Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Ghouls of Wall Street

 

"Now we remember that it was Bill Clinton's administration that deregulated derivatives, deregulated telecom, and put our country's only strong banking laws in the grave. He's the one who rammed the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through congress.  Mass incarceration and the repeal of welfare, two of Clinton's other major achievements, are the pillars of the disciplinary state that has made life so miserable for Americans in the lower reaches of society.  He would have put a huge dent in Social Security too, had the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal not stopped him.  If we take inequality as our measure, the Clinton administration looks not heroic but odious."

Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion, 1 September 2006

"In 1999, on signing Gramm-Leach-Bliley into law, Clinton said, 'This is a day we can celebrate as an American day' and that 'the Glass-Steagall law is no longer appropriate for the economy in which we live' and 'today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down these antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority' and 'This is a very good day for the United States.'"

Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Clinton on Deregulation

"I think Bill Clinton was the pivotal figure of our times. Before he came along, the market-based reforms of Reaganism were controversial; after Clinton, they were accepted consensus wisdom. Clinton was the leader of the group that promised to end the Democrats’ old-style Rooseveltian politics, that hoped to make the Democrats into a party of white-collar winners, and he actually pulled that revolution off. He completed the Reagan agenda in a way the Republicans could not have dreamed of doing—signing trade agreements, deregulating Wall Street, getting the balanced budget, the ’94 crime bill, welfare reform. He almost got Social Security partially privatized, too. A near miss [Miss Lewinsky that is] on that one.

He remade our party of the left (such as it is) so that it was no longer really identified with the economic fortunes of working people. Instead it was about highly educated professional-class winners, people whose good fortunes the Clintonized Democratic Party now regarded as a reflection of their merit. Now it was possible for the Democratic Party to reach out to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, and so on. This was something relatively new for a left party in the industrialized world, and it was quickly adopted by other left parties in other countries, most notably 'New Labour' in the UK. Unfortunately, this strategy has little to offer the people who used to be the Democratic Party’s main constituents except scolding. It merely assumes that they have, as the ’90s saying went, nowhere else to go."

Seymour Hersh, Ordinary People By the Millions, July 13, 2023

"There is no Republican Party.   There is no Democratic Party.  You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1907

"What is the Democratic Party’s former constituency of labor and progressive reformers to do? Are they to stand by and let the party be captured in Hillary’s wake by Robert Rubin’s Goldman Sachs-Citigroup gang that backed her and Obama?   The 2016 election sounded the death knell for the identity politics. This strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed.

This election showed that voters have a sense of when they’re being lied to. After eight years of Obama’s demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial backers on Wall Street. 'Identity politics' has given way to the stronger force of economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer work."

Michael Hudson, Break Up the Democratic Party, November 2016


Gold and silver meandered around, and were pressed down below upper resistance for small losses.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

VIX climbed quite a bit from its recent complacency.

Stocks were hammered.   And they went out near the lows.

And so it was for today's stock option expiration.

The Banks will struggle, and the political class will try to muddle through.

One of the things that comforts me in my old age is that I never voted for either of the Clintons.  Obama once.  I was fooled along with many that he was a reformer, a belief of which he quickly relieved us with his economic and financial actions and appointments.

I have never voted for Trump.  And not for Biden either, for what I hope are obvious reasons.  You could say that my votes are 'wasted.'  Unlike the world, nothing is wasted in God's economy.

But I am very glad that Trump is seeking an end to that insane conflict in the Ukraine.  It has deep roots in American politics, and it will not go away quietly.   Like so many of our recent wars, its was a source of enrichment for some, and of sorrow for many.

My geopolitical concerns in the Middle East as high.  I think it represents a serious threat to many things that we cherish.

But this is how the world works, from one debacle to another.  I've seen worse.

Need little, want less, love more.  For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Vulgar Exceptionalism of the Plutocracy

 

"The big reactionaries of the business world and their allies and instruments among politicians and newspaper editors took advantage of this division of opinion, and especially of the fact that most of their opponents were on the wrong path; and fought to keep matters absolutely unchanged. These men demanded for themselves an immunity from governmental control which, if granted, would have been as wicked and as foolish as immunity to the barons of the twelfth century. 

