Hey everyone. Welcome to this week's video update for Friday, August 4th. Hope everybody had a good week of trading. Let's take a quick look at the markets and then we'll jump into the trades and positions for the week. Starting with the S&P.  In fact, look what volatility did. I mean, don't look now, but VIX is back above 17. VIX was down about 8% at one point today on Friday and it closed up 7%. So about a 15% swing from low to high in VIX. So pumping some juice back into these options, which is a welcome for us premium sellers. NASDAQ, same price action down as well. Same with the Russell down and the Dow down as well. Gold and silver both lower, although gold had a little bit of a bounce today as kind of an opposite of the market. Notes and bonds down as well, but big bounce today. And then the 10-year yield which pushed all the way up to almost 4.2 drew back down to a little above 4. Oil higher on the week, natty gas down the first part of the week up yesterday and today. Soybeans kind of chopping around with a little bit of a continuation lower early in the week. Wheat down continuing from its down move from last week and same with corn. Euro and the pound kind of chopping back and forth and Bitcoin hanging around that $29,000 level. All right, so let's jump into our trades for the week starting with zero DTE. So nice work, nice week for zero DTE, almost 35,000 in booked profits for zero DTE just last week.  So this is all my zero DTE minus power hour, so just a little over 2600 on these trades. Had an AM ratio on Monday, booked a nice winner. Quiet lunch on Monday, booked a nice winner. AM ratio on Tuesday, small winner. A zero day duck on Tuesday, that was a nice winner. Quiet lunch on Tuesday, that was a nice winner. Did an AM ratio on Wednesday where that big sell-off gapped open and kept going.  And then I also took a loss on a zero day duck, which I should not have taken. It did not fit the criteria, but I thought I knew better, so I put on a duck. Really, it didn't fit the criteria for entry and ended up taking a loss on that one. AM ratio on Thursday worked nicely. Zero day duck on Thursday worked nicely. And then today had a RIC, it was a winner. In fact, so I got out of four of my five contracts at 30% on the first down move, and then it ripped up, went through my valley all the way to the upside, and I just closed out my last runner for a small profit on the upside. So I didn't hold it through the other down move, but still a nice winner. And then lastly, quiet lunch today on Friday, which ended up being a wild lunch. So it took a loss on that one. So that's the first loss on the quiet lunch in the short time that I've been trading. So that is everything except for power hour. And then if I just do power hour, show you what we did there. So on, let me refresh this. So total profits just from power hour over 32,000. So Monday had a loss on trunch one, but trunch two and three came through as winners. So a net of about 3,800 on Monday. On Tuesday, all three tranches were winners over 10,000 just that day. On Wednesday, trunch one was a loser, but trunch two and three came through. So let's see that's nine. So about plus 5,000 on Wednesday. And then Thursday, trunch one was a loser, but trunch two and three. So nine minus four, about about a $5,000 winner on Thursday. And then today for power hour, another nice winner, all three ended up being losers. Trunch two is a small winner or excuse me, all three tranches were winners. Trunch two was a small winner, but net net over 8,000 for power hour today on Friday. And those still shown as open, but my longs will settle on Saturday morning. And so it'll be a take a little bit off those whatever I paid for the longs. So nice week. Nice, nice week. All right. Next strategy dynamic butterfly. So no, no woodpeckers, but time flies. So this is a class that I'm actually doing this Thursday. So mark your calendars, 3.30pm. This Thursday, I'm going to be doing a class on these time flies. So these weren't actually sent out to as alerts yet because we haven't done the class yet, but I booked three winners on these 120, 825 and 920. So a total of a little over $1,800 on those. So I'm looking forward to sharing that with you this Thursday. And then a red week on dynamic calendars. Took another sizable loss on a TGIF. Get all those checked. So took a $5,700 loss on a TGIF that we closed today, closed yesterday at one DTE. Six sevens have been crushing it though, plus 2000 on that six seven, 625 on a 3.5. A little single calendar scratch that went on that NDX trade, $585 winner on a BNB. Then on that big gap down Wednesday, took a 540 loss on a BNB and a $2,200 loss on a 2.3 MJ. And then had another $240 winner on a BNB. We've currently got a TGIF, a 5.7 and a 3.6 on. So let me show you those. So on our TGIF, put this on earlier in the day when volatility was really down. And then of course the market moved down and volatility pumped up. So we're up a little bit on that, but it has pushed into the lower end of our range. So we will deal with that on Monday. And then on the 3.6, now this is the 5.7. So we just put this on near the close. So not much has changed on that one. And then 3.6 is this one here. So we're up a tiny bit of money, but still pretty centered. So the 3.6 will take off first thing Monday morning. And the 5.7 will manage just as we talk about in the class. Alright, so that's the dynamic calendars. Let's move on to NTT and check all of these. Oh, first, sorry, Iron Ducks. So just opened one new duck. No clothes trades this week. So let's go to our Ducky Ducks. We've got one in rut, which has an 818 expiration in the AM cycle. Price is right here. So in good shape on that one. In SPX, we've got this one here, which expires on the 8th. So hopefully price can kind of stay in this area. And we have a chance to book a max profit duck head on that one. And then on our other duck, this one is pushed into the duck head too, but we've got till 822 on this one. So we've got a little bit more time. So we're going to need price to kind of simmer down there to profit on that one. And then, so that's the one we just opened this week. And so that's it on the Ducks. NTT, Navigation Trend Trading. So not too many trades, plus 1600. And actually this one is closed. That P&L is correct. Booked over $2,400 on soybeans. I got to double check why that's still showing as open. But that one is closed. Scratch, little scratch winner in EEM. $370 loss on M2K short. No, that was long. Yeah.  Still long gold and short Netflix. And then lastly are options selling and hedgehogs. So took a winner out of MES on a short strangle plus 382.50. The short strangle in oil, it's still open. In fact, I'll show you the open ones on the platform.  All the others are open. So let's go take a look at those. Starting with 6E. Got a short strangle in 6E. We've rolled down calls a couple times on this, but it's bounced back. Not quite to center, but we're in good shape on that one. CL, excuse me. CL, we've got a couple of positions. We have a hedgehog, which has an 817 expiration. Got a little bit of profit going on that one. And then we've got a short strangle where price is pushed up here. So we need to get out of that. We would hit our, we've rolled our puts up three times on this and collected over $1,500 in credit. If we can get out, if we get a little bit of a down move in oil next week, and we can get out of this thing for $2, currently trading at $260. If we can get out at $2, we'll hit our profit target of 50% of initial credit. ES, we've got a hedgehog. Price is hanging out right here. So we've got, we've got a chance if price continues lower to keep moving into our sweet spot, if we can get some continue down move. And then obviously, depending on how close we are to expiration, we'll determine our level of profit on that one. We still have until about the 17th or 18th before we would consider taking that one off. You can see, generate some decent profits if that happens. Big if, but in good shape on that one. In gold, we've got a reverse hedgehog. And it's just kind of hanging out right here. We want it to start climbing as we get closer to expiration on that. MES, we've still got a short strangle here. We have not adjusted this one. We're up a little bit pretty well centered on that one. We put on a new hedgehog in NQ today. Price is right here, so nothing to do on that. ZS, we've got a short strangle in ZS. We've adjusted this one a couple times. Price is right here. We're actually, we're up money on this one after adjustments, but not quite to our profit target. IWM, we've got a hedgehog. Price is right here. QQQ, we've got a, oh yeah, we already closed this one out for a profit. We were just holding this as kind of a lottery. This one will expire today. And then the others are, we got our ducks. And then lastly in VXX, we've got a volatility contraction play. When volatility was contracting and VIX was down eight, we had a nice little profit going. And then volatility spiked and it pushed back up. So we're not too far off from where we put this one on. All right. So that is it, my friends. Remember, Thursday is the class. We'll be streaming live. In fact, let me grab the live stream calendar. So next week is the seventh. So I will be live streaming in the morning for zero DTE. Chad will be live streaming on Tuesday for our other day trading strategies Wednesday. I will be streaming live for zero DTE in the morning. And then Thursday and Friday in the morning, Chad will be streaming for the others. And then we'll be streaming live for power hour every day. All right. So that is it, my friends. Take care. Have a good weekend. Talk to you next week.


