"'After dinner, 'Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice,' Ms. Warren writes. '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.'
I had been warned."
Elizabeth Warren,
A Fighting Chance
“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”
Émile Zola
"The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government.
This is the contempt in which they hold the majority of American people and the political process: the common people are easily led fools, and everyone else who is smart enough to know better has their price. And they would beggar every middle class voter in the US before they will voluntarily give up one dime of their ill gotten gains."
Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup, May 2009
"The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and
in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of
one another.”
Samuel Johnson
“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside
observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its
civic courage. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable
among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss
of courage by the entire society.”
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
"Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us."
Chalmers Johnson
Stocks managed to hold their own today, a fairly meager accomplishment given the deep level of selling that they currently are maintaining.
Gold and silver were hit by steady selling throughout the NY trading session. They are now approaching what may be a tradable bottom, depending on what the other financial markets may do.
VIX remains elevated.
The Dollar strengthened further to just below the 104 handle.
Have a pleasant evening.
