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| George Frederick Watts, Mammon |
"Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness.
A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair. Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture."
Thomas Merton
"Thus we see how the neoliberal utopia tends to embody itself in the reality of a kind of infernal machine, whose necessity imposes itself even upon the rulers. Like the Marxism of an earlier time, with which, in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia evokes powerful belief - the free trade faith - not only among those who live off it, such as financiers, the owners and managers of large corporations, etc., but also among those, such as high-level government officials and politicians, who derive their justification for existing from it.
For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks.
And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses."
Pierre Bourdieu, L’essence du néolibéralisme
The first two charts below, which describe the decline in life expectancy in the US and the rise of negative yielding sovereign debt, are emblematic of a status quo in serious decline, but grasping the reins of power desperately, as they slowly lose control.
Stocks continued their move to the downside today, taking back only a little bit of it into the close.
The NDX finally closed the big gap it had left open a few weeks ago. These gaps keeps getting closed in these moves up. We are not seeing any breakaway gaps. That speaks volumes about these rallies, a word to the wise.
The SP 500 fell back to its 61.8% Fibonacci retracement in the most recent rally.
I have not yet labeled this latest episode as a blow off top, because I want to see it set a lower low first.
Gold held its gains from yesterday fairly well, as the Dollar continued to move even lower.
I was a little concerned about the big gold gain, because a portion of it was clearly due to short covering as the front runners of the Non-Farm Payrolls report short side play got smoked.
The action next week, the first week in August, will be most interesting.
I think we might look with some concern to the autumn, particularly September and October.
Have a pleasant weekend.
