Those Who Live In Darkness - The Social Contract

"'I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my family, for I have five brothers.  Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.’  Abraham replied, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’   No, father Abraham,’ the rich man said, ‘but if someone from the dead appears to them, they will repent.’ 

And Abraham said, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not change and repent, even if someone were to rise from the dead.’”

Luke 16:27-31


"When the social contract is broken in a civilized society, the leadership is discredited & replaced. One of the costs governments were willing to pay to bailout the banks and save the bankers was upending the social contract. I wonder if the politicians realized the implications for democracy and the rise in partisanship that would result?

It is a shameful reality that scarcely any of our current politicians or newscasters are aware of what the social contract is, much less that severe damage to it was done by people like Paulson, Bernanke, Geithner and Summers.

Even our elite economists seem to have failed to learn or forgotten about the social contract. Such ideas were somehow lost when subject of political economy abandoned in favor of pure economics, especially in US academia."

Harald Malmgren

Stocks were having another wide-ranging day, shoved higher and lower by the hot winds of greed and fear.

Greed seemed to prevail, as stocks went out nearer to the highs of the day.

After the bell Facebook announced its earnings. We will have to wait for the conference call to see how those chips may fall, although the Street was cheered somewhat by the initial numbers.

There will be a Non-Farm payrolls report on Friday.

Gold and silver were weakly traded today with the Dollar rising higher, and the split personalities of the market were vacillating between risk on and risk off.

The stores of ounces of physical gold for ready delivery in Hong Kong has dropped to a rather low level again. The registered gold in NY is not very robustly supplied either, at least at these prices.

Have a pleasant evening.