Many of them were evil men.  Many others were just as good men as were some of these same barons; but they were as utterly unable as any medieval castle-owner to understand what the public interest really was.  There have been aristocracies which have played a great and beneficent part at stages in the growth of mankind; but we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy."

Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography, 1913

“Though you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen slag, burnt down together with the terrestrial globe.  

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.  You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty.  So I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth.  I don’t want to understand you."

 Anton Chekhov, The Bet, January 14, 1889

"What is truth?  You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.  To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.  If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.  If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.  The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.   Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing.   At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.

Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing.  Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference.  It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.

Do not obey in advance.  Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.  In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.  A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important.  It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges.  Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.  Modern tyranny is terror management.  When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power.  The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book.  Do not fall for it.

No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood.”

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, February 2017

Gold and silver rallied sharply, but the prices were steadily pushed lower into the close.

Stocks struggled with a large decline, but gained back some ground in the afternoon.

See a trend here?   

VIX wallows.

The Dollar gave up on chopping and declined steadily.

The inventory of physical gold bullion in Hong Kong has fallen to a low that I cannot remember seeing in all the years I have been following this.

It is running a fine line on a failure to deliver.   It appears that the customers are willing to work with them on their limitations to supply demand at these prices, for now.

Stock option expiration on Friday.

Comex expiration next week.

Will Wall Street be hoisted on its own pétard?

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Anguish of the Fallen

 

"The goal has been the 'Third Worldization' of the United States:

• an increasingly underemployed, lower-wage work-force;
• a small but growing moneyed class that pays almost no taxes;
• the privatization or elimination of human services;
• the elimination of public education for low-income people;
• the easing of restrictions against child labor;
• the exporting of industries and jobs to low-wage, free-trade countries;
• the breaking of labor unions;
• and the elimination of occupational safety and environmental controls and regulations."

Michael Parenti, Land of Idols, 1994

“Son of man, they have set up idols in their hearts. They cling to the errors that will make them fall into sin. Why should I allow myself to hear them?"

Ezekiel 14:3

"Surface idols are things like money, spouse, children, through which our deep idols seek fulfillment.  For example, money can be a surface idol that serves to satisfy more foundational influences.  Surface idols are things through which our deep idols seek fulfillment.  Some people want lots of money as a way to control their world and life, and such people usually don’t spend much money and they live very modestly. They keep it all safely saved and invested so that they can feel completely save in the world. Others want money for access to social circles and to make themselves beautiful and attractive. These people do spend their money on themselves in lavish ways.

Other people want money because it gives them so much power over others.  In every case, money functions as an idol, and yet because of various deep idols it results in very different patterns of behavior. The person using money to serve a deep idol of control will often feel superior to others and use money to obtain power or social approval. In every case however, money idolatry slaves and distorts lives.

An idol is something we cannot live without.  We must have it.  Therefore it drives us to break rules we once honored, to harm others, even ourselves, in order to get it.  Idols give us a sense of being in control.   Idols control us since we feel like we must have them or life is meaningless.”

Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods, 2009

“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

"Then the kings of the earth, the rulers, the generals, the wealthy, the powerful, and every slave and freedman hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains. And they cried to the mountains and the rocks, 'Fall on us, and hide us from the face of the one who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of their judgement has come, and who is able to survive?'”

Revelation 6:15-17

As a reminder, there will be a stock option expiration this Friday.

 

Stocks did their usual boogie woogie, with unsurprising mixed results.

 

The rally is narrowing again.   The SP 500 is working on what could be a triple top.

 

VIX was lower, and is starting to sound a bit of a complacency alarm.

 

The Dollar chopped sideways.

 

The battle over the physical supply of precious metals continues, pitting the banking dreadnoughts of the American financial system against most of the rest of the world.

 

Things are likely to get more and more interesting, and enlightening.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Creatures of the Kleptocracy

 

"The London Gold Pool was the pooling of gold reserves by a group of eight central banks in the United States and seven European countries that agreed on 1 November 1961 to cooperate in maintaining the Bretton Woods System of fixed-rate convertible currencies and defending a gold price of US$35 per troy ounce by interventions in the London gold market.

The central banks coordinated concerted methods of gold sales to balance spikes in the market price of gold as determined by the London morning gold fixing while buying gold on price weaknesses. The United States provided 50% of the required gold supply for sale. The price controls were successful for six years until the system became no longer workable. The pegged price of gold was too low and runs on gold, the British pound, and the US dollar occurred and France decided to withdraw from the pool. The London Gold Pool collapsed in March 1968.

