Most Popular
1. Banking Crisis is Stocks Bull Market Buying Opportunity - Nadeem_Walayat
2.The Crypto Signal for the Precious Metals Market - P_Radomski_CFA
3. One Possible Outcome to a New World Order - Raymond_Matison
4.Nvidia Blow Off Top - Flying High like the Phoenix too Close to the Sun - Nadeem_Walayat
5. Apple AAPL Stock Trend and Earnings Analysis - Nadeem_Walayat
6.AI, Stocks, and Gold Stocks – Connected After All - P_Radomski_CFA
7.Stock Market CHEAT SHEET - - Nadeem_Walayat
8.US Debt Ceiling Crisis Smoke and Mirrors Circus - Nadeem_Walayat
9.Silver Price May Explode - Avi_Gilburt
10.More US Banks Could Collapse -- A Lot More- EWI
Last 7 days
Stock Market Volatility (VIX) - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Investor Sentiment - 25th Mar 24
The Federal Reserve Didn't Do Anything But It Had Plenty to Say - 25th Mar 24
Stock Market Breadth - 24th Mar 24
Stock Market Margin Debt Indicator - 24th Mar 24
It’s Easy to Scream Stocks Bubble! - 24th Mar 24
Stocks: What to Make of All This Insider Selling- 24th Mar 24
Money Supply Continues To Fall, Economy Worsens – Investors Don’t Care - 24th Mar 24
Get an Edge in the Crypto Market with Order Flow - 24th Mar 24
US Presidential Election Cycle and Recessions - 18th Mar 24
US Recession Already Happened in 2022! - 18th Mar 24
AI can now remember everything you say - 18th Mar 24
Bitcoin Crypto Mania 2024 - MicroStrategy MSTR Blow off Top! - 14th Mar 24
Bitcoin Gravy Train Trend Forecast 2024 - 11th Mar 24
Gold and the Long-Term Inflation Cycle - 11th Mar 24
Fed’s Next Intertest Rate Move might not align with popular consensus - 11th Mar 24
Two Reasons The Fed Manipulates Interest Rates - 11th Mar 24
US Dollar Trend 2024 - 9th Mar 2024
The Bond Trade and Interest Rates - 9th Mar 2024
Investors Don’t Believe the Gold Rally, Still Prefer General Stocks - 9th Mar 2024
Paper Gold Vs. Real Gold: It's Important to Know the Difference - 9th Mar 2024
Stocks: What This "Record Extreme" Indicator May Be Signaling - 9th Mar 2024
My 3 Favorite Trade Setups - Elliott Wave Course - 9th Mar 2024
Bitcoin Crypto Bubble Mania! - 4th Mar 2024
US Interest Rates - When WIll the Fed Pivot - 1st Mar 2024
S&P Stock Market Real Earnings Yield - 29th Feb 2024
US Unemployment is a Fake Statistic - 29th Feb 2024
U.S. financial market’s “Weimar phase” impact to your fiat and digital assets - 29th Feb 2024
What a Breakdown in Silver Mining Stocks! What an Opportunity! - 29th Feb 2024
Why AI will Soon become SA - Synthetic Intelligence - The Machine Learning Megatrend - 29th Feb 2024
Keep Calm and Carry on Buying Quantum AI Tech Stocks - 19th Feb 24

Market Oracle FREE Newsletter

How to Protect your Wealth by Investing in AI Tech Stocks

From Organised Religion to Government - The Fall of Confidence

Politics / Social Issues Mar 06, 2015 - 12:23 PM GMT

By: Dr_Jeff_Lewis

Politics

Institutional confidence is akin to gravity. We know it’s there, and we understand a lot about it - but we haven’t yet been able to explain it adequately enough. At least not enough to quantify its relationship  - or unify gravity with the other physical forces that we do understand. Of course, we are much further from unification of the interactions between confidence (behavior), the economy, and finance. 

It’s easy to see the effect finance has on the economy. One can even map the ultimate effect through history, which is riddled with failed currencies. Ultimately, the failure of an untethered financial system culminates with the collapse of a currency. 


