Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Day of the Beast

 

"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined. Suddenly it all comes to be, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done. For that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair."

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, 1955

"God will send them a deceiving power so that they may believe the lie, that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have taken pleasure in their lawlessness."

2 Thessalonians 2:3-12

"Once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder. As soon as men know they that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles."

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947

"Satan has been in the Heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan. Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament. He has wished to ‘be himself’, and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted. The Hell he carries with him is, in one sense, a Hell of infinite boredom."

C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942

"If heaven is seeing and in turn being seen, transformed and made new, by the beatific face of Pure Love in resplendent glory, then hell must be seeing, at the last and forever, one's own dark and miserable soul, as it really is, alone."

Jesse, Death By Overdose, 24 February 2015

"Great and sustained destruction requires great ambition. It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order, and although the idea behind that new order may be criminal and objectively very stupid, it must also be compellingly simple and at the same time absolute.  The ideology of genocide is all of those things.”

Philip Gourevitch, Tomorrow We Will Be Killed, 1998

“Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.”

Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon, 1952

"Those who have faith had better keep in the state of grace, and those who have neither had better find out what they mean, for in the coming age there will be only one way to stop your trembling knees, and that will be to get down on them and pray.  The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about."

Fulton J. Sheen, The Day of the Beast, 1947

Bessent's economic war plan, Operation Economic Outcast, continues as the US attempts to control the soaring interest rates of its sovereign debt, the price of a shrinking global supply of oil, and the crippled confidence in the full faith and credit of the US Dollar.

But in the short term if you have the will and the cash you can cast a fairly broad fig leaf over the desiccated corpse of your strategic position.

The Dollar continues to chop sideways.  Again, DXY is not all that relevant given its heavy weighting to the Euro.

VIX fell.

Oil took a heavy handed hit that was a blatant price manipulation with the primary effect of enabling traders connected to Bessent and Trump to make easy illicit profits.  

It has little to no effect on global oil supplies, and no significant benefit to the American people.

There was a precious metals futures option expiration on the Comex today. 

It was more significant for silver than for gold.

We may get another gut check by the wiseguys on those holders of new futures contracts from their 'in-the-money' longs.

This is going to end badly.

The responsibility for this is not on one man, but those in the Congress and the Courts who have enabled this chronic abuses of the Constitution and the national interest.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Don Tzu

 

"Gentleness brings victory to him who attacks, and safety to him who defends. Those whom Heaven would save, it fences round with gentleness.

There is no calamity greater than lavish desires, there is no greater guilt than discontentment, and there is no greater disaster than greed. He who is contented with contentment is always contented."

Lao tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans by Wing Tsit Chan, 1963

"The Court is corrupt,
The fields are overgrown with weeds,
The granaries are empty,
Yet there are those dressed in fineries,
With swords at their sides,
Filled with food and drink,
And possessed of much wealth.

This is taking the lead in robbery,
Far indeed is this from the Way."

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

I have somewhere to be.

Just charts tonight.

This is madness.  All of it.

Madness. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Peak Currency War

 

"Today, we are launching Operation Economic Outcast to foreclose every other option available to the Iranian regime.  Treasury has mapped every node, every facilitator, and every network that Iran has used to smuggle oil and evade sanctions.

Beginning today, the actions of Treasury and other agencies will tighten the noose and block every potential source of revenue that funds the IRGC and the Iranian regime.  We are enforcing a zero-leakage approach.  There will be no minimal breathing space for the regime to rebuild its capacity to inflict terror against America and the world.

Iran’s enablers purchase and transport its petroleum.  They facilitate the flow of its finances through exchange houses and free trade zones.  They welcome Iran’s flights and maintain registries on its behalf.  They turn a blind eye to seaborne fuel transfers and to overland transits. And they condone the illicit use of their banks, all while concealing the extent of their complicity.  The President is making phone calls to world leaders with specific requests to cease their interactions with the regime.  Those who stand with the United States will reap the rewards of our partnership.  Those who tether themselves to Tehran should expect to share in the isolation of a withering regime.

Teams from the Treasury, State Department, and the U.S. military are now meeting with their global counterparts to tell them that the United States expects action.  Every country has a defined timeline to shut down activities we have identified.  If they do not take action, we will do so unilaterally through Treasury authorities.  For example, every Bank Melli branch must be shuttered.

