"Again the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare— the people they had met travelling; then people who couldn't add a row of figures or speak a coherent sentence. The little man Helen had consented to dance with at the ship's party, who had insulted her ten feet from the table; the women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs out of public places—
—The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn't real snow. If you didn't want it to be snow, you just paid some money."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited, February 1931
"To the politician and administrator laissez-faire was simply a principle of the insurance of law and order, with the minimum cost and effort. Let the market be given charge of the poor, and things will look after themselves...
Hobbes had argued the need for a despot because men were like beasts; [Joseph] Townsend insisted that they were actually beasts and that, precisely for that reason, only a minimum of government was required.
The acceptance of near-indigency of the mass of the citizens as the price to be paid for the highest stage of prosperity was accompanied by very different human attitudes. Townsend righted his emotional balance by indulging in prejudice and sentimentalism [Dissertation on the Poor Laws]. The improvidence (lacking personal responsibility) of the poor was a law of nature, for servile, sordid, and ignoble work would otherwise not be done. (born to be vile?) Also what would become of the fatherland unless we could rely on the poor? "For what is it but distress and poverty which can prevail upon the lower classes of the people to encounter all the horrors which await them on the tempestuous ocean or on the field of battle?"
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation
"The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police and the health and workers’ administration. The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious or in need of help. They came from psychiatric clinics and childrens' hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps. The number of victims is huge, the number of offenders who were sentenced, small."
Commemorative Tablet at Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin
“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”
C. S. Lewis
The spokesmodels were unnerved with the rally in gold today, which was in no doubt in part due to the weakness of the Dollar, and the stress on the physical supply on the return of China to business.
Their concern was that it is unusual for gold to rally in what appears to be a safe haven move, with stocks also rising. Always the stock market, that is their major concern, their priority. The system is God, and damn the people whom it was designed to serve and support.
Stocks did back off markedly into the close after a rather robust showing during the day. We must put our best foot forward for the rest of the world after all.
Gold in fact has begun to flesh out a new
cup, which if it succeeds and manages at some point to break out will target $1550 at a minimum.
As I noted in some posts over the holiday weekend, the long bear market in gold, which was sustained by managed selling of physical gold by central banks in order to manage the market has clearly ended around 2007. The price of gold began to rally a few years earlier in anticipation of this sea change.
And so now, after a long consolidation after the first leg of the new bull market, the price of gold appears to be attempting to begin its second leg, and move to take out the prior highs.
A higher price in gold is likely to be accompanied by social disruption and political uncertainty as one might expect on an examination of history. We do seem to be lurching towards some perversely desired rendezvous with destiny.
If by some miracle of providence we could have what a good person might
wish for, rather than what they might see coming despite all their efforts, our grandchildren might not be tempted to damn us for our willful foolishness and careless pride.
But we can take comfort in the undeniable fact that the future is an elusive mix of possibilities and probabilities, and that the eventual outcome is, in the final analysis, in the hands of Providence, as well as our own.
Have a pleasant evening.