Alrighty, I'm here to talk about Fury325 at Carowinds and what has happened with it. Everything I'm about to discuss is pure speculation, and obviously Carowinds and Bulgar and Mabelard know best, and yeah, I believe they've provided a statement, honestly it was really professional, super transparent, and I honestly fully respect that statement, and I fully trust that this is never going to happen at a Cedar Fair Park ever again, and it shouldn't have happened. I know Cedar Fair's safety standards and they are honestly immaculate, so it's quite shocking that it did take so long to get noticed, and that's the only flaw in the entire storyline, is how it did take over a week for Carowinds to catch on to that in the structure, and that is definitely a maintenance problem. So I, in my previous video, I obviously have talked to people in the industry, that is the one benefit to being a construction rumors and speculation channel, is you get some serious connections in your home parks community, and I have some, to be honest, really phenomenal connections in the construction industry, and I actually have kept my mouth shut for the most part, until I've heard some concrete kind of, I guess you would call it speculation still on what happened, and since my last video, I've had the opportunity to have a really good conversation with a welding company that works on, you know, some really serious projects in Canada, and honestly, like, it all makes sense to me, and I'm going to present what I know about the situation from talking with this amazing company, and I know this company would 100% know what transpired or what could have been avoided, and I'm going to share that information, and obviously take that with a grain of salt, because it is just speculation, and again, I trust Bulgar and Mabalard and Cedar Fair with my safety beyond belief, and I can definitely assure you this will never happen again, especially with it making the big time news. Cedar Fair is one of those companies that does not like anything negative shared about them in the media. I do want to talk about, I think this was such a serious topic of discussion, and honestly, hearing all the speculation and the assumptions in the community, it's been kind of a turn off. Everyone immediately jumping down companies' throats and assuming what went wrong without waiting for all the information, or at least gathering some really important context to the situation, it was just a really toxic thing to watch transpire. There were a lot of people that really liked my video when I discussed what was going on and defending Cedar Fair, because again, I do fly my drone every day, and I have seen Wonderland, I know it's a Canadian park, and I know the standards could be different in Canada versus the US, but I will say since that video, I can confirm the standards at Canada's Wonderland are the same at Carowinds, Cedar Point, Kings Island, and all the American parks. So what you're seeing on my drone camera of Cedar Fair doing their due diligence to analyze the rides and maintain them is the same standard that all the American parks follow, and I can stand by that comment fullheartedly now. I do want to say that everything again that I'm about to discuss is the opinions of myself, and again, not concrete because it did not come from Cedar Fair or Carowinds, and only they know truly what has happened, but I do want to discuss a few things that I've learned. So a lot of discussion has been going on about the specific support type that was supporting that section of the ride, and a lot of people have discussed the specific welding joint of that specific support column. In the welding community, because there is one, this specific support and weld job is actually viewed as kind of like a bad practice, I guess you could say. Having two welds so close together could lead to situations like this. It could have been easily avoided given the amount of tension in that area probably saw with the load of the train and the location of that weld. Over time, that weld with the diagonal brace and the weld from that connection plate are too close together, possibly touching at some points or even overlapping, which creates a very tight location to even maintain or reach that weld for a person to perform their weld job. So again, it could have been poor quality in a critical tension zone, but again that is an assumption. And we see this on some B&M's like for example at Six Legs over Georgia, I believe it is, and then even at Canada's Wonderland's Leviathan, plates have been added in high tension areas on those style of columns or support columns. Again, this is to help alleviate high areas of tension and it looks like this could have been one of those rides where it needed those plates or a little bit extra welding to support in those weaker weld points if it is that. Again, keyword if it is that, this is just speculation. So if you look at the way the failure sits completely detached, there is a slight offset. This indicates that there may have been some lateral deflection, some preload on the column applying tension, bad tension at that in the area where the crack initiated, even without the train on it. So that would add to the load of the train on the column to move the column that far, especially considering it has a diagonal brace would take fairly significant force. But having said that, I don't consider that amount of offset excessive and is probably normal within the load calculations. There's also a chance the offset was caused by slight movement of the adjacent columns because of increased loads due to the column failure and or sagging of the unsupported track section. And it may be caught in person. So again, this is one of those things where Cedar Fair Standards for maintenance. And again, this is not me pointing blame, but it should have been caught. For example, anyone in the industry knows that hairline fractures occur on rides all the time. Like it's it's every theme park in the world, every ride in the world will get a hairline fracture and it is up to the maintenance to discover these and they are usually 100% of the time caught and caught really early and they're fixed very cheaply and very quickly and efficiently. And it takes a really long time for a hairline fracture to turn into anything serious. For example, as you saw in the video, a lot of these rides are over designed and I can confirm after talking with a couple of people that even Fury 325 was in no immediate danger. It is so over designed, you saw it like a fully loaded train, like a really high tension point, essentially barely moved again to the naked eye barely moved like it was able to support itself. Obviously over time, like the fracture, it becomes more and more. But I just found all this information really interesting. So why did it crack is a question. There are so many variables. I don't believe the column is under designed, but it's possible given the speed of the coaster through that section. One thing that caught my eye about the layout slash column design was that the diagonal brace that the crack pro gated propagated from across the top of the weld is under tension being pulled essentially. Had it been on the opposite side of the column, it would be in a compression being pushed and we probably wouldn't be having this conversation if that were the case. Steel performs better in compression than it does in tension. Seeing the ground surrounding the track, it was unnecessary for that brace to be on the inside. It should have been on the outside of the curve. So I thought that was really interesting information because essentially when I was having this conversation with the company, it appears that B&M put the diagonal braces on the inside tension of the curve to minimize the overall footprint of the coaster, but they'd be better on the outside a compression state. So that was a common conversation that I had when I was discussing it with this construction and welding company. So again, hopefully I haven't lost anyone and hopefully I'm not sounding crazy, but this is just the conversation that I was having and it was a really interesting conversation. I was like, I was so invested in this conversation because I was truly learning a lot that I never even thought about when it came to a coaster. And it's funny because these design flaws happen all the time and it's a common thing. For example, as you just saw, Yukon Stryker had a sinking footer, a bobbing footer, and it was an easy fix. And you didn't even need to fix it right away. It ran the rest of the season with a temporary fix on it. And then when the off season came, they did a permanent fix on it. And I think that's exactly what's going to happen with Fury 325. So I'm going to give you guys a very dumbed down version of like what the common practices for maintenance at a theme park. And this isn't Cedar Fair, this is every theme park, but essentially every morning, a maintenance mechanic does a track walk, which is a visual inspection from the ground looking for anything unusual. This is where it does become a little, you know, like, come on carolins. They had at least a week, if not more to see that thing. I'd argue it was visible for at least a week based on the coincidental photo from the week prior. In my opinion, from the company, again, not my opinion, sorry, that's the primary failure. One individual, maybe two, depending on the shifts did their track walk and failed to spot it. I believe I can really only speak from their their current job and their construction company, that Cedar Fair did meet and continue to meet and exceed and this company did stress that they know that, you know, a park like Wonderland in Cedar Fair exceed all manufacturer, state and provincial regulations with regard to inspection and maintenance. So I do want to stress this. This is a company that doesn't even work with Canada's Wonderland, may I add, but they said that Cedar Fair and a park like Canada's Wonderland is known in the industry to exceed all manufacturer, state and provincial regulations with regard to inspection and maintenance. But if an individual fails to do their job, things will be missed. And that is going to be the case at any job. And this is what the person stressed any job, any industry, anything stuff happens. And that is the beauty of an over engineered ride. The system to catch a major crack in a structure ride, anything in the industry is there. But if the individual if the individual is complacent, inexperienced or distracted, it will be missed. But yeah, so that's essentially everything I have kind of like learned about the incident. Again, it's a very complicated situation. It could be as simple as a difficult welding job. It could be as complicated as, you know, rearranging the support design for that area. As I mentioned earlier, and it could be as, you know, complicated as redesigning the footing map for that specific section or just as simple as you saw Leviathan adding a more bracing to high stress, high tension moments of the ride. So I again, none of this is concrete. Again, this is all just speculation. I wanted to pass on what I had, you know, I taken some time I didn't want to make a video every day about carer ones and give you guys some really scary, or you know, predictions about what was happening or if it was going to open soon, I wanted to get some concrete information. So I reached out to a lot of my sources and people in the industry and got you guys as much information as I possibly could about what was going on at carer ones. Hope you guys enjoyed this. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch this video and get a better understanding of what possibly could have happened. Thanks so much. Have a good one guys. Bye


