"There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice, that does not live by secrecy."
Joseph Pulitzer
"An investigation later discovered that business journalists for at least eight papers promoted stocks in their writing in return for bribes. The most embarrassing were at the Wall Street Journal, where reporters who wrote 'Broad Street Gossip' and 'Abreast of the Market' took payoffs for stock tips in the 1920s.
The revelations about the Journal reporters came out during hearings by the Senate Banking and Currency Committee in 1932, more than three years later, when Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia produced cancelled checks written to the Journal reporters from publicist A. Newton Plummer. The stories based on the bribes had gone as far back as 1923."
University of North Carolina, History of Business Journalism
"This elite-generated social control maintains the status quo because the status quo benefits and validates those who created and sit atop it. People rise to prominence when they parrot the orthodoxy rather than critically analyze it. Intellectual regurgitation is prized over independent thought.
Real change in politics or society cannot occur under the orthodoxy because if it did, it would threaten the legitimacy of the professional class and all of the systems that helped them achieve their status."
Kristine Mattis, The Cult of the Professional Class
"I would say that practically all the financial journals were on the take. This includes reporters for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Herald-Tribune, you name it. A publicity man called A. Newton Plummer had canceled checks from practically every major journalist in New York City."
Robert Sobel in PBS, The Great Crash of 1929
"The power which the moneyed interest can exercise, when concentrated under a single head and with our present system of currency, was sufficiently demonstrated in the struggle made by the Bank of the United States.
It is one of the serious evils of our present system of banking that it enables one class of society, and that by no means a numerous one, by its control over the currency, to act injuriously upon the interests of all the others and to exercise more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs."
Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address
Stocks attempted to rally on the much weaker than expected Non-Farm Payrolls report, it being dovish and all that.
But alas, once again the realities of pandemic caused stocks to drop from their most recent bubble heights.
Gold and silver rallied, which is unusual for a Non-Farm Payrolls day.
The Dollar was flat.
The VIX remains elevated.
Have a pleasant weekend.