The London Gold Pool controls were followed with an effort to suppress the gold price with a two-tier system of official exchange and open market transactions, but this gold window collapsed in 1971 with the Nixon Shock, and resulted in the onset of the gold bull market which saw the price of gold appreciate rapidly to US$850 in 1980."

Wikipedia, The London Gold Pool

"Let us create a society in which it is easier for people to be good."

Peter Maurin

"We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The US Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K."

Edward 'Steady Eddie' George, Governor Bank of England 1993-2003, from Reg Howe v. BIS, JPM et al.

"God intended things to be much easier than we have made them."

Dorothy Day

"You might think that parking your money in a big bank like JP Morgan Chase would insulate you from fraud. It’s just the opposite.   The big banks are the biggest perpetrators of financial fraud – fraud that affects millions of us, either directly or indirectly, on an ongoing basis.  While they are wrist slaps when properly scaled, you can see the list of 'settlements' made between the government and the big banks here.   These 'settlements,' the aftermath of Wall Street's near production of a second Great Depression, entailed not a single criminal indictment.   The top two repositories of banksters, based on the number of settlements, are Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase.

The banks engage in fraud for two reasons.   First, they profit from swindling the public.  Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique.   They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions."

Laurence Kotlikoff, When Banksters Buy Regulators and Prosecutors, Forbes, October 21, 2014


Gold and silver rebounded sharply from the calculated slamdown of last Friday. So why did they bother? 

What they accomplished was to break the upward momentum of the precious metals, in order to keep their price 'under control' in heavy demand.  And more importantly it loosened up some of the physical bullion that was being borrowed from certain funds at increasingly higher rates.  

The precious metal complex in New York and London is highly leveraged, and gold is often leased and rehypothecated multiple times.

The collapse of a leveraged scheme like this can result is some serious fireworks in the financial markets.  

Stocks managed to hold on and eke out some gains.

VIX wallowed.

The Dollar ticked up a bit.

 There will be a stock market option expiration this Friday.

Precious metals futures contracts options expiration next week.

Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.  

Often without really making up our minds to be either good or evil.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Blessings and Woes - The Sermon on the Plain

 

"Why do you call out to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ but not do as I ask?  I will tell you what someone is like who comes to me, listens to my words, and acts on them.  That one is like a person building a house, who dug deeply and laid the foundation on rock; when the flood came, the river burst against that house but could not shake it because it had been well built.  But the one who listens and does not act is like a person who built a house on the ground without a foundation.  When the river burst against it, it collapsed at once and was completely destroyed.”

Luke 46-49

As long as we live within the world's delusions, our addictions condemn us to futile quests leaving us to face an endless series of disillusionments while our sense of self remains unfulfilled.  In these days of increasing addictions, we have wandered far away from our Father's home.   The addicted life can aptly be designated a life lived in 'a distant country.'  It is from there that our cry for deliverance rises up.”

Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son

“Cursed is the man who trusts in men, who trusts in the flesh for their strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord. For they will be like a bush in the desert and will not see when good comes. They will live in dry wastes in the desert, in a land of salt where no other people live.

Good will come to the one who trusts in the Lord, and whose hope is in the Lord. They will be like a tree planted by the water, that sends out its roots by the river. It will not be afraid when the heat comes but its leaves will be green. It will not be troubled in a dry year, or stop giving fruit."

Jeremiah 17:5-8

"The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘I thank you, God, that I am not like other people—cheaters, sinners, adulterers. I’m certainly not like that tax collector! I fast twice a week, and I give you a tenth of my income.’  But the tax collector stood at a distance and dared not even lift his eyes to heaven as he prayed.  Instead, he beat his chest in sorrow, saying, ‘O God, be merciful to me, for I am a sinner.’  I tell you, this sinner, not the Pharisee, returned home justified before God. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Luke 18:11

"The root of all sin is pride, superbia.  I want to be my own law, I have a right to my self, my hatred and my desires, my life and my death.  The mind and flesh of man are set on fire by pride; for it is precisely in his wickedness that man wants to be as God."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 1939

"You felt secure in your wickedness.  You think, ‘No one sees what I do.'  But your so-called wisdom and knowledge have led you astray.  And you believe that, ‘I am the one, no one else matters.’   Disaster will overwhelm you, and you won’t be able to talk it away.  Misfortune will descend upon you, and you won’t be able to buy your way out.   A catastrophe will strike you suddenly, one which you cannot avoid."

