"We are coming apart as a society, and inequality is right at the core of that. When the 90 percent are getting worse off and they’re trying to figure out what happened, they’re not people like me who get to spend four or five hours a day studying these things and then writing about them — they’re people who have to make a living and get through life. And they’re going to be swayed by demagogues and filled with fear about the other, rather than bringing us together.
President Theodore Roosevelt said we shall all rise together or we shall all fall together, and we need to have an appreciation of that.
I think it would be easy for someone to arrive in the near future and really create forces that would lead to trouble in this country. And you see people who, they’re not the leaders to pull it off, but we have suggestions that the president should be killed, that he’s not an American, that Texas can secede, that states can ignore federal law, and these are things that don’t lack for antecedents in America history but they’re clearly on the rise.
In addition to that, we have this large, very well-funded news organization that is premised on misconstruing facts and telling lies, Faux News that is creating, in a large segment of the population — somewhere around one-fifth and one-fourth of it — belief in all sorts of things that are detrimental to our well-being.
So, no, I don’t see this happening tomorrow, but I have said for many years that if we don’t get a handle on this then one of these days our descendants are going to sit down in high-school history class and open a textbook that begins with the words: The United States of America was … and then it will dissect how our experiment in self-governance came apart."
David Cay Johnston, May 2014
"Inequality is a euphemism, a kind of shorthand, for all of the things that have gone to make the lives of the rich so much more delicious, year on year, for the last three decades. And also for the things that have made the lives of working people so wretched and so precarious in that same time. This word inequality. It's visible in the ever rising costs of healthcare and college, in the coronation of Wall Street, and the slow blighting of wherever it is that you happen to live.
And you catch a glimpse of inequality every time you hear about someone that had to declare bankruptcy because a child got sick, or you read about the lobbying industry that drives Washington DC, or the new political requirement, the new constitutional requirement that every presidential candidate has to be a billionaire's favorite, or a billionaire themselves.
Inequality is about the way in which speculators, and even criminals, get a helping hand from Uncle Sam, while the Vietnam Vet down the street from you loses his house."
Thomas Frank
"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason.
But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"Capitalism is at risk of failing today not because we are running out of innovations, or because markets are failing to inspire private actions, but because we’ve lost sight of the operational failings of unfettered gluttony. We are neglecting a torrent of market failures in infrastructure, finance, and the environment.
We are turning our backs on a grotesque worsening of income inequality and willfully continuing to slash social benefits. We are destroying the Earth as if we are indeed the last generation."
Jeffrey Sachs
Stocks were on another risk on rally today, with the SP and NDX making new highs again.
After the bell some of the big story stocks like Peloton and Uber and Square were getting spanked on their earnings and guidance.
Ed Yardeni assures us that stocks are not rising due to any monetary support from the Fed, but from their wonderful earnings growth.
Like I said yesterday— delusional.
Well in fairness there is a lot of that going around these days.
Gold and silver bounced back, along with the Dollar which took back the 94 handle decisively.
Hmmmm. Now why would these three canaries rise on a risk on day.
Besides the shock from the Bank of England, the bond market's unreliable boyfriend.
And who could have seen it coming?
Non-Farm Payrolls tomorrow.
Have a pleasant evening.
