"Seneca had made the bargain that many good men have made when agreeing to aid bad regimes. On the one hand, their presence strengthens the regime and helps it endure. But their moral influence may also improve the regime's behavior or save the lives of its enemies. For many, this has been a bargain worth making, even if it has cost them—as it may have cost Seneca—their immortal soul...
The Rome he has been trained to serve, the Rome of Augustus and Germanicus, was gone. In its place stood Neropolis, ruled by a megalomaniac brat.”
James Romm, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero
"The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the 'last thing standing' between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability."
Thomas Frank, Trump to the White House, and liberals put him there, The Guardian, 9 November 2016
"The end result was to be a new Imperial Order and a New World Empire run by elite, self-perpetuating oligarchies from the leading nations of the earth."
Dr. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966, p. 860
"I think one of the cleverest things the 1% have done over the last few years is the way they have created a relentless public discourse, via their paid political front-men and women and their media empires, to insist on the need to ‘fix’ and protect the system, and the extreme danger to us all should the system not be ‘saved’. This has served as a perfect cover for making sure that not enough people have noticed that the system is, in fact, being gutted and replaced by something that better serves the interests of the 1%. We have not been fixing the banks, we have been feeding them."
Golem XIV, The Next Crisis Part One, 2014
The risk markets seem to have finished gorging on the excess liquidity supplied by the Fed in the event of a dislocation caused by a disputed national election, which never happened.
This reminds me very much of late in the year 2000 with a bubble of liquidity and a gross mispricing of risks.
Hey what do I know. I don't even charge for my blog, or sell anything, or even take ads.
I just trade for myself, as I have done since 2001, and have no job or other sources of income. Because I don't need or want them.
Watch as the appointments for this new presidential administration unfold, as actions speak louder than words. They flaunt their intentions.
Stick a fork in that cruel experiment in the Ukraine— it's done. History will not forgive the ones responsible, and it ought not to forget.
The Mideast is about to run face first into a buzz saw of hard realities. It may turn out much worse than I fear, and that is going to leave a mark.
The madness serves none but itself.
Gold and silver rallied sharply today, and the Dollar fell.
Wash - rinse - repeat.
If you lost money of any significance in this little exercise, you may wish to switch to longer term positions and stop trading. It's not going to get any easier.
These are historic times.
Stocks are getting extra crispy. Their timer is running out.
Have a pleasant evening.
