14 March 2025

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - What Is Truth?

 

“There was a certain rich man who was splendidly clothed in purple and fine linen, and who lived each day in luxury.   At his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, who was covered with sores.  As Lazarus lay there longing for scraps from the rich man’s table, the dogs would come and lick his sores.

Finally, the poor man died and was carried by the angels to be with Abraham.  The rich man also died and was buried, and his soul went to the place of the dead. There, in torment, he saw Abraham in the far distance with Lazarus at his side.

The rich man shouted, ‘Father Abraham, have some pity!  Send Lazarus over here to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue.  I am in anguish in these flames.’

But Abraham said to him, ‘My son, remember that during your lifetime you had everything you wanted, and Lazarus had nothing.  So now he is here being comforted, and you are in anguish.  And there is a great chasm separating us.  No one can cross over to you from here, and no one can cross over to us from there.’

Then the rich man said, ‘Please, Father Abraham, at least send him to my father’s home.  For I have five brothers, and I want him to warn them so they don’t end up in this place of torment.’

But Abraham said, ‘Moses and the prophets have warned them.  Your brothers can read what they wrote.’

The rich man replied, ‘No, Father Abraham! But if someone is sent to them from the dead, then they will repent of their sins and turn to God.’

But Abraham said, ‘If they won’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded, even if someone rises from the dead.’”

Luke 16:19-31

"The sin of the rich man in the parable of Lazarus was not that he had been given great wealth, even though has no gratitude, and thinks that it is all because of his own merits.   No, his sin is that he allowed his preoccupation with worldly possessions to blind himself to the suffering of Lazarus, his poor brother, who sat every day on his doorstep.  And he gave him nothing.

It was only in the torment of the afterworld that the rich man's eyes were opened, and looking across the great gulf finally sees holy Abraham and Lazarus.  And the first thing that the rich man does is to beg for comfort for himself, and ask for favors.  He feels no repentance, never once saying that he is sorry.  For even as his eyes were opened, his heart remained hardened, and firmly in the grip of his sins.    His sins were the chasm that separated them;  the door to his torment was locked from the inside.

So too, nations that have been blessed can sometimes blind themselves to their excesses and offenses.  And so they misuse their power and wealth and great fortunes, granted to them by God, to oppress and subjugate others, merely to suit their own vain purposes.  They would mount themselves aloft to rule over all.

And in their hardened hearts they hold their rapaciousness high, profanely, as the greatest good, the exceptional—  even as they oppress and plunder and murder.  Until at long last God humbles them, and breaks the backbone of their power.

Let us thank God then, for both our consolations and our trials, which cause us to pause and reflect, and keep a righteous understanding of who we are and whom we serve.  For both good and ill come with the ease of His good Providence, from the endless ocean of His incomprehensible love.

Truly one has come back from the dead and spoken, spoken plainly to we who abuse the weak and murder our prophets, if only we can open our hearts, and listen."

Jesse, The Blind Among the Fortunate, 21 March 2019


'What is truth?' asked Pilate.  And then turned and washed his hands of it.  

Stocks took a healthy bounce back after their recent drubbing.

Relief rallies in bearish markets tend to be violent and impressive- and short lived.

Gold and silver gave up some ground, although gold hit an intraday new all time high, hitting my long term chart objective at 3018.

They did managed to scrape up some gold to add to the physical inventory in Hong Kong.

But the metals remain under pressure on supply and demand.

If this blows up, and the banks come with their hands out for a bailout, I certainly hope they don't get it. But I am less hopeful of this than you might imagine.

VIX of course fell.

The Dollar wallowed what was clearly a risk back on reaction.

Let's see how things develop.

"When a man takes an oath, Meg, he's holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then— he needn't hope to find himself again."

Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons

Lawlessness and the trampling of the truth seems to be the fashion amongst our betters in many places these days.  They seem to be drinking deep of the heavy intoxicant of nihilism.

"A true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.” 

Czeslaw Milosz, Discreet Charm of Nihilism 

The worst lies are the lies that people tell themselves to justify their lawlessness, in order to get whatever it is that they want.  

If I had no hope in God, I would have no hope.

Need little, want less, love more.  

For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.

13 March 2025

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Madness and Moral Hazard

 

"Wall Street did not accidentally run a barge aground and leave a small oil slick on the Hudson River. Wall Street did not accidentally release tainted lettuce that sickened a few dozen people. What Wall Street did was intentional and criminal: it financially engineered a toxic subprime house of cards which it knew from its own internal reviews was going to collapse; it then molded the toxic product into inscrutable bundles; it sold the bundles to unsuspecting investors around the globe while making side bets that it would all come crashing down.

Then, after causing the greatest financial collapse in the United States since the Great Depression, Wall Street’s unrepentant scoundrels paid themselves billions of dollars in bonuses with taxpayer bailout funds. The 2007-2009 financial crash was more than the product of greed.  There was both knowing and criminal wrongdoing, but none of those responsible have gone to jail. None of the regulatory gaps that allowed this to happen have been rectified. The biggest Wall Street banks have grown even bigger and remain too-big-to-fail."