Everybody forced here up in bowman chrome cosmic the light seven box number three Find the results on your screen anytime at late in sports cards calm. Let's get to the break Let's do it.  I don't even want to read that dude his wife. I think as cancer too freaking horrible. All right, here we go All right. Okay. All right. My aya. Okay. All right. All right Here we go. All right iconic Adley Retschman green refractor. It's Jeremy Pena. There you go Astros on the world baseball classic flag 1099 Talk about Wakefield first bowman auto Joey estes For the A's or Estes as Lane says for some reason Like like crusty is like the pancake mix Shimmer Jacob Melton. What is the best pancake mix like in a box not like obviously obviously making it yourself is way better, but Like like regular stuff not like the cinnamon toast crunch one Purple the 250 Justin Crawford for the Phillies. I would say This quick is pretty fire Yeah, I don't care about the Pats losing in the Red Sox last place When it comes though when it comes to the Wakefield news, I think that's probably how you spell it shady, right? I don't know another way to spell Jemima first auto is Jordy Vargas for the Rockies I'm kind of fine with any of them When when we were kids my dad used to go to Sam's with the big bag of crusties That a gold or a yellow There's iconic Corbin Carroll. I think it's yellow. You got a 75 Miguel blaze red Sox Yeah, I guess so illegal I guess the team that I'm not a fan of getting drew holidays is a silver lining, huh? I was coming here be like yeah, hey at least the the blazers got Deandre Aiton Wow. Yeah, I never I didn't think about that. Oh Geez, what was that by job? What about by Josh low in the outfield? Just I don't know a bouncing ball got past He's not even good Celtics are gonna be a weird team. Oh, yeah, I remember that shady. I got you. I follow I follow common arrow I'm an arrow bomb today. That got Jake that got Jake going good day to be a Tampa sportsman Valdez rookie fuchsia to 299 red Sox First of First first of several seven hundred He's gonna hit seven hundred got green the 99 a schwarber for the Phillies on the flag give a rain or Arias Yeah, it is sad. Well, what happened? apparently It's been going on for a little while now and Kurt Schilling last week like Basically, I don't know who he told or where he said it, but yeah first auto brewers been medsinger But he brought it up and like wake didn't want it to like come out Like he wanted to keep it totally private and of course knowing the person that Kurt Schilling is He basically just told everybody that was like Thursday or Friday got shimmer parada for the Mets So yeah hasn't it's it's just been it's not been great being a Red Sox fan past few days Johan Rojas on the backwards base inserts. I Mean obviously it's never good when a legend of any, you know, I've any I've any sport, you know, especially a good person dies It always hits home more when you're a fan of the team On his podcast dude who gave Schilling a microphone Jesus got purple first. You'll see galana 250 for the Rangers Oh Shane no, he is nuts. Yeah Gunner-Handerson iconic random cone on the Invicta Corbyn carol. It came to the league for the dime of acts anyway What do you guys got in these first series here? What is it called the division? No, they're wild card rounds. What do we got? First auto Brett wisely for the rays Sebastian Walcott I think I am in a pic Tampa. Let's go The home teams are gonna have big advantages here, although that didn't have that was the last year was the first year of it That did not go well for a lot of the home teams Got a ruchman short print photo variation You go Orioles cellist then Yeah, shady who puts these people in front of microphones anyway on the internet opening sports cards. Who does that? Right Jake, right? All right. Let's do cosmic now Cosmic Cosmic, um, who do the Marlins have? Brewers. No, yes Marlins at brewers, I'll take brewers in that I'll take Philly's over the dime of acts. I think I picked all the home teams so far and Then what is it Rangers and? There's a who but it was blue jays raise Wait, so I just pray no, I'm taking the Rangers over the race of his Rangers raise Yeah, sorry, yeah, I'm taking I'm taking Rangers if it's Rangers raise Cleo Mack has six sacks today what? I do think brave is one of all though I think this is one of the times where the best team will win it playing me the best man win You guys got to go to a game You guys should go Tuesday Lane you got to go to troptober with Jake on Tuesday. I'm down make content. Just have rich pay Ritchell rich will pay Rachel go though. Rachel go. I just troll both you guys He would literally just root against both teams He would laugh whenever each team makes an error or something. Yeah, you just be like Red Sox should be here Yeah, some some nonsense Okay, guys, we got to get sapphire going here it got down to 11 and his hasn't moved I that's so weird to me Usually breaks keep filling use that's what happens All right Cosmic You he would wear Red Sox jersey braves over Orioles. Yeah, I think the O's will probably come out of the American League. I Think I felt like the American League is closer than the National League at least at the top Rookie Aqua to 199 Red Sox Tristan Kossus That's very nice Red Sox clean Pena Adley and Gunna gonna Volgobuck met Jersey Jesus gold extra terrestrial town Cardinals Jordan Walker That's Jay Walker right there Corbin Carroll Alvarez on the die-cut. Oh, it's a 3 p.m. Start Tuesday, but even game three we have that we have we're busy Thursday and Thursday evening We're fractured burns for the Brewers Yoshida Jake can go Yelka Brara There you go anyone anyone any big names retiring next year MLB I guess we got a sea on Granky Yeah, I don't think anyone's really announced it Fractor hobby air for the ashes. Yeah, no one's announced it yet. I guess you could look out for You know, it's got like Verlander Kershaw Scherzer at this point Granky will have to see this offseason Blue number two 99 Logan Webb Giants. Oh, it starts it starts tomorrow Yoshida extra-terrestrial talents the latent jet got nucleus rookie Brian Bayo Red Sox Good Red Sox box. Oh, no way the last out was a grounder right to McGee That's actually pretty cool. That's the last play of his career. God stars in the night of Miguel Vargas Kids Roll the die for the triples here go one two left three four middle five six, right? Unless there's a majority it'll go one way for the two boxes here. If there's a numbered card. We'll our random instead One they'll go left. So unless somebody has the other two teams that'll go left on any of the multi trios multi-team trios. Oh Nice Mike single-digit sapphire single-digit sapphire Nine to go links coming to you in chat right now. Oh, do the Cowboys one? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what happened, but the Cowboys one so you guys after sapphire basketball is all sold out We just are at single digits in every single Football break now. So you have five total breaks left for tonight. You got more breaks in the morning with Sam Oh, it came out. Oh, yeah, Nathan. I was I was anticipating a close game Stars in the night Corbin Carroll for the Dime of Acts Come on illegal. Jordan Walker. I should trust your talent Legal told me what he does for work, but I I don't believe it. I think he's a professional troll refractor Nick Casiano's Phillies I think he's just gets paid by somebody just troll Jake acts like that More one football spots and Immaculate Collegiate spots top one was the number one play today Number one something. What is going on? Oh It was the inning Is bottle gonna retire. I think he's got another season I don't think so either strap Trout not on he's got a good good a contract go back and make the money Show hey, oh, Tony on the launch and orbit for the angels. He only needs like four or five more starts to get three 3,000 K's though I was gonna say just go back to the Royals and be like, yeah, I will literally like retire after the first month of the season if you Just let me play Aqued a 199 Chapman for the Jays Gunna Adley Corbin Carroll Got refractor a key Langley ears for the A's Got a nucleus of a Louisa rise for the twins I think I think no one walked it off though. Well, that was terrible Jordan Lupo pitching. I don't know in a 2-2 game. Maybe it doesn't matter. They don't probably don't want you the pitcher 299 is a Rosario for the Guardians Rocky, yeah, let's try to find my collegiate guys sapphire still at nine Very odd full case first auto for the Braves Louise Guanipa nice hit Atlanta first auto Yankees is Louis Serena and Refractor Brewer's first woman auto Dylan. Oh Ray 171 to 499 First woman auto for the Pirates axial plaza First woman auto for the Braves Roy Barcelona's a refractor first woman auto will Fredo Antuñez the 499 for the Guardians sub hunt Antuñez for the Guardians Come on breakers of light. Let's go. He gets very good NBCC football night in America. All right refractors Yeah, he shows up in bunches. It seems like Brandon Sean Murphy Christopher Morel Tyler Stevenson Cody Clemens Matthew Libertor and M. J. Melendez Got a wave to 75 of Reese Hoskins for the Phillies Orange Youth Quake Mackenzie Gord at 25 Nationals photo negative rookie for the A's is JJ Bleday Actually, I'll do the youth quake of O'Neill Cruz here Both are negative Bleday base rookie auto Carlos Perez for the White Sox and Refractor auto Wow the legend auto 250 is Nolan Ryan nice Astros great hits The chrome legends auto won a case in breakers of light as well One of the only uh Live legend autos there is too. I think it's like him and Jeter like all the other ones are redemption. It seems like Awesome card astros Still could recap here. Chris B grab a spot and sapphire down to eight there Hello lu all dang Boy, don't I do all day. Do you know who runs that account Jake? Yeah? Interesting. You may not know who it is. Oh, yeah, I may or may not Yeah, you got a photo variation of Adley Rutschman from Bowman Chrome 299 Valdez the 250 Crawford Galan to 199 wish Chapman and Kossus out of cosmic It's a 99 Schwerber and Pena Got Rosario web to 75 Hoskins and blaze to 59 short Walker gold extraterrestrial talents I feel like that definitely counts Brandon. I hadn't seen a pulls yet. That's awesome though That's probably one of the bigger Legend autos they have in here. It's like him and Jeter. I don't know if Griffey has legend autos in this Me I swear. It's not me. It's up Romo Uh Autos of Carlos Perez Robert Salinas ox y'all plaz louis serena louis guanipa Rhett wisely ben medzinger jordy vargas joey estes Refractors the 499 Dylan array on the auto Wilfredo intern. Yes guardians And it's a 58 Nolan Ryan on the chrome legends auto That'll do it. Thanks again everybody moving on now to sapphire. Hopefully


