Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Great Sifting of Sins

 

"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.  It’s the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.  Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

"What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works?  Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?  So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead."

James 2:14-17

"They have become twisted in their reasoning, and their foolish hearts are darkened."

Romans 1:21

“Not everyone who calls me Lord will enter God’s kingdom.  The only people who will enter are those who do what my Father in heaven wants.  On that last Day many will call me Lord. They will say, ‘Lord, Lord, by the power of your name we spoke for God.  And by your name we forced out demons and did many miracles.’  Then I will tell those people clearly, ‘Get away from me, you who are lawless. I never knew you."

Matthew 7:21-23

“'You that are cursed, depart from me into the eternal darkness prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.'  Then they will answer, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?' Then he answered, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’”

Matthew 25:40-46

"You should become resigned to the fact that you will seem ridiculous to a race of janitors and bureaucrats if you are to enter the service of His Splendor.  Then you will know what it means to be the friend of God. The Friend of God!"

Léon Bloy

"Wonderful providence indeed which is so silent, yet so efficacious, so constant, so unerring.  This is what baffles the power of Satan.  He cannot discern the Hand of God in what goes on; and though he would fain meet it and encounter it, in his mad and blasphemous rebellion against heaven, he cannot find it.  Crafty and penetrating as he is, yet his thousand eyes and his many instruments avail him nothing against the majestic serene silence, the holy imperturbable calm which reigns through the providence of God."

John Henry Newman

 

And so we see the end of the first half of 2025.   The paint on the tape is drying.

Our illusions, our willful distortion of what is real, is in place. 

Stocks managed to squeeze out another late day rally to finish at all time highs.

This is a vanity market.  And as always, part of the great wealth transfer scam that is now the US economy.

Gold and silver moved higher.   

The Dollar gave up the 97 handle.

VIX is wallowing in complacency.

If you cannot see what is happening, in this great sifting of sins and the revelation of lawlessness, then your eyes are closed and your hearts have hardened.

Look carefully to what it is that you serve.

It breaks my heart to see those who have been among the faithful sliding peacefully into the abyss.

And for what?   A corrupt politician?  A vicious set of policies?   The despoliation of law?  Simple murder?   Personal vanity and greed?  

They have given themselves over to their desires,  thinking themselves to be righteous. 

And the regrets when their eyes are opened will be the torments of their hell.. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - And All the Consequences

 

"Time to move the blame to where it really belongs.  That means no more coddling banks with bailout billions marked 'secret.'  No more allowing their executives lavish bonuses and new corporate jets as if they’ve won the megalottery and not sent the economy down the tubes.  And no more apostles of Wall Street calling the shots."

Bill Moyers, Changing the Rules of the Blame Game, Bill Moyers Journal, April 7, 2009

"Over the past 30 years the plutocrats have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. Remember that Citigroup reference to "market-friendly governments" on their side? It hasn't mattered which party has been in power — government has done Wall Street's bidding.

This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet. So it is that like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy.  Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs. Democracy only works when we claim it as our own."

Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal (last episode), 30 April 2010

"That sound of shattered glass you’ve been hearing is the iconic portrait of Jamie Dimon splintering as it hits the floor of JPMorgan Chase.  As the Good Book says, 'Pride goeth before a fall,' and the sleek silver-haired, too-smart-for-his-own-good CEO of America’s largest bank has been turning every television show within reach into a confessional booth.  Barack Obama’s favorite banker faces losses of $2 billion and possibly more – all because of the complex, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t trading in exotic financial instruments that he has so ardently lobbied Congress not to regulate.

Once again, doing God’s work — that is, betting huge sums of money with depositor funds knowing that you are too big to fail and can count on taxpayers riding to your rescue if your avarice threatens to take the country down — has lost some of its luster. The jewels in Dimon’s crown sparkle with a little less grandiosity than a few days ago, when he ridiculed Paul Volcker’s ideas for keeping Wall Street honest as 'infantile.'”

Bill Moyers, Are JPMorgan's Losses the Canary in the Coal Mine?, May 16, 2012

"America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up. They (the corporations) are counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They're counting on you to stand at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether 'we, the people' is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality - one nation, indivisible - or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others."

Bill Moyers, September 23, 2016

And so we close in on the end of the first half of 2025.  And Donnie will be bragging about the stock markets being at new all time highs.

It's no longer Biden's market.  Or wars.   He owns it now.  And all the usual consequences.

