“I think I’m signaling something a little bit shocking to Americans, and to myself, actually. Which is the situation we find ourselves in at this moment, this week, is very strongly reminiscent of the situations we’ve seen many times in other places.

But they’re places we don’t like to think of ourselves as being similar to. They’re emerging markets. It’s Russia or Indonesia or a Thailand type situation, or Korea. That’s not comfortable. America is different. America is special. America is rich. And, yet, we’ve somehow find ourselves in the grip of the same sort of crisis and the same sort of oligarchs”.

Bill Moyer’s Journal, Interview with Simon Johnson, February, 2009

“National Socialism brought dream and conformism together into something satanic. Hitlerism was a mass flight to dogma, to the barbaric dogma of the tribe, the dogma that gave every man importance only in so far as the tribe was important and he was a member of the tribe.

I fooled myself.I had to.Everybody has to.If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it.But I didn’t want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent.I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community.”

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free 

“The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well.Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them.Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich.Plunder, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

Tacitus, Agricola 

Gold put in a fourth day of gains, taking the $1200 handle in the futures, from the low last week at $1159.

Silver managed to put in a gain on the dollar weakness as well, just hovering below $12.