which we will resume very shortly with Professor Ronald Hayden Preston's lecture. Before I call on my colleague for the introduction of Professor Preston, let me mention one aspect of the conduct of our program that will be responsive to some of the suggestions that I've been receiving as the program has continued. I again invite you to submit questions for our consideration and for the panel to take up. We are aware that we have not been able to devote as much time to questions from the floor as we hope to and expect to before the program has finished. We very much invite your questions and we will try very hard, henceforth, to see that they get some attention. My colleague, Professor Garrett Paul, then to introduce Professor Preston. On two separate occasions during this conference, it has been remarked to me that economics and theology seem to have a great deal in common. I may be mistaken, but I do not think that the comparison was intended to be complementary for either discipline. But economics and theology do have much in common for their concerns overlap at several points. The questions of political economy have been very much at the heart of theological ethics throughout this century and it is safe to predict that the same will be true for the remainder of the century. The reason for this is, as Professor Booner reminded us yesterday, that economics involves a normative vision of human being and that question occupies theologians as well. Both economics and theology ask, what is a person? What should a person be and do? What should be the relationship of an individual person to the communities that sustain her or him? Our next speaker is eminently qualified to address the legacy of Keynes with ethical questions in view. Ronald Hayden Preston has had a long and distinguished career in the church and the academy during which he has maintained his interest in that stimulating and frustrating area where theology, economics, politics, and ethics meet. His first academic degree was the Bachelor of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics. This was followed by graduate study at Oxford and Manchester. He has held numerous important ecclesiastical positions in addition to his academic appointments at the University of Manchester where he was lecturer in Christian ethics until 1970, Samuel Ferguson Professor of Social and Pastoral Theology from 1970 to 1980 and is now Professor Emeritus. Professor Preston's involvement in social and economic questions dates back to the crisis of the Great Depression. Indeed, when Keynes' general theory was published in 1936, then student Preston was already serving as Industrial Secretary of the Student Christian Movement. Also in that same year, 1936, Professor Preston published an essay titled The Christian Case Against Capitalism which appeared in Reinhold Niebuhr's Journal Radical Religion. His activity reaches from that epic age down to the present as indicated by two of his more recent books entitled Religion and the Persistence of Capitalism and Church and Society in the late 20th Century. With the rich and varied background in theology and economics that reaches back to the era of Keynes himself and extends to present day social questions, the Reverend Cannon Professor Preston is eminently qualified to address us today on his chosen topic of the ethical legacy of John Maynard Keynes. Please join me in welcoming Professor Preston. Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, I am the odd man out in this conference, the amateur among the professionals. I must say I found this a matter of some apprehension in advance and it is not entirely dissipated by the experience of participating. But I must say the task of thinking about the ethical legacy of John Maynard Keynes is one that I have found extremely interesting and I hope I will be able to convey some of that interest to you. At a recent colloquium in Canada, I heard Keynes referred to as ethically an empty box yet he himself took ethics seriously. It will be wise if this adverse verdict is in our minds as we consider his ethical legacy. There are three stages in our inquiry. First, what was his general ethical position? What was the intellectual and social context in which he acquired it and which made it so cogent to him? Did he modify it in later life? Then we must look at the way in which he applied his general moral philosophy to the economic order in the shape of laissez-faire and his hopes and forecasts for its future. And third, we need to appraise his views on the relation of ethics to economics and on the ethical problems of living with uncertainties in making economic decisions on which he laid so much stress. There is no doubt where to begin. In September 1938, at his home in Sussex, Keynes read a paper, My Early Beliefs, to a memory club, the members of which were friends of his. The paper was not published in his lifetime, but in his will he expressed the wish that alone of his unpublished writings, this should appear. Together with a memoir, Dr. Melchior, a defeated enemy, who was a German Jew with whom he negotiated at the peace conference in 1919 and for whom he came to feel a distinct rapport. Both are very fine pieces of writing, showing Keynes' sensitivity and his skill in the use of words to express it. Keynes arrived at Cambridge University as a fresher in 1902. Immediately he came under the influence of G.E. Moore, a moral philosopher whose book Principia Ethica was published in 1903. This book had an immense influence the decades among moral philosophers in the Anglo-Saxon world, and it is still constantly referred to in any survey of 20th century moral philosophy. It was in a private club, the Apostles, which Keynes was soon invited to join, that he met Moore. In My Early Beliefs he says, Now what we got from Moore was by no means entirely what he offered us. He had one foot on the threshold of a new heaven, but the other foot in Siegwick and the Benthamite Calculus and the general rules of correct behavior. There was one chapter in the Principia Ethica of which we took not the slightest notice. We accepted Moore's religion, so to speak, and discarded his morals. Indeed, in our opinion, one of the greatest advantages of his religion was that it made morals unnecessary, meaning by religion one's attitude towards oneself and the ultimate, and meaning by morals one's attitude to the outside world and the intermediate. He adds, Our religion closely followed the English Puritan tradition of being chiefly concerned with the salvation of our own souls. Our religion was altogether unworldly. With wealth, power, popularity, or success, it had no concern whatever. They were thoroughly despised. He goes on to say, I have called this faith a religion, and some sort of relation to neoplatism it surely was, but we should have been very angry at the time with such a suggestion. We regarded all this as entirely rational and scientific in character. Under a branch of science, it was nothing more than the application of logic and rational analysis to the material presented as sense data. Our appreciation of good was exactly the same as our appreciation of green, and we perpated to handle it with the same logical and analytical techniques which was appropriate to the latter. Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics came out in the same year as Moore's Principia Ethica, and the former in spirit furnished a method for handling the material provided by the latter. The aim was to make vague notions clear by using precise language and asking exact questions. What exactly do you mean? Was a question often asked in the club? There can of course be no quarrel with this. Its error was the further assumption that if precise questions could be formulated, issues long in dispute would be seen to have a clear answer. And a problem with it was the exclusion of the realm of mystery, ambiguity and imagination from serious consideration. In preoccupation with extreme literalness in the use of everyday words, ambiguity appeared slipshod. In his chapter The Ideal in Principia Ethica Moore maintained, no one probably who has asked himself the question has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in art or nature are a good in themselves. This is the ultimate and fundamental truth of moral philosophy. It is only for the sake of these things in order that as much of them as possible may at some time exist that anyone can be justified in performing any public or private duty. They are the raison d'etre of virtue. It is they that form the rational ultimate end of human action and the sole criterion of moral, of social progress. Moore thought of himself as a pioneer. These appear to be truths which have been generally overlooked, he writes. It did not seem probable to him that they might be questioned. Keynes says that this religion was a very good one to grow up under. However, he reflects that it is remarkable how oblivious Moore managed to be of the qualities of the life of action and also of the pattern of life as a whole. He was existing says Keynes in a timeless ecstasy. Keynes says the New Testament is a handbook for politicians compared with the unwoldiness of Moore's chapter on the ideal. Keynes seems to see no reason to shift from these fundamental intuitions and indeed he did not. But he says they are much too few and too narrow to fit actual experience. Nevertheless, the life of passionate contemplation and communion enabled the apostles to escape from the benthamite tradition, which says Keynes is the worm which is being gnawing at the inside of modern civilization and is responsible for its present moral decay. He says we're used to regard the Christians as the enemy because they appeared as the representatives of tradition, convention and hocus pocus. In truth, it was the benthamite calculus based on an overvaluation of the economic criterion which was destroying the quality of the popular ideal. Further, Keynes goes on to say that the apostles also ignored Moore's discussion and the duty of the individual to obey general rules. They claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term immoralists. This he says has deeply coloured the course of their lives. And as he is concerned, it is too late to change. I remain and all worlds will remain an immoralist. However, he goes on to say that this attitude was flimsily based and disastrously mistaken. In a powerful passage, his diagnosis is we were among the last of the utopians who believed in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational and decent people influenced by truth and objective standards who can safely be released from