.

We know, deep down in our very heart of hearts, that at that moment, the moment immediately after our death, the moment in which we will finally discover for ourselves whether it is to be consciousness or nothingness, the regret that one might feel at having been wrong, of having misjudged the real rules of the game, of having purposely misunderstood and deluded ourselves about the true nature and meaning of our own life?  Of having squandered everything on items that have no lasting consequence?

If so, it would be more overwhelming than anything we might dare to imagine. That is what Leon Bloy means when he says that 'in the end, the only real sadness is not to have been a saint.'

It is what is called Pascal's wager.   But it serves us not to think about it.  And so we distract ourselves with lesser things.

Have a pleasant evening.

Mark Blyth On Neoliberalism, Brexit, and the Global Revolt Against the 1% and their Unelected Elites

"...a full 95% of the cash that went to Greece ran a trip through Greece and went straight back to creditors which in plain English is banks. So, public taxpayers money was pushed through Greece to basically bail out banks...So austerity becomes a side effect of a general policy of bank bailouts that nobody wants to own. That's really what happened, ok?

Why are we peddling nonsense? Nobody wants to own up to a gigantic bailout of the entire European banking system that took six years. Austerity was a cover.

If the EU at the end of the day and the Euro is not actually improving the lives of the majority of the people, what is it for? That's the question that they've brought no answer to.

...the Hamptons is not a defensible position. The Hamptons is a very rich area on Long Island that lies on low lying beaches. Very hard to defend a low lying beach. Eventually people are going to come for you.

What's clear is that every social democratic party in Europe needs to find a new reason to exist. Because as I said earlier over the past 20 years they have sold their core constituency down the line for a bunch of floaters in the middle who don't protect them or really don't particularly care for them. Because the only offers on the agenda are basically austerity and tax cuts for those who already have, versus austerity, apologies, and a minimum wage."

Mark Blyth

Although I may not agree with every particular that Mark Blyth may say, directionally he is exactly correct in diagnosing the problems in Europe.

And yes, I am aware that the subtitles are at times in error, and sometimes outrageously so.  Many of the errors were picked up and corrected in the comments.

No stimulus, no plans, no official actions, no monetary theories can be sustainably effective in revitalizing an economy that is as bent as these have become without serious reform at the first.

This was the lesson that was given by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.  There will be no lasting recovery without it; it is a sine qua non.  One cannot turn their economy around when the political and business structures are systemically corrupt, and the elites are preoccupied with looting it, and hiding their spoils offshore.