The elite don't care.  Our rulers are not even concerned.  They don't believe in laws, or justice, or plagues. 

US markets will be closed next Friday for the Fourth of July.

The market in equities is at a bubble high in my estimation.  

Gold and silver were smacked down so the metals bears can minimize their paper losses and maximize their gains. 

'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

And judgement waits. 

Have a pleasant weekend. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Blind Tyranny of Shameful Foolishness

 

"They defended him, verbally and physically, every time he committed one of his criminal acts. They went blithely on past the suffering of all the bombing victims, the prisoners in the concentration camps, and the religious persecutors, because a different regime would have meant the end of their power."

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair, 1947

"For these are a rebellious people, deceitful children, unwilling to listen to the commandments of the Lord. They say to their seers,‘Do not see!’ and to the prophets,‘Say nothing of what is right! Tell us only things that please us, prophesy illusions."

Isaiah 30:8-10

"Foolishness is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.  One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force.  Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own downfall in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.

Against such foolishness we are defenseless.  Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the foolish person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.  In all this the foolish person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

For that reason, greater caution is called for dealing with a foolish person than with a malicious one.  Never again will we try to persuade the foolish person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous.  If we want to know how to get the better of foolishness, we must seek to understand its nature.  This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one.  There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet foolish, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but foolish. 

The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him.  He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings. 

We must abandon all attempts to convince the foolish person. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome foolishness."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, executed on April 9, 1945

Foolishness has overreached.  If you cannot see this by this point, you cannot see. 

All that remains is for them is failure after failure, and the sickening downfall, and judgement in this life or the next.

Stocks rallied once again.

The complacency in the VIX is apparent.

Gold lost a bit of ground, silver gained.

The gold miners ignored the paper metal and were bought by the smart money.

The Dollar continues to slide.

And so it goes down the familiar halls of history. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Pack of Ravening Wolves

 

"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell, The New Statesman and Nation, August 1937

"This elite-generated social control maintains the status quo because the status quo benefits and validates those who created and sit atop it.  People rise to prominence when they parrot the orthodoxy rather than critically analyze it.  Intellectual regurgitation is prized over independent thought.  Real change in politics or society cannot occur under the orthodoxy because if it did, it would threaten the legitimacy of the professional class and all of the systems that helped them achieve their status.

Kristine Mattis, The Cult of the Professional Class, 4 April 2016

"The American economy increasingly serves only a narrow part of society, and America's national politics has failed to put the country back on track through honest, open, and transparent problem solving.  Too many of America's elites-among the super-rich, the CEOs, and many of my colleagues in academia-have abandoned a commitment to social responsibility.  They chase wealth and power, the rest of society be damned."

Jeffrey Sachs, The Price of Civilization, January 2012

"When the person at the top is malignant and self-serving, unethical behavior cascades through the organization and becomes legitimized. Narcissists change the companies or countries they lead, much like bad money drives out good, and those changes can outlast their own tenure. Divergent voices are silenced, flattery and servility are rewarded, and cynicism and apathy corrode any sense of shared purpose in a culture where everyone’s out for themselves. In the extreme, they can destroy the institution itself."

Lee Simmons, How Narcissistic Leaders Destroy From Within, Stanford Business, April 30, 2020

"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor figs from thistles."

Matthew 7:15

 

Stocks did a classic 'pop and flop' today as the intoxication of a ceasefire begins to subside into reality.

Gold and silver managed to hold their ground, and even gain some ground back.

The Dollar continued its slide, and gave up the 98 handle.

VIX is now signalling that a trend change may be near. 

The further one gets away from the natural trendline, the more power and force it requires to sustain a market manipulation. 

And this is why all bubbles and manipulation pools eventually fail.  

The longer they press on from the mean, the worse the eventual correction will become.

The bubbles are underpinned by vapor.

And so a reckoning may be in the card.

Will it be the 'final collapse' or just another setback in the process of wealth transferral?

Only time will tell, since the nature and scope of the 'trigger event' will greatly influence this outcome.

As it was in 2002 and 2008, so it will be again.  Most did not believe it, they did not see it then.

They will never learn, because it does not suit them to change what has for the past 30 years been a veru successful series of control frauds and abuses of the system stemming from the rollbacks of reforms in the 1990s.

And the victims, including their followers in lawlessness, will be sacrificed once again to the idols of pride and greed — deceiving, and being willfully deceived.

The madness is sin, a turning in the wrong direction. And serves none but itself. 

Have a pleasant evening.