Just as gravity is crucial for keeping things from floating away, sound money is the force that is crucial for controlling the trajectory of modern financial policy. 

Somewhere along the line, confidence pushes things over the edge, and the tipping point comes from a confluence of failures in faith. 

This may be where we are now. When you hear people speak of “something afoot,” this is what they mean. 

Of course, financial confidence is an abstract concept formed in the collective view--a view maintained by truly dangerous falsehoods. 

We may not be able to unify confidence with the real economy and a financial system unhinged, but we can all come to appreciate its gradual thinning. 

Note: Some people assume all finance is bad. I don’t. But I believe that a financial system should be rooted firmly to some physical reality. It should be fixed to a substance that can be easily valued, measured, and is free floating in the market place. What that literally looks like and how we could get there from here is another topic for another day.  

Cracks of confidence can appear over broad stretches, in a variety of institutions that one may find quite surprising when looked at in the overall. 

For example, a friend recently sent me a rant about the health care system. It went as follows:

“The Sick Care fiasco has so many problems that have metastasized over decades of abuse that I don’t know it can ever be fixed.  Between pharmaceutical corporations, research universities, patent law, doctors, hospitals, FDA, CDC, and other government bodies, trade associations, insurance companies, psychiatry, medical coding, no-fault settlements, Hollywood, Wall Street, and the ignorant ‘just-give-me-a-pill’ consumer/patient - we are stuck in a downward spiral.” 

I immediately wrote back with a quasi-MadLib to exhibit how easily the same could be said for other institutions. My version:

“The {Sick Care | financial system} fiasco has so many problems that have metastasized over decades of abuse that I don’t know it can ever be fixed.  Between {pharmaceutical corporations | giant multinational banks}, {research universities | economics departments}, {patent law | zero prosecutions}, {doctors | HFT-dark pool exchanges}, {hospitals | agency revolving door}, {FDA | SEC | CFTC}, {CDC | Federal Reserve | Treasury | IMF | World Bank}, & other government bodies, trade associations, insurance companies, {psychiatry | general ignorance  |  mass propaganda}, {medical coding | financial reporting | fictional accounting standards GAAP}, {no-fault settlements | two-tiers of justice}, Hollywood, Wall Street, and the ignorant {‘just-give-me-a-pill’ | ‘just give me yield’} {consumer/patient | investor/Muppet} - we are stuck in a downward spiral. 

Institutions are strong, cohesive sets of beliefs and expectations held in the collective mind. 

Institutional confidence or “confidence” represents the great unquantifiable component of modern finance. It simply doesn’t fit into the equations, the risk profiles, the algorithms or the charts. 

There will always be a few, however, who hang on to the conceptual idea, no matter how poorly the home team performs or how invasive they become. 

The problem we face with institutional confidence is that the remaining fans have near absolute power — they can make things appear to be as they are not for an extended period of time. 

These collective patterns may have made sense or might have worked at some point, but are now out of date. They are antiquated, afraid, and grasping for more and more power. 

Here’s a list of institutions in order of confidence from a Gallup poll taken last year. 

The Military
Small Biz
Police
The Church or Organized Religion
The Medical System
US Supreme Court
The Presidency
The Public Schools
Banks
The Criminal Justice System
Newspapers
Organized Labor
Big Business 
News on the Internet
Television News
Congress

Military at the top, banking in the middle, and Congress at the bottom. 

For more articles like this, and/or for a breath of fresh silver market reality amidst the stench of denial and technically meaningless short term price obsessed madness, check out http://www.silver-coin-investor.com

By Dr. Jeff Lewis

    Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, in addition to running a busy medical practice, is the editor of Silver-Coin-Investor.com

    Copyright © 2015 Dr. Jeff Lewis- All Rights Reserved Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors.

Dr. Jeff Lewis Archive

© 2005-2022 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication.


Post Comment

Only logged in users are allowed to post comments. Register/ Log in