outward constraints of convention and traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct were left from now onwards to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good. In short, we repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin. We were not aware that civilisation was a thin and precarious crust only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence for everything and everyone. We completely misunderstood human nature, including our own. The rationality we attributed to it led to superficiality of judgement but also of feeling. Finally, Keynes follows this disavowal of the over-emphasis of the rational in life by denying the existence of any authority or standard to which he can appeal if what he thinks of as normal behaviour is under threat. And he ascribes a tendency of his still to do so as perhaps some hereditary vestige of a belief in the efficacy of prayer. An example of his tendency to produce wilder sides in conversation and in writing which characterised his undergraduate days and which never quite left him so much for the substance of his account of his early beliefs. Why did it seem so convincing to him in the Cambridge of the early 1900s? As a boy, he had a conventional church upbringing. The family who lived in Cambridge had non-conformist connections. His father, John Neville Keynes, was a distinguished university teacher and administrator. Only since the university's test act of 1871 had most of the offices and administration of the university been open to those who were not members of the Church of England and had fellows of colleges of the university been freed from the requirement of subscribing to the 39 articles of religion of the established Church of England. The family attended Immanuel Congregational Church on Sunday mornings. Maynard, as an adolescent, went to Eaton College, perhaps the most socially distinguished and one of the most intellectually distinguished of English public, that's to say in American terms English private schools. Like most of the public schools it had an Anglican foundation. Maynard attended Chapel and was confirmed at the age of 15. Let us home express criticism of chapel preachers. But the criticisms are in general terms of schoolboy disparagement with no precise intellectual or moral specificity. His brother Jeffrey says that although intellectually interested in religion, Maynard and I at the age of 17 or 18 passed painlessly, as did my sister, into a natural state of agnosticism. The only clue as to the reasons for this loss of faith is a remark by C. R. Fay, a college friend. Keynes was staying with him in Liverpool and explained to him as they were on the way to church on Sunday that T. H. Huxley had exploded Christianity. Christian beliefs to him and to the club were irrational. They occasioned raised eyebrows and were not to be taken seriously. In this easy assumption that science had exploded Christianity, it was in tune with a powerful zeitgeist. Darwin's The Origins of Species had been published in 1859 and in Cambridge as elsewhere many intellectuals lost their Christian and religious beliefs. The Victorian order rested for the most part on a combination of evangelical religion combined with social deference. What was to replace it? It was a serious question involving religion in Keynes' sense of the word and ethics. Huxley had advocated the retention of the Christian ethic but the rejection of Christian theology. Another possibility was the erection of an all-embracing metaphysics which would comprehend the whole of the universe in a tightly argued deductive system which would include a social philosophy. This was more characteristic of Oxford than Cambridge. G. E. Moore represented a reaction from this in favour of a philosophy of common sense more in line with the British empirical tradition from Locke onwards. It was an attempt to prick what was thought to be philosophical bombast and rhetoric and to substitute candour, clarity and a cool frankness which exposed superstition and Kant and called in question existing institutions and conventions. Moore was obsessed with the need for clarity as he understood it. It seemed to be a new dawn. Those influenced by Moore thought of themselves as the first generation to ask with sufficient care what the two precise questions which it was a task of ethics to answer. What states of affairs or kinds of things are intrinsically good and ought to exist for their own sakes? And secondly, what kinds of action ought we to perform? We have already noted Moore's answer the first and he held that these goods are simple and unanalyzable. We just recognise them when we think about the good. His answer the second was those actions which will cause more good to exist in the universe than any possible alternative. What this assumed as Keynes was later to see was a society sufficiently stable in its social and financial arrangements and the place of a social and intellectual elite within it suitably provided with domestic servants to enable the practitioners of Moore's ethic to devote their time to the acquisition of desirable states of mind. It was also influenced by a mood of automatic progress which was common in the early 1900s. Leonard Wolfe, for instance, returning from the salon in 1911 as a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a kind of intellectual salon to which many of Keynes' friends belonged for the next 20 years in London, Leonard Wolfe thought that the world was on the brink of becoming civilised and he was not untypical among Keynes' associates. D.H. Lawrence saw things differently and it was reflection on Lawrence's contemptuous dismissal of the Bloomsbury Group as done for which prompted Keynes to write my early beliefs. Lawrence thought it corrupt. It was certainly parochial and class-bound. It was at the Apostles Club where, as we have seen, Keynes chiefly absorbed Moore's philosophy or that part of it which captivated him. This was a small select and secret society of which details have only recently become widely known whose formal title was The Society or the Cambridge Conversationary Society. Founded in 1820, it had been shaped towards intellectual distinction in its early years such as Frederick, Dennis and Morris, perhaps the leading English theologian of the last century, but it had become agnostic and definitely anti-Christian. It met every Saturday evening in term for dinner, a paper and discussion. Moore, addressing the situation of a godless universe, set out to produce a moral philosophy that, in fact, supported conventional morality on a better basis than that of hedonistic utilitarianism. He thought of himself as pioneering a new path in moral philosophy by regarding the primary questions, not as what ought I to do, but what is good, as we have seen. Once that is established, the virtues then become a means of good and they must be pursued by proportionate reasoning. Keynes, in my early beliefs, does not bring out explicitly enough that there were three strands in Moore's thought which are intellectually separable. It is possible to hold any one or two of them without holding all three. First, good is a simple, unanalyzable concept. Decisions as to what is good depend on direct intuition in particular cases. This has continued to engage the interests of moral philosophers as a thesis in the logic of ethics. I doubt whether many now agree with it. It did not greatly interest Keynes and me not concern us. Two, ethical pluralism, not just a concentration on pleasure as with the classical utilitarians. By far the most valuable goods, as already mentioned in Moore's thought, are the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects which point to the life of passionate contemplation and communion. Three, where ethics is in relation to public conduct is concerned, Moore was an ideal utilitarian. Maintaining the rightness of an act derives from its consequences in producing the most good as against the hedonistic utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick. Moore rejected the hedonism but retained the consequentialism. In his view, the best achievable states of affairs were bound to be complex hopes and in many cases would be the product of following conventional morality. Keynes may have been partly teasing when in my early beliefs he says they were immoralists. True, at Cambridge they ignored the third element in Moore's teaching. Like many young and not only young intellectuals, they universalized their emotional needs in the guise of rational philosophy. But subsequently, many of them took up public causes in the spirit of classical consequentialist utilitarianism in which they had been reared and in practice it often led them to support the cause of the underdog even if in a paternalistic fashion. Certainly this was the case with Keynes himself. He was no immoralist. Indeed, in my early beliefs he does in fact give illustrations of ethical issues discussed by the apostles even if of a somewhat bizarre kind in which estimates of the relative value of the consequences of different answers were involved in resolving them. What he is particularly concerned with is the excessive weight given to economic criteria. And as we shall see, all his life he held that although considerable stress on these was a regrettable but necessary stage in economic development it was one for which he expected the need to be outgrown in a century or a little more. Furthermore, the claim of the apostles not to be bound by a general rule but to judge each case on its merits is one aspect of a consequentialist ethic. There has recently been a vigorous discussion of this within Christian ethics in what is known as the situation ethics debate. There is no general ethical position which does not have difficulties in that very awkward questions can be posited for it to resolve. But it is in no sense an immoralist position. Nor is it necessarily connected with an optimistic understanding of human goodness and rationality. Keynes' subsequent change to what is a more realistic and a more Christian position did not involve any change in the consequentialist character of his method in making specific moral judgments. An example of his later recipients is his analysis of the ineffectiveness of Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Keynes portrays him as two principles, two conscientious. His Presbyterian temperament became dangerous. Keynes says with a touch of mischief that his attitude to his famous 14 peace points was akin to the verbal inspiration his forefathers ascribed to the Pentateuch. In order to preserve them and his conscience intact the president deceived himself by agreeing to suffer trees which kept the form of the points but undermined their reality. Keynes says he had the theologian's capacity for self-deception. This revealing aside shows the prejudice Keynes harbored against the Christian faith for the capacity for self-deception is notoriously not confined to theologians. Perhaps at the back of his mind the plausible thought that theologians ought to be most aware of