“One day, we will have to stand before the God of history. And we will talk in terms of things we've done. And its seems to me that I can hear the God of history saying, 'That was not enough. For I was hungry, and you fed me not. I was naked, and you clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and you provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness.'" Martin Luther King
“Every organization should tolerate rebels who tell the emperor he has no clothes.”
Colin Powell
But there are not always those who are willing to place principle above power and self-interest to speak such truth to power, right Colin?
Great events abroad, but here at home just another blissfully uneventful day in the markets under the Pax Americana.
However, I cannot help but feel that there is a 'tension' on the tape, and that the largely unchanged nature of the box scores for the day are masking what may turn out to the an imminent move.
Stocks seem overpriced, and the metals, especially gold, seem to be undervalued and ill-supplied.
“The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.”
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
"Nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."
Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur
“It is better to be a child of God than king of the whole world.”
Aloysius Gonzaga
As you most likely have heard by now, the Non-Farm Payrolls Report For May came in quite shockingly low.
Despite a great deal of popular nonsense The Recovery™ is reserved for the one percent.
I had to crack up at one remark this morning that the jobs number is so low because we are at full employment, and therefore there are not any more jobs to be had or people to take them.
Never mind the Labor Participation Rate which is still falling and awful, and average wages which are sluggish.
But nevertheless stocks rallied as expectations of the Fed's raising rates this year more than once or twice have fallen dramatically on the lack of inflation and jobs.
And because of that, the dollar tumbled and gold and silver caught a bid on expectations of more Fed looseness, along with their buddies at the ECB and BoJ.
So what next?
Make no mistake. Stocks are in a bubble now. And the underpinnings in the real economy, despite the rhetoric from the ivory towers and beltway bandits, is just not there. And therefore this inflated paper asset tower is doomed to fail because there is no organic growth to sustain it.
They may bubble on even more, but one look at big cap tech should tell you everything you need to know. They are mispriced for risk, or on the other hand, now priced for stupidity. And the Wall Street denizens wait patiently for the greater fools.
How will the Fed and the government respond to the next financial crisis? What new lies and scapegoats will be forthcoming from the maw of the establishment? What jealous entities are undermining our exceptionalism now?
This is not going to be pretty, especially since there are so many propagandized zealots running around with great expectations fed by their respective demagogic saviours on the polarized right and left. The only genuine reformers and friends of the people are largely friendless in the circles of power and the rat alleyways that surround them.
And the powerful and the wealthy are ascendant, and feeling good about themselves almost to the point of fearlessness. This is the effect of disordered minds, whose judgement has been corrupted by pride, and a lack of self-knowledge grounded in place their true place in the universe.
They do not know themselves, or even what they do not know, being willfully blind.
"A demagogue must be neither an educated nor an honest man; he has to be an ignoramus and a rogue. You possess all the attributes of a demagogue: a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, cross-grained nature and the language of the market-place."
Aristophanes, The Knights
Trump announced the withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate accords today. At the end of the day it was mostly a symbolic act in withdrawing from a largely toothless agreement.
He missed a wonderful opportunity to actually announce something with teeth in it, like major infrastructure initiatives to improve the power grid in the US, and encourage the use of renewable energy and new technologies.
He might even have suggested that the US will start looking at the trade inflows from countries that are major polluters and abusers of human rights with a less favorable eye. That might have some real bite to it. And not a collection of voluntary agreements from politicians who are above all artful liars.
Trump says he is doing this for the average working people of the US. If only this was true.
Doing things for the common people of the US is a fig leaf that the GOP perennially likes to use when they are doing some fairly despicable things in the service of Big Business. If you think that they care about the public, watch what they are doing with healthcare and taxes and fiscal policy initiatives to create living wage employment.
Stocks were rallying today on expectations that America is becoming great again. And after what The Donald says the Street is expecting a nice fat Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday. That at least would follow from DT's bragging about the stock market showing what a great recovery is already underway.
Gold and other risk assets were weak, and VIX fell back down to single digits again.
Stocks were weak most of the day with Chinese economic data having come in rather weakly.
A late day rally pushed them into largely unchanged.
Gold caught a flight to safety and was into downtrend breaking territory much of the day, but was pushed down into the close.
As you can see from the CME clearing report below there were quite a few gold contracts changing hands as we are now into the active month of June.
There are many things in life which you may experience and enjoy. Being short physical gold, when it goes limit up with none offered, is not one of them.
Swing Kids - The Swing Kids (German: Swingjugend) were a group of jazz and swing dance fans in Germany in the 1930s, primarily in the port city of Hamburg and Berlin. They were 14 to 21-year-old boys and girls. They admired the British and American youth culture, defining themselves with swing music as opposed to the National-Socialist fashions and behaviours, especially those of the Hitler Youth (German: Hitlerjugend).
Their dress consisted of long, often checked English sports jackets, shoes with thick light crepe soles, showy scarves, Anthony Eden hats, an umbrella on the arm whatever the weather, and, as an insignia, a dress-shirt button worn in the buttonhole, with a jeweled stone. The girls too favored a long overflowing hair style. Their eyebrows were penciled, they wore lipstick and their nails were lacquered.
The Swingjugend rejected the Nazi state, its ideology and uniformity, its militarism, the 'Führer principle' and the conformity of the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). They rebelled against all this restriction of personal freedoms with jazz and swing, which stood for a love of life, self-determination, non-conformism, freedom, independence, liberalism, and internationalism.
On 18 August 1941, in a brutal police operation, over 300 Swingjugend were arrested. The measures against them ranged from cutting their hair and sending them back to school under close monitoring, to the deportation of the leaders to concentration camps. The boys went to the Moringen concentration camp while the girls were sent to Ravensbruck.This mass arrest encouraged the youth to further their political consciousness and opposition to National Socialism. They started to distribute anti-fascist propaganda. In January 1943, Günter Discher, as one of the ringleaders of the Swing Kids, was deported to the youth concentration camp of Moringen.
On 2 January 1942, Heinrich Himmler wrote to Reinhard Heydrich calling on him to clamp down on the ringleaders of the swing movement, recommending a few years in a concentration camp with beatings and forced labor.
The Swing Kids of Hamburg at some point had contacts with another famous resistance movement, when three members of the White Rose (German: Weiße Rose) developed a sympathy for the Swing Kids. No formal cooperation arose, though these contacts were later used by the Volksgerichtshof ("People's Court") to accuse some Swing Kids of anarchist propaganda and sabotage of the armed forces. Their consequent trial, death sentences and executions were averted by the end of the war.
There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday of this week.
The inventory of physical bullion in Hong Kong continues to decline.
Stocks were little changed in a very quiet trade.
The Western establishment continues to grind against the impulse of democratic populism.
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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