Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - When the Operation of the Machine Becomes So Odious

Congress is cutting a deal to allow retiree benefits to be cut. 

"A measure that would for the first time allow the benefits of current retirees to be severely cut is set to be attached to a massive spending bill, part of an effort to save some of the nation’s most distressed pension plans.

The rule would alter 40 years of federal law and could affect millions of workers, many of them part of a shrinking corps of middle-income employees in businesses such as trucking, construction and supermarkets."

As you may recall, Congress responded to business lobbying by allowing their pension plans to make outrageously optimistic assumptions about future returns, so the corporations could divert more of their money from pension contributions to short term profits.  Now that corporate profits are at record levels, someone has to take up the slack and that must be the elderly.  Let's just rewrite the contracts after the fact, and take the money from them.  

In a conversation today some were tut-tutting this decision.  But after all, someone has to tighten their belts in hard times.  It certainly can't be the privileged class, so it may as well be the pensioners.

I hope people are so sanguine when the Banks come to seize their assets to make up their derivatives losses, which emboldened they will almost certainly do.  First they come for the pensions, and then they come for the savings deposits and IRAs.  It is a sign of the times.