the danger of it when in fact they frequently held their position with a cock-shawness which blinded them to it. Keynes' basic perception of Wilson however shows a power of modern analysis worthy of Rhino Libor. But like Libor he set it in the context of a larger hope. He wanted his book on the Paris peace conference in which it occurs to set in motion what he describes as moral forces of instruction and imagination which change opinion. The assertion of truth the unveiling of illusion the dissipation of hate the enlargement and instruction of men's hearts and minds must be the means. However unlike Libor he did not see the necessity of harnessing power to interest in order to achieve a more just society nationally and internationally. And to do this under the scrutiny of a transcendent source of judgment such as the Christian understanding of the kingdom of God provides which and this sets all interests within the larger perspective of the common good and puts a question mark against utopian hopes of completely fulfilling in a future historical order the vision which calls out our loyalty. Keynes was to some extent alert to this point Burke's political philosophy influenced him to the extent of making him wary of deliberately creating evils in the present on account of the alleged future social benefits that would ensue a cautionary attitude because our powers of prediction are so slight. He thought Burke went too far in defense of existing property arrangements but he was never tempted by the Marxist willingness to intensify present ills as the means to future utopia. Keynes was exceedingly able self-confident to the point of arrogance and often ruthless. He never lost his belief that stupidity and ignorance are the chief villains that ultimately reason triumphs and that social problems need to be solved by the application of intelligence. He remained a rationalist bristling with indignation at stupidity and prejudice but still confident that an enlightened management of the economy by a popularly elected government would be possible and that an intellectual elite would be able to wear down prejudice and to persuade sufficient of the electorate by rational arguments and that management would be in the hands of a similar elite of high civil servants such as he had met in the India office from 1906 to 1908. This did not prevent him from expressing exasperation from time to time as when he wrote to T.S. Eliot in 1945 concerning full employment that insufficiency of cleverness not of goodness is the main trouble. He never fully faced the corruptions to which the intelligent are liable even if he did begin to appreciate the truth expressed in the term original sin with respect to human beings in general. Turning now to specific examples of Keynes' ethical stances and their significance for us I mentioned three that which you consider. One, his view of laissez-faire and its place in his hopes for the economic future of humanity. Two, his view of the relation of economics to ethics and three, the attitude required of human beings who have to live with inherent problems of uncertainty about the future in making economic decisions. But first of all, something about an issue of personal ethics needs to be said. It is clear that the use made by the apostles of Moore's ethics was much conditioned by their cultural and social position as privileged intellectuals in a stable society and was not nearly so universal and culture free as they imagined. In particular, it was affected by the predisposition of several of them to homosexuality. Keynes himself was a bisexual. He had several homosexual relationships, some of them transient, the most prolonged with the painter Duncan Grant. Later, he was happily married to Lydia Lopakova of the Deagalith Ballet whom he married in the St. Pancras Registry office in 1925 and who was to prove a tremendous strength to him, especially after his first heart attack in 1937.  But this is doubtful. It was certainly a major element in the reaction of the apostles to Victorian conventions, restraints and hypocrisy, particularly in the wake of the Oscar Wilde case. Indeed, it is only within the last three decades that homosexuality has become widely discussed and within limits accepted. And that we are aware of both how much more we know about it and how much we do not yet know about it. Because it was underplayed in Harrod's life of Keynes, there is the temptation now that it has come into the open to assume it must have an overall significance not as the perspective of everything in Keynes' life. This, I think, is a mistake. Just as it seems that homosexuality spans the whole range of human characters and has not any other traits which are particularly associated with it, so in the case of Keynes, his homosexual expressions of his bisexuality do not seem to have any special place among the social and intellectual sources of his other ethical stances. Therefore, I do not propose to say anything more on the matter. I turn to his attitude to laissez-faire. Keynes' objection to it was both practical and ethical. Practically, he claimed to show that it did not necessarily work. There has been an immense discussion of his analyses, particularly since the publication of the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936. Was his challenge to economic policy or, more radically, to economic theory? He set out to demonstrate that the laissez-faire economy does not contain an automatic mechanism for the reconciling of conflicting interests. Instead, a chronic lack of effective demand can lead to an equilibrium well below the level of full employment. The pursuit of private profit does not necessarily lead to public benefit. And in particular, private virtue in the shape of saving or thrift can be a public vice, the occasion of insufficient investment and lack of demand. To correct this, there could be no escape from political judgments rather than the monetarist's preference for a neutral regulator of the economy. This evades, by reliance on an impersonal mechanism, the problem of political choices. Government action is needed to shift the economy out of its under-employment and keep it out. I must leave it to professional economists to evaluate Cain's technical and practical criticisms of the laissez-faire economy and whether he can solve the problem he pinpointed. My concern is with his ethical criticism, which was associated with it. Cain's made a sharp distinction between the immediate and the longer-term future. For the present, he saw the need for a mixed economy with some redistribution of wealth as a condition of economic progress or growth and not an obstacle to it. Capitalism is unnecessarily evil for the moment. It delivers goods and services reasonably efficiently. It is capable of considerable reforms without affecting its basic performance. It channels potentially disruptive energies into relatively less harmful channels connected with money-making and money-loving. And it accumulates capital without which it is impossible to solve the economic problem. In many ways, it is extremely objectionable, but it is more efficient for advancing economic ends than any other system in sight. So much for Cain's short-term view. The longer-term one is very different. In his essay, The End of Laissez-faire, he shows how the ethics and philosophy underlying its individualism draws upon diverse sources. The conservative individualism of Locke and Hume, the democratic egalitarianism of Rousseau and Bentham, a Darwinism which found competition in nature, and theories propounded by economists who were helped by the incompetence and corruption of 18th-century governments and the undeniable material progress of the 19th century. Then he goes on to say, it is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive natural liberty to their economic actions. There is no compact conferring perpetual rights on those who have and those who acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interests always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they do coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlighten self-interest always operates in the public interest. In the medium term, Cain says it is needful to move out of the 19th-century Laissez-faire into an era of liberal socialism. In the general theory, he makes it clear that by this he does not mean a widespread state socialism but controls to establish an aggregate volume of output to correspond as nearly as possible to full employment, involving a corporate decision as an organized community to achieve a common purpose. This will be the environment for the free play of economic forces to achieve the full potentialities of production, including the advantages of decentralization and the play of self-interest. This individualism is the best guarantee of personal liberty and human variety. In the class war, he will be on the side of the educated bourgeoisie. At the same time, his aim was the gradual euthanasia of the rentier, that functionless investor, as capital is deprived of its scarcity value within one or two generations. This thought leads to a remarkable optimism of the essay economic possibilities for our grandchildren. Assuming that there are no important wars and no important increases in population, assumptions falsified, of course, since 1931, Cain says the economic problem may be in sight of solution within a hundred years, and then humanity will be faced with its real and permanent problem, how to use its freedom from pressing economic cares to live wisely, agreeably, and well. There will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have long haggred in us for 200 years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities, such as the love of money as a possession, into the position of highest virtue. He goes on to say, I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue, that avarice is a vice, that the exacting of usury is a misdemeanor, and the love of money is detestable, that those who walk most truly in the path of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the moral. Yet, for at least another hundred years, we must pretend to ourselves that fair is foul and foul is fair, for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our goal for a little longer, for only they can lead us out of the turmoil of economic necessity into daylight. This vision is astonishingly like Marx's picture of communist society, except that Marx did not see that there would be any human problem in it, because men and women would apparently live in a state of continuous harmony and goodwill. Keynes does think there will still be a problem of how to live wisely, agreeably, and well. But even leaving aside his already falsified assumptions, is there not an unreality in his vision? Since human wants our relative to possibilities, is it conceivable that in any future we can at present think of, let alone that of our grandchildren, we shall reach a state where there are no relatively scarce economic resources of alternative uses, the allocation of which is our basic economic problem? Further, is it not ethically naive to say that we must give so much scope to ethical attitudes and motives which we think unsavory until we have solved our basic economic problem, after which we will abandon them and take up virtue? It reminds me of a similar attitude taken by many in the last world war.  