ETC

Put another way, the amount of high quality collateral backstopping this mess has shrunken dramatically. On top of this, traders have been piling into sovereign bonds in anticipation of various QE programs, forcing yields to multi-decade if not multi-century lows.

Elon Musk, Silicon Valley’s poster-boy genius replacement for the late Steve Jobs, rolled out his PowerWall battery last week with Star Wars style fanfare, doing his bit to promote and support the delusional thinking that grips a nation unable to escape the toils of techno-grandiosity. The main delusion: that we can “solve” the problems of techno-industrial society with more and better technology. The denizens of Silicon Valley are crazy about the Tesla. There is no greater status trinket in Northern California, where the fog of delusion cloaks the road to the future.

Very rarely, if ever, is there a failure of regulators, a failure of central bankers, a failure of commercial bankers, failures on the war on drugs, failures in military wars, etc. because all of these institutions and people deliberately plan, execute and achieve exactly what they intend to accomplish.

Meant to extend and widen trade and related commercial relationships between the participating countries, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has also been presented as a way for the U.S. to maintain his economic and political power in East Asia in the face of the rising influence of China in that part of the world. What should be most clear is that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not a free trade agreement. Parts of it may, no doubt, lower some trade barriers, thus making easier the production, sale and purchase of a wider variety of imports and exports. However, TPP, like all other trade agreements in the post-World War II era is a managed trade agreement.

In a remarkably unbalanced and lazy article on gold this month the Economist magazine attempts to dismantle the case for investors and others to own gold. Both from an investment point of view and also from an ethical point of view. The article is so laughably one sided that it resembles propaganda rather than journalism. Therefore, we take pleasure in dissecting the article misleading sentence by misleading sentence.

“In a democratic society,” observed Oakland police chief Sean Whent, “people have a say in how they are policed.” Unfortunately, if you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is never held accountable for violating your rights and his oath of office to serve and protect, never forced to make amends, never told that what he did was wrong, and never made to change his modus operandi, then you don’t live in a constitutional republic. You live in a police state.

At 38 consecutive days, it is now the longest streak without the Dow hitting either a 1-month high or low in at least 100 years. That milestone alone would justify discussion, but as Dana Lyon notes, the current 1-month range in the Dow is a very tight 1.58% (the 17th narrowest 1-month range since 1990). Simply put, the bar for setting a 1-month high or low has been very low for the Dow, yet it has been unable to achieve one; but given the length and amount of the market compression, one might expect it to explode one way or another once the streak was broken.

"Those who might want to borrow are no longer creditworthy due to excessive debt and/or stagnant income, or those who qualify to borrow more are not interested in borrowing more at any interest rate: they are done with debt." The Fed can push interest rates down and make it easy for banks to loan more money, but it can't (yet) force us to borrow money we don't want or need.

The consequences and patterns of war, whether by one nation against another or by a government against the citizenry, rarely change. However, the methods of war have evolved vastly in modern times. Wars by elites against populations are often so subtle that many people might not even recognize that they are under attack until it is too late. Any defense the American people might muster against elitist dismantling of constitutional liberties would inevitably turn to "insurgency". So using CFR member Boot’s views on counterinsurgency as a guideline, here is how the elites will most likely wage open war on those within the American population who have the will to fight back.

Twitter had a very bad last week when its stock tanked ~ 27% in 5 trading days.

What follows is a remarkable data base of Corporate Fines and Settlements. From blatant cartel price-fixing or not disclosing the dangers of the company's heavily promoted medications to destroying documents to thwart an investigation of wrong-doing, the list is stunning and reads like a who's who of Corporate America and Top 100 Global Corporations. In other words, these were not wrist-slaps for minor oversights of complex regulations - these are blatant violations of core laws of the land and while the PR spins how corporate profits benefit widows and orphans, this vast wealth is concentrated in the top 1% and the top 5%.

As is almost always the case, the price of gold was leaned on at the standard PLAN A time in London when The Gold Cartel traders reported for work, but their nudge was thwarted pretty quickly. Gold took off again going into the Comex trading hours and managed to reach $1200 where it was stopped dead in its tracks. James Mc early this morning…

"I am not very optimistic about the fate of mankind as while our problems tend to evolve in exponential ways, our attempts at solving them move in linear fashion. That is true as much for the problems we ourselves create as it is for those that – seem to – ‘simply happen’. I think it would be very beneficial for us if we were to admit to our limits when it comes to solving large scale issues, because that might change the behavior we exhibit when creating these issues. The human capacity for denial and deceit plays a formidable role in this. We’re simply not smart enough to acknowledge our own limitations. Therefore, as Meadows says: "we are going to evolve through crisis, not through proactive change.""

Yes ... They're Collecting the Content of AMERICANS' Phone Calls, Too