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. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Progressivism: A Square Deal for the People

 

"Roosevelt appeared an unlikely candidate for a reform president. Born into a wealthy family, he enjoyed a youth beyond the reach of most Americans, touring Europe and the Middle East, studying with private tutors, and coming of age in a New York mansion. A Harvard man, he socialized with America's upper crust. In practice, however, TR looked after the interests of working class Americans against rapacious corporate trusts, defying -- and some would say betraying -- the very society from which he had sprung.

When TR entered the White House in 1901, he took control of a federal government that often aligned itself with big business. Roosevelt restrained his progressive leanings for a short time, wisely avoiding a shakeup on Wall Street, where jittery investors saw him at best as a loose cannon and at worst as a dangerous demagogue.

In early 1902, however, TR took the offensive against powerful corporate trusts. He convinced Congress to create a Bureau of Corporations to regulate big business, then shocked the nation by bringing an anti-trust suit against J. P. Morgan's Northern Securities Corporation.  Morgan condemned the president, not just for what he had done, but for the ungentlemanly way in which he had done it -- publicly and without warning.  A new paradigm had been established in Washington, and Roosevelt would go on to file suit against more than 40 major corporations during his presidency.

If Roosevelt's trust-busting surprised big business, it was certainly consistent with the major influences on his life. Theodore Roosevelt grew up worshiping a father who preached the moral duty of helping the poor, and he worked to be like his father in every way he could.  As a young man, TR experienced life as a rancher in North Dakota's Badlands, where all the money in the world could not make a cow easier to rope or the summer sun less blazing, and years of honest work from sunup to sundown might still leave a person poor.

He learned to value working class people, and he never forgot them.  From the time he took office in 1901 to the time he left it in 1909, the cowboy president did much to help working Americans. He passed laws to ensure the safety of food and drugs sold in the American marketplace.  He placed millions of acres of land under federal protection, preserving America's natural resources.  He regulated interstate commerce and helped laborers to get a fair shake at the negotiating table.

Plutocrats deplored Roosevelt. Yet TR adamantly defended the right of big business to exist. Trying to destroy the trusts, Roosevelt wrote in his Autobiography, "was a hopeless effort... those who went into it, although they regarded themselves as radical progressives, really represented a sincere form of rural Toryism." To TR, Progressivism meant a square deal for the American people and American business, a society where businesses profited by fair competition -- but not at the expense of the average American.

In fact, Roosevelt's relationship with labor was a tenuous one; he probably feared nothing more than he feared labor's potential for violence. "We can no more and no less afford to condone evil in the man of capital than evil in the man of no capital," Roosevelt wrote. One of his greatest frustrations was the inability of capitalists to see that their greed might well foment a bloody American revolution. Labor regularly condemned him, insisting that his brand of reform did not go far enough.

After leaving the presidency, Roosevelt continued to push for domestic reform, most notably during his Progressive party campaign for the presidency in 1912. He ran on a "New Nationalism" platform, calling for women's suffrage, an end to child labor, pensions for the elderly, unemployment insurance, and increased regulation of the trusts. While Theodore Roosevelt failed in this final presidential bid, others picked up his torch, and many of the ideas he championed would later come to fruition."

PBS American Experience: TR's Domestic Policy,


Most Americans are not well-informed of their own history, and the struggle for rights and justice that has occurred from time to time.

The Progressive reform movement was a reaction to the abuses of 'The Gilded Age' around the turn of the century.

Corruption always goes too far, because that is its nature.   And then it faces a counter reaction to reform. 

And so it goes. 

Do the markets really need any additional words today from what has already been written? 

Dollar drifting lower as contra-dollar investments and commodities are moving higher.

The power elite and their moneyed interests: their toxic behaviour is running the country and the economy into the ground. 

Stocks — dancing on a volcano.

"American political corruption was the buying up of legislatures and assemblies to keep them from doing the people's will and protecting the people's interests; it was the exploiter entrenching himself in power, it was financial autocracy undermining and destroying political democracy.

By the blindness and greed of ruling classes the people have been plunged into infinite misery ; but that misery has its purpose in the scheme of nature. Something more than a century ago we saw the people driven by just such misery to grope their way into a new order of society; they threw off the chains of hereditary monarchy, and made themselves citizens of free republics. And now again we face such a crisis only this time it is in the world of industry that we have to abolish hereditary rule, and to build an industrial commonwealth in which the equal rights of all men are recognized by law."

Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check, 1919

The hour for reform has surely come. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Wholesale Luxury, Monstrous Vice

 

"Everywhere Rome was failing in her duties as mistress of the civilised world.  Her own internal degeneracy was faithfully reflected in the abnegation of her imperial duties. 

When in any country the small-farmer class is being squeezed off the land; when its labourers are slaves or serfs; when huge tracts are kept waste to minister to pleasure; when the shibboleth of art is on every man's lips, but ideas of true beauty in very few men's souls. 

When the business-sharper is the greatest man in the city, and lords it even in the law courts; when class-magistrates, bidding for high office, deal out justice according to the rank of the criminal; when exchanges are turned into great gambling-houses, and senators and men of title are the chief gamblers; when, in short, 'corruption is universal, when there is increasing audacity, increasing greed, increasing fraud, increasing impurity, and these are fed by increasing indulgence and ostentation.

When a considerable number of trials in the courts of law bring out the fact that the country in general is now regarded as a prey, upon which any number of vultures, scenting it from afar, may safely light and securely gorge themselves; when the foul tribe is amply replenished by its congeners at home, and foreign invaders find any number of men, bearing good names, ready to assist them in robberies far more cruel and sweeping than those of the footpad or burglar' — when such is the tone of society, and such the idols before which it bends, a nation must be fast going down hill.

A more repulsive picture can hardly be imagined.  A mob, a moneyed class, and an aristocracy almost equally worthless, hating each other, and hated by the rest of the world; Italians bitterly jealous of Romans, and only in better plight than the provinces beyond the sea; more miserable than either, swarms of slaves beginning to brood over revenge as a solace to their sufferings; the land going out of cultivation; native industry swamped by slave-grown imports; the population decreasing; the army degenerating; wars waged as a speculation, but only against the weak; provinces subjected to organized pillage; in the metropolis childish superstition, wholesale luxury, and monstrous vice.

The hour for reform was surely come. Who was to be the man?"

A.H. Beesley, The Gracchi Marius and Sulla, 1921

"Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us."

Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, 2006

The dollar fell off the 99 handle today, and gold and silver and even bitcoin rallied in response.

Oil rallied, and then fell back to unchanged late in the day.

VIX fell sharply on the stock pop, but was unmoved by their later flop.

The financial system has not been a sound evaluation mechanism of risk and allocator of capital for some time now. 

Over time this erodes the organic growth in the economy, and leads to serious imbalances in the structure of a society.

This is 'bad news.'

In the very long term the only thing that matters is that we have been chosen and redeemed.  I realized that in a profound way not too long ago and I remember my spirit soaring at that realization.

That joy foundered a bit on some trailer tires that resisted many attempts at seating their beads back on their rims, during a hot and bug-lashed, heavily humid afternoon that sends stinging sweat into your eyes in August.  Ratchet straps, starter fluid, pounding with a soft mallet, words my crusty marine sergeant father taught me, yada yada.  

But eventually they too fell to dogged persistence.  Now if only the politicians in Washington could be as malleable in their stubborn resistance to reform.

But you know what I mean.  It's easy to get caught up in the little things, the irritations of the moment.  But at the end of the day, the field has been won for us. And in that our joy is complete.

"And we have come to know and to trust the love that God has for us.  God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them."   1 John 4:16-17

Have a pleasant evening.