There will be no holds barred. Everything will be permitted. Then when victory is won, we will pick up again our traditional moral code, perhaps our Christian ethic, and build a new and morally better world. Such an attitude forgets that the means used to achieve an end may so corrupt the process that it renders the end impossible of achievement. And it was this attitude among the allies in the war which led to their policy of unconditional surrender and the peace settlement with unsatisfactory features from which Europe and indeed the world is still suffering. Many of the attitudes to which Cain's refers are indeed distasteful, some radically so. Others are necessary aspects of the human situation. For example, self and family love which need harnessing by social institutions towards achieving a common good. We need social institutions which allow them scope whilst maximizing their potentiality for good and minimizing their potentiality for harm. And this requires political wisdom. And it needs continual exercise as institutions are shaped, refined, create new problems and are further refined. Cain's is quite right that the theory of laissez-faire abandons the problem and naively leaves it to the spontaneous operation of the market. What he wanted for the immediate future, market forces operating in a more sophisticated social framework is persuasive. However, he blackens economic morality too much. Maybe the unworldiness of Moore's ethic betrayed him. That, together with his elitist background, left him with an aesthetic distaste for the processes of economic life even as he exploited them successfully himself. He made huge sums of money for his college at Cambridge, King's, and for himself and spent a lot on the arts and on other good causes. To my mind, his economic vision for us could be better expressed in the resolution to remove primary poverty from the third world in one generation, which the rich two-thirds world could do if it would. In another essay in Persuasion, Cain says that the political problem is threefold. One, to secure economic efficiency and this needs technical knowledge. Two, to achieve social justice and this needs an unselfish and enthusiastic spirit which loves the ordinary man. Three, to respect individual liberty. This requires tolerance and appreciation of the excellence of variety and independence and readiness to give an unhindered opportunity to the exceptional and aspiring. This last remark gives too much scope for a meritocratic society which would be an exceedingly unpleasant one. It is one thing to give scope to exceptional talent but to say it must be unhindered obscures the common humanity of the gifted and the less gifted as the basis of citizenship. Apart from this, we can surely accept Cain's formulation of the political problem. How it is to be solved involves policies derived from a mixture of technical economic analysis, social and political diagnosis and ethical evaluation. There is abundant scope for genuine differences of opinion here among those who are agreed with the general aims and also those who are agreed with the need to deal with the challenge of a Hayek who calls the very conception of social justice a mirage. But underlying the political problem is the likelihood that capitalism has been parasitic on a hangover of several pre-capitalist model virtues which it has not itself fostered and indeed tends to undermine. That is why we need to embody fairness, altruism and compassion in economic and social institutions which encourage citizens to behave as if they felt these virtues whether or not at any particular time they do. Within this framework the market can be left to fulfill its function. I turn lastly to the relation of ethics to economics in Cain's thought and to the question of living with uncertainty in making economic decisions. I doubt if Skidelski is right when he says that unlike Marshall economics was not an activity through which Cain's ethical beliefs found expression because he followed Moore who had cut the links between economics and ethics. In fact, I'm sure Skidelski is wrong. In a letter to Harrod in 1938 Cain's argues that economics is essentially a moral science not a pseudo-natural science. It is a branch of logic a way of thinking and progress in it is a science progress in it as a science of thinking is in terms of models combined with an art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world. Good economists are scarce because the gift of choosing good models is a very rare one. Economics employs introspection and judgments of value. On the other hand it requires rigor to see that the conclusions do properly follow from assumptions behind the model. On the other hand motives, expectations and psychological uncertainties are also involved. This double aspect of economics as a science and an art does not seem to be well teased out by Cain's but it does in principle do justice with both modern economics and the older term political economy out of which it grew and which is still in use in a few places. Economics has freed itself from the philosophical utilitarianism out of which it grew and has established theoretical models which can be handled mathematically and which are useful as a heuristic device if they are not mistaken for an adequate model of reality. By this means the economist is able to avoid value judgments and dwell in the value free realm of mathematics except for economic efficiency as an ideal and mathematical elegance in the evaluating models as a subordinate virtue or value. However, he cannot stop there in practice efforts to relate these logical deductions from the models to the actual working of the various economies of the world have to be made and here we are in the realm of political economy. There does seem to be a tendency for mathematical sophistication in economics to increase the more remote it becomes from actuality. Political economy however is full of empirical uncertainties to which I shall short refer which it can never fully resolve and where the selection and waiting of significant facts is affected by value judgments. That is why there are continual policy disagreements among economists. But if the public is apt to get impatient with them economists need to sell themselves better. Keynes had rightly a high view of their significance as witness his famous toast at the dinner of the Council of the Royal Economics Society in 1945 to economists as trustees, not of civilization but of the possibility of civilization. Without their work the possibility of the various things which Moore had taught him to think of as self evidently good and which he himself cultivated all his life would be hardly available not even for the elite which he represented still less for the wider community which he hoped within a century would share in them. As we have seen Keynes took an adverse view of the ethics of the free market as something to be tolerated for a while longer until it has brought us to a level of productivity of goods and services when it will no longer be needed. In my view this is too negative and too transitory a view. I think the free market is best viewed as a technical device to serve the human purpose of maximizing what can be produced by the allocation of relatively scarce resources with alternative uses in so far as human beings want to pursue that aim compared with other social aims. It has potential moral dangers which require it to be put in a strong social and political institutional framework which is a matter of political decision. At the same time a greater realism is needed as to how far away in practice free market economists are from maximizing their productivity by bending to special interests and disguising the economic costs of doing so. Moreover efforts to counter Keynes' ethical criticism of the free market by giving it a favorable moral status underplay the organic and interdependent nature of human society and the damage to this that can be done by great social and economic inequalities. Society is temporarily prior to the individual person who is molded by it from infancy and in so far as its institutions are inhumane and unjust persons are thwarted by it in growing to maturity. Yet that same person transcends society and when adult can challenge its institutional structures in the name of a greater justice and humanity. Turretian efficiency is consistent with gross inequalities. At the most arguments deriving from it support some system of property rights rather than the common ownership of everything that is to say a free market set within the framework of a redistributive system of income and wealth taxes and this is what Keynes came to advocate in the long run a better distribution of demand rather than an increased aggregate of demand. The other ethical issue which Keynes' thought raises in connection with economics is that of living with uncertainty, error and ignorance. Models in classical economics presuppose among other things perfect foresight. Hence rational expectation can be the basis of decision making. Rational expectation is the most important underlying difference between the conditions the theory assumes and those which exist in fact. For instance the Quantity Theory of Money to which Keynes came to be opposed assumes an identity in a fundamentally stable and decentralized economy but in fact hides unproven assumptions about the significance and behavior of each of the four components and so is unusable for policy advice. Keynes was primarily a mathematician by training. He only had eight weeks instruction in economics in the whole of his life. He was primarily a mathematician by training who worked for years on probability theory in mathematical logic. As Frank Knight pointed out in his classic work in 1921, risk is an actuarial matter, uncertainty is not. Probability statements involve judgments on the bearing of evidence on conclusions not the forecasting of results. In the general theory Keynes stresses uncertain knowledge with regard to matters where decision and action is necessary and yet on which there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability. Uncertainty is particularly important in the case of investment, a central feature of his analysis. And he says that an entrepreneur's decision to invest depends largely on his level of animal spirits. I take it that economics has to cope with uncertainty, error and ignorance for three reasons. One, it has no accepted laws as to how the economy actually works. It can establish trends but it cannot be sure that they will hold in particular instances. For example, in the early 1970s the rate of inflation in the United Kingdom was such that the real rate of interest on saving was in fact negative. But