And let me be clear: any entity that facilitates money laundering on behalf of Iran will be removed from the U.S. dollar system. The new sectoral sanctions determinations issued today target five of Iran’s most vital lifelines that it exploits in other countries: digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping.

These measures broaden secondary sanctions risk for anyone foolish enough to continue conducting business with this regime—and accelerate the speed with which we pursue them.

As I speak, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control is also sanctioning over 60 entities, individuals, and vessels across the world that enable the Iranian regime to procure illicit nuclear and missile technology, conduct cyber operations, and generate oil revenue. This is a sustained campaign to collapse every last option for Iran. Let there be no ambiguity as to the position of the United States: An economic engagement of any kind with this murderous regime will expose those responsible to the full reach of American power.

For decades, this regime has drawn strength from a calculus that regards Iranian retaliation as certain and American enforcement as negotiable. Under President Trump, that era is over. To the ordinary soldiers supporting this regime: as more and more of your paychecks stop or are supposedly “just delayed,” ask whether your commanders are leading your country to triumph or to ruin. And recall that the Berlin Wall fell when ordinary soldiers decided not to shoot.

And to those who enable Tehran: Do not discount the cost of testing Washington. No nation should expect to enjoy the rewards of our system while helping those who seek to destroy it. It is now time for world leaders to make a decision. Between prosperity and isolation. Peace and terror. America and Iran."

Scott Bessent, US Treasury Secretary, Operation Economic Outcast, 24 August 2026


Well, this is certainly going to get interesting.

The Dollar ticked up a bit.

Gold rallied, silver was off.

Bitcoin gained again but is starting to feel toppy at this high end of its trading range.

VIX bounced higher.

Stocks fell.

The proposed Operation Economic Outcast is puzzling to me on a number of levels.

Strategically it does not look well-aimed.  That is, it seems more likely to put the stake in the heart of the reign of the US Dollar.

D-Day was a meticulously planned operation involving a broad coalition of allied nations. 

This latest economic sanctions operation seems more like a rage-fueled 'release the hounds' decree by Mr. Burns of The Simpsons, backed primarily by his faithful retainer Waylon Smithers.

This does not appear to be constructive for the US dollar and the economy. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Suicide Music

 

"Decency, security and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.  In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously.  Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.

Crime is contagious.  If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.  To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution.  Against that pernicious doctrine this Court should resolutely set its face."

Louis Brandeis, dissenting, Olmstead v. United States, 1928

"Successful totalitarian rule is precisely that because it allows little variation in its subjects’ intentions—and the Nazi regime was a totalitarian regime par excellence.  When Hitler spoke of the German ‘Volk’ he did not make a suggestion, but a demand: 'if a German, you are a Nazi or a traitor'.

It is crudely general to suggest collective responsibility for the German populace.  It is, however, fair to suggest that those who continued to defend the idea of Germanhood publicly as the war went on — when this had become synonymous with barbarity — were in fact renouncing their humanity for the sake of individual survival and peace of mind."

Panayiotis Demopoulos, Götterdämmerung: Suicide Music and the National Self, May 2014

"Recognizing the occasional tyrannies of governing majorities, they amended the Constitution so that free speech and assembly should be guaranteed.  Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and assembly.  Men feared witches and burnt women.  It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.  To justify suppression of free speech, there must be reasonable ground to fear that serious evil will result if free speech is practiced.  There must be reasonable ground to believe that the danger apprehended is imminent.  There must be reasonable ground to believe that the evil to be prevented is a serious one...

Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards.  They did not fear political change.  They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.  It is therefore always open to Americans to challenge a law abridging free speech and assembly by showing that there was no emergency justifying it.  Moreover, even imminent danger cannot justify resort to prohibition of these functions essential to effective democracy unless the evil apprehended is relatively serious."

Louis Brandeis, Whitney v. California, 1927

Count Witte: I see. So they talk, pray, march, plead, petition and what do they get? Cossacks, prison, flogging, police, spies, and now, after today, they will be shot. Is this God's will? Are these His methods? Make war on your own people? How long do you think they're going to stand there and let you shoot them? YOU ask ME who's responsible? YOU ask?

Nicholas and Alexandra, 1971

Gold and silver continued to rally higher.  

Bitcoin looks to be breaking out as well.

The Dollar is hanging on to the 98 handle but does not seem to have its usual perkiness.

VIX fell.

All eyes on oil and the mideast.

Have a pleasant weekend.