“People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”
C. Wright Mills,
The Power Elite
"And such was the attitude of their minds that a shocking crime was dared by a few, with the blessing of more, and the passive acquiescence of all."
Tacitus, Histories: Book I, XXVIII,
The Murder of Galba
"Hot money seeks out the conscious mispricing of risk. Capital, in the form of both money and personal talent, increasingly flows into malinvestment and the gaming of markets. The productive economy languishes, left wanting for the lack of creative resources and attention. The bubble rises to unsustainable valuations— and fails, and a nation's capital is consumed.
The next five years are not about winning, but surviving."
Jesse,
The Men Who Sold the World, 5 August 2019
“In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.”
Nassim Taleb,
The Bed of Procrustes
"This is what a society looks like when the glue that holds it together starts to dissolve. This is the way ordinary citizens react when they learn that the structure beneath them is crumbling. And this is the thrill that pulses through the veins of the well-to-do when they discover that there is no longer any limit on their power to accumulate.
Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation."
Thomas Frank,
Rendezvous With Oblivion
"The people who designed the plans are either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent.”
Joseph Stiglitz,
On the Obama Administration Bank Bailout Plans, April 17, 2009
"So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing [US sponsored Ukraine regime change] and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, fuck the EU."
Victoria Nuland, US senior diplomat,
Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call, BBC, 7 February 2014
"After dinner, Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: they don’t criticize other insiders."
Elizabeth Warren
"We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life."
Jimmy Carter,
television interview, September 27, 2015
"They live out their days in prosperity, and slide peacefully down into hell."
Job 21:13
It was a wobbly day, with a slight risk on bias.
Stocks ended higher on the day.
Gold and silver were lower.
The VIX fell.
The Dollar rose.
The FOMC rate decision tomorrow is a pivotal moment for the markets.
Such is our failure to reform the financial system after a devastating series of financial debacles and serial bubbles. And so we in the West seem trapped in an endless cycle of political betrayal, greed, war, hate, demagoguery, and fear.
When the suffering becomes acute enough, we may again go forward.
Have a pleasant evening.