contrary to all expectations the rate of saving showed a significant increase. Two, even if models of how the economy actually works are identical between economists different assumptions can be fed into forecasting for example, on the state of world trade government policy the rate of obsolescence of new inventions or what will be the rate of interest a decade ahead. Three, economists have to begin by some analysis of the immediate past and it is a considerable time before they know whether they were right. Complex empirical investigations never quite catch up. For these reasons, decisions in the real world are made on the basis of gas work, uncertainty and conventional assumptions. The economist who has most stressed this is G.L.S. Shackle in his insistence that choice takes place in the face of vague, uncertain and shifting expectations, hopes and fears. He refers to the irreducible uncertainty arising from the ultimate impossibility of men ever knowing whether or not in any particular case they have all the relevant information. Now, living with uncertainty requires considerable moral and spiritual resources. At worst, it can be frenetic. The animal spirits to which Cain's refers can produce the atmosphere of a casino and expose what Edward Heath called the unacceptable face of capitalism. On the other hand, it can be paralyzing. It could be creative and liberating. I think institutional controls are needed to keep these phenomena within bounds but that is not my main concern. For living with uncertainty is an inescapable feature of human life. It is in how they set about this that human beings show their best qualities and their worst. Basically, we all need to draw upon the sources which set us free to live creatively towards the uncertain future. The Pauline phrase is the Pauline phrase is to walk by faith and not by sight. I quote this because I think the Judeo-Christian tradition whose foundation Cain's assumed to be exploded has much to offer at this point for it applies as much to ethical decision making as it does to basic doctrinal attitudes. I understand why in the context the young Cain's dismiss the Christian tradition so completely at the age of 17 or 18. Much theology bumbled badly in coping with new intellectual outlooks of the 19th century. One can see how many young, confident intellectuals became the culture of despisers of religion to whom Schleyer Marker had addressed himself at the turn of the century as did Bishop Joseph Butler in the 18th century. Butler, in the preface to his analogy of religion, writes it is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much a subject of inquiry but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treated as if in the present age this were an agreed point among all people of discernment and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule as it were by way of reprisals for it's having so long interrupted the pleasures of the world. That comes pretty close to the attitude of the apostles in Cain's. One would have hoped that someone as clever and with as wide simplicity as Cain's would have probed more deeply. Is there not a touch of intellectual and spiritual arrogance in those who refuse to do so? In my experience, scientists including economists have been prone to this dismissive arrogance. Everyone works at bottom with a faith in the sense of some fundamental presuppositions about humans and their place in the universe on which they build and behind which they cannot go. As we have seen, Cain's realized this. Butler in his preface goes on to say that any reasonable man who will thoroughly consider the matter may be as much assured as he is of his own being that it is not however so clear a case that there is nothing in Christianity. There is, I think, strong evidence of its truth but it is certain no one can on principles of reason be satisfied to the contrary. Because life's evidence is ambiguous a choice of faith has to be made and in this sense agnosticism and atheism are also faiths. Cain's thought true belief to be important. He feared that our age has lost the possibility of believing in having true beliefs. I am sorry Cain's did not give the Judeo-Christian tradition more attention because I think it makes more sense of more facts than any other. It is hard to imagine Cain's totally outside it for he had absorbed much from it. At its best it is the best foundation for what he strove for all his life. Concerned for the good of human persons at the widest scale and for social and economic conditions which allow them to pursue the good as they perceive it. It might have sustained him and he might have made a direct contribution to it had he been explicitly inside it. Thank you very much, Professor Preston for that very insightful and penetrating presentation. We will break the program at this time to reconvene for the seventh lecture at 3.30 a preload to commence at 3.20. Thank you.


Hi, good morning and welcome to the day's product and focus so you can see there the US 30 has broken through potential Resistance at 16 738 now targeting 16 9 6 9 and it does look like We're getting a very strong recovery after the wobble in the markets is two weeks ago with most global equity markets Actually moving high this morning at the time of recording this the European markets Just opened with the Germany 30 and UK 100 all seemingly posting a decent start to the morning Technical signals are still quite bullish with the MACD crossover and the slow stochastic there breaking above the 20% level Not like a massive rally this morning But we did close at the top end of the candle on Friday, and we are falling through a little bit more with this so far there today And things continue to go well People will be looking will be looking at 17 362 As a longer term all-time high and the next potential resistance after we break 16 9 69 Looking at the UK 100. We actually have been slightly higher this morning But we're still pushing on looking at 6 4 6 3 We are trading above the 21 period SMA that I'm gonna need to tidy up this chart a little bit because we do have a Large number of support resistance levels on here But come back to that at some point later on again technical signals They're also looking relatively positive and nowhere the chart is not quite as as nice as the US 30 In regards to recovery, so there's a lot more ground for the UK 100 to make up Obviously the US earning season is helping to boost the US 30 and we had some very good earnings there on Friday specifically Microsoft still doing quite well in that region as well So a lot of you US stocks outperforming expectations US looking relatively Comfortable as most of these as US earning season only has on the smaller recession left to complete So looking at Japan 225 Dollar yen as ever has been in focus between 108 and 109 And that's helping to push Japan to do five up higher I'll be at their potential resistance at 15 488 has remained in place for the last three sessions including today Which also coincides with 21 period SMA I mean we need to be able to punch through that to to re-challenge 15 8 28 So looking at dollar yen We have been seeing some interesting US dollar moves the last couple of sessions We have an amazing break out there on on Thursday But a lack of a lot of direction and conviction to push on higher So we do appear to be utilizing the 21 period SMA as potential support Which could still act as a springboard to get us up to 110, but today we're already towards the Towards the bottom of the range We almost got across over there in the MACD But we need some positive US dollar news coming out today to help push this up that little bit higher Fortunately, not gonna get it today. I won't think because there's not a huge amount of US data Well, you've got housing we've got a housing index data coming out of to that's not gonna have a huge massive impact on US dollar We do have some European data Tuesday again, not too much Fast forward on to Wednesday Again, not too much Thursday US wide well, we've got a Larger amount of data a whole host of GDP data and jobless claims And that might be Thursday that we have to wait to get that that true catalyst because you're not gonna really get it today Or tomorrow or Wednesday based on a lot of these factors unless earnings continue to to be expectations The dollar might be a little bit listless So moving on to the crude oil As ever West Texas is drifting lower still targeting potential support at 77 resistance remains at 84 Technicles are still oversold, but we're not getting any massive rebound as Kind of supply glut continues to hit the markets obviously we had the crude oil limitaries there last week came in much higher than expected and With Saudi Arabia still looking to corner the market with market share rather than defend prices by cutting back on supply People seem to be quite happy to have West Texas below $80 So maybe we'll get at some point this week So looking at gold with the risk risk appetite back on gold's getting hurt a little bit Retreating back down below 1241 eyeing up 1218 is an exponential support, but you've also got the 21 period SMA right there as well That's pretty closer to 1224. It's just four dollars away from where we are right now We are in the middle of two ranges of gold probably isn't that that much of excitement for many traders out there So your dollar European stress test came out A small number of banks failed between 24 28 banks nothing too major I'll be I guess one of the headlines was that they Lloyd's only just Scraped through that stress test right there. That's why Lloyd's is down We're running about 1.6% was most of the banks are up But the stress test did perform better than in 2011 2012 But still some lessons to be learned right there your zone still a little bit delicate But nevertheless the euro did have a little bit of a move higher this morning But very much lacking conviction as ever train between two ranges one 2661 and 2746 Not really anything to write home about right here We are looking a little bit top-heavy even at the bottom of this uptrend We try to rally back up, but we fail to do so So I think the euro dollar is still very much in the back foot But we do have some European data due out today money supply and German IFO business survey data Which could be either a help or a hundreds for your dollar depending how they come out And we finish up with GBP USD We had a bit more of a rally there on Friday as UK GDP came out relatively well nothing special though But no fall through again today bouncing off that 21 period SMA We're probably still going to be in period of consolidation right here Still looking at one spot 609 to one spot 5917 as a springboard for an eventual Move back to the upside Though it does depend on how strong that us macro data comes out and the way things are going just now I think the the us is about to Push on again But we'll have to wait to see if the data backs that up Keep you on the chart form as always make inside as part of your layer and join me again tomorrow to find out What happened next?