“It’s been proven that every business depends on every other business… so everybody ought to share the burdens of everyone else.”
-Orren Boyle (Atlas Shrugged)
While it’s hard to pinpoint exactly who each character in today’s emerging socialist state would be in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, I’m very confident that Tim Geithner could audition for more roles than one. He’s trained for this for 47% of his life.
In Chapter 3 of “Atlas Shrugged”, titled “The Top And The Bottom”, Rand introduces the largesse of Big Government Intervention via a political panderer by the name of Orren Boyle who “had appeared out of nowhere, five years ago, and had since made the cover of every national magazine…”
Ah, to be on 60 Minutes… my life would finally have purpose…
“Disunity,” drawled James Taggart, “seems to be the basic cause of all social problems.”
“You said it, Jim. Disunity that’s the trouble.”
That conversation (pages 44-45) between a modern day bailout socialist (James Taggart) and Geithner (Orren Boyle) pretty much sums up how this country’s central planning board of directors thinks about things – in real-time.
Real-time? Yes We Can. Check out these comments yesterday by The Gopher (Geithner) about this country’s fiscal affairs:
- “Dark forces are waging a war of attrition against efforts to strengthen regulation of the financial system…”
- “They’re trying to starve the agencies of funding so they can’t enforce protections…”
- “Right now this is all theater… I think there are some people pretending not to understand…”
No – I could not have made up these quotes if I tried. Nor do I find them funny. Political “theater” like this is a national embarrassment. Our moving more and more to the left everyday has every capitalist in America subliminally losing confidence in how this is all going to end.
“Who Is John Gault?”
This is the world’s 2nd most influential book of all-time (according to a 1991 survey by the Library of Congress) next to the Holy Bible for good reason. There are socialists and there are capitalists. And there are politicians in your life - at work, school, and play – angling … and scheming… somewhere in between the socialist-capitalist spectrum.
Never mind “Who Is John Gault?” – maybe a better question is who are you in today’s edition of Gopher Shrugged? It’s an important question to ask yourself as we extend and pretend on the definition of a true free-market society.
Back to the Global Macro Grind…
US stocks and commodities we’re up yesterday because the US Dollar was down. If you want to fix this “disunity” thing – for short-term political resolve - that’s pretty much the only way to do it (if you think getting stocks up is the answer that is). All these fat cats have to do is blow up the hard earned credibility embedded in America’s currency.
The problem with this solution to the problem – the problem that they created - is that when you abuse it (and I mean burn it), the “reflation” trade turns into The Inflation (and some loony guys making Reardon Macro in New Haven said INFLATION SLOWS GROWTH).
That’s the problem.
Dollar DOWN a smidgen yesterday = commodity inflation UP big time (up +1.5% on the CRB Commodities Index – a basket of 19 commodities). So take that “theater” at the pump this Memorial Day weekend folks, and like it.
There’s seemingly no juice left in The Gopher’s “agencies.” Market volumes are drying up. And the “dark forces” of market gravity associated with those God blessed things called supply, demand, and price have US stocks down for 4 consecutive weeks.
What are we pee-ons who are starting our own companies, on our own sweat capital, to do? Easy answer. Raise Cash in our portfolios so that we can be there … once again - like we were in 2008… to hire and creatively destruct all that is wrong with central planning.
My immediate-term support and resistance ranges for Gold, Oil, and the SP500 are now $1, $96-89-101.57, and 1, respectively.
Best of luck out there today,
KM
Keith R. McCullough
Chief Executive Officer