Wall Street On Parade, The Power Players Behind Silencing Wall Street Reform, October 18, 2017

"Each time banks fail, by bailing the system out again, we teach our finance sector a lesson: you can safely take too much risk because, when you lose, the taxpayer will pick up the bill. Such a system is destined to fail, but the party can run for a long time."

Simon Johnson and Peter Boone, Economic Donkeys, 19 September 2009

"Moral hazard is the probability that a party insulated from risk will behave differently from the way they would behave if fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act with increasing recklessness, literally 'without reckoning." It also encourages the rise to power of the sociopath in the affected organizations. 

Unfortunately there is a small but powerful oligopoly of privilege that is trying to project themselves onto the global stage while believing that they are immune to ordinary consequence, and have become addicted to the notion that 'others must pay' for their failures. Moral hazard comes from rewarding bad behaviour in markets with wristslaps and bailouts. It is a danger to the economy and to the public."

Jesse, Moral Hazard, 22 March 2008


Today was a risk off day, with the commensurate flight to safety that occurs sometimes when the dawn of reason breaks through the fog of the mispricing of risk.

VIX surprisingly did very little.  This to me is a strong sign that this, at least for now, is a managed unwinding of bubble assets by a select group of relative insiders.

The Dollar rose.

Gold and silver soared.

Gold futures continuous contract tagged the 2999.7 level today before close a few dollars lower.

Silver took out the prior managed resistance and just thrashed it with some authority.

That Gibraltar of safe havens, Bitcoin, fell back down to the 80,000 level.

Like fools, a new meme coin seems to be born every minute, severely diluting the hot money crowd.

Stocks are hitting some 'must hold' levels.  The slow managed decline suggests that we may not be done with this unwinding, flash relief rallies notwithstanding.

To their credit the attempts to halt the Ukraine proxy war is well appreciated by anyone who is not a slavering neocon.  

Otherwise Trump and His Merry Grifters seem to be stressing the global monetary and political system, with what appears to be gratuitous showboating, and not of particular benefit to the broader American public.   

Moral hazard is not a purely economic function.  It applies to those who wield power more generally as well.

Have a pleasant evening.


12 March 2025

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - There's a Slow Train Coming Around the Bend

 

“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America.  Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created.  Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage.  And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed.  Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.”

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, 1965

“In societies that worship money and success, the losers become objects of scorn. Those who work the hardest for the least are called lazy.  Those forced to live in substandard housing are thought to be the authors of substandard lives.  Those who do not finish high school or cannot afford to go to college are considered deficient or inept.  No system in history has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, devouring the resources of whole regions, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.

Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.  The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny.

The guiding principle of ruling elites was— and still is: when change threatens to rule, then the rules are changed.”

Michael Parenti, Democracy For the Few, 1974

"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.  And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women?   It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes.  That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow.  A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few, as we have learned to our sorrow."

Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty, 21 May 1944

“It's impossible that there could be a plague, because everyone knows that they have vanished from the West.  We should not act as though half the town were threatened with death, because then it would be.   Yes, everyone knew that, except for the dead."

Albert Camus, The Plague, June 10, 1947


Stocks managed to hold a little bounce.

They were cheered by this morning's CPI numbers.

Gold and silver enjoyed a small rally.

The Dollar was choppy.

VIX fell.

The physical gold inventory in Hong Kong has hit a new low.

"Big-time negotiators, false healers and woman haters
Masters of the bluff and masters of the proposition
But the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency
All non-believers and men-stealers talkin' in the name of religion
And there's a slow, slow train comin' up around the bend."

Bob Dylan, Slow Train Coming album,  1979

Have a pleasant evening.

11 March 2025

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - History Is a Step-Child

 

"As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression.  In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged.  And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice, The Douglas Letters, 1987

"So, no, I don’t see this happening tomorrow, but I have said for many years that if we don’t get a handle on this then one of these days our descendants are going to sit down in high-school history class and open a textbook that begins with the words: 'The United States of America was … and then it will dissect how our experiment in self-governance came apart.'"

David Cay Johnston, Inequality's Looming Disaster, Salon May 22, 2014

"The financial asset bubbles since the turn of the 21st century have been enabled by four basic instruments of monetary policy error: Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, and Powell.  Whether we will have a third major collapse and crash to follow this latest asset bubble, as a consequence of misguided monetary policy, economic priorities, and bank regulation is not the issue.   The question is, shall we have a system that holds together long enough to have a fourth?"

Jesse, Malice Domestic and Endless Foreign Wars, 31 July 2018

"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason.  But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right.  The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

"This is a very crucial point: there is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past."

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Interview: Writing about Suffering, Journal of the International Institute Vol 6 No 1, Fall 1998

"The essential characteristic of a good and healthy ruling elite, however, is that it views itself not as a function of the monarchy or the commonwealth, but as its very meaning and highest justification, and that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886


Stocks were a bit choppy today, with a decline, a recovery, and then a failure to hold any gains.  

Gold and silver managed to bounce.

The physical gold inventory in Hong Kong is back to the bottom of the bowl again.

And Bitcoin did as well.   It's no fun riding a roller coaster that does not climb back up the next hill.

VIX fell. 

The Dollar fell.

A bit of the old back and forth, wash and rinse today I suspect. 

Consumer inflation information out tomorrow morning.

That may move things around a bit.

Have a pleasant evening.