Isaiah 47:10-11

‘Blessed are you who are poor,
      for yours is the kingdom of God.
‘Blessed are you who are hungry now,
      for you will be filled.
‘Blessed are you who weep now,
      for you will laugh.
‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you,
      revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man.
Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven;
      for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

‘But woe to you who are wealthy,
      for you have received your consolation.
‘Woe to you who are full now,
      for you will be hungry.
‘Woe to you who are laughing now,
      for you will mourn and weep.
‘Woe to you when all speak well of you,
      for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.'"

Luke 6:20-26

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Time To Come Home

 

"What is a proper disposition towards life?   It is to accept God as a loving father, who is full of tenderness and forgiveness for us, despite our willful blunders and hardened hearts.  He yearns for us, as a father and mother yearn for the return of their most beloved child.It is to accept that we are not lost, we are not abandoned.  We are wandering like a wayward child, full of our own headstrong delusions. 

And our father waits expectantly, calling for us through the darkness.   He sends the spirit out to find us, a light to find our way home to him out of the gloom of the night.  It is to accept that his door is always open, and that he will not abandon us, until he has at last welcomed us into his house.

How do we know what he is doing?  Talk to him.  He is always listening.  He delights in our presence, and notes everything about us, as a loving parent does to a sleeping child.  His love is boundless, but will not overwhelm us.  Because that is how deep his love is for us."

Jesse, Acceptance and Forgiveness, 2 January 2018

"So the greatest of all virtues is love.  It is here that we find the true meaning of the Christian faith.  This is at bottom the meaning of the cross.  The great event on Calvary signifies more than a meaningless drama that took place on the stage of history.  It is a telescope through which we look out into the long vista of eternity and see the love of God breaking forth into time. 

It is an eternal reminder to a power drunk generation that love is most durable power in the world, and that it is at bottom the heartbeat of the moral cosmos."

Martin Luther King, St. Paul’s Letter to the American Churches, November 4, 1956

"The corruption that has become widely tolerated throughout the various upper strata of our society is shocking in its boldness.  And even more shocking is its general acceptability, and too often downright fashionability, among our elite in business and government, and their courtiers and partisans in the various professions.  And it provides a corrosive example and temptation to the public.  That such gaming the system is widely tolerated and accepted does not make it right.  The breaking of oaths is a serious transgression, and there will be an accounting for it, if not in this world then the next.

And sadly it is the partisanship, and the willing gullibility of simple souls given over to the wiles of a skillful persuasion to anger, and willfulness, and hatred, that permits the unscrupulous to prosper.  I have seen otherwise honorable and sincere people do and say some shocking things in service to dark powers in the past few years.   There can be little doubt that the ordinary and the unsophisticated are learning from our cynical and proud elite.  And that scandalous example is their sin as well. It would be better for them to have been thrown into the sea, with a millstone around their necks."

Jesse, Repentance, Forgiveness, the Wellspring of Joy, 22 December 2017


Gold and silver were hit hard, very hard today.

I suspect it was intended to break the upward momentum of the metals, and perhaps more importantly, to ease the pressure on borrowing gold from various places including some of the bigger ETFs, where borrow rates had soared.

The smackdown in silver was particularly impressive, coming on a break through the 34 price level.

One of the things you might wish to keep in mind going forward is that the regulatory structure of the US, as bad as it might have been, is getting obliterated now, and it is going to become much worse.

If you panicked and sold at the bottom today, you *might* want to consider that you really ought not to be trading.   This is no knock on you or your intelligence.  It just means that you are like about 90% of the people who are better off investing for the longer term, and doing productive things in the real world.

The Dollar continued to decline.

VIX fell again to what is considered a rather low level these days, as I have indicated on its chart.

Inventory in Hong Kong bounced back a little, but they are scraping the bottom of the barrel.

The world and those who serve it do not care about you or your family.

To them you are things to be used and thrown away.  At most a statistic.

Your pride will not permit you to accept this, but it is how thing are.  

This I know.   

They want you do die for them.   But there is one who has already died for you.

There is only one who is worthy of your heart. 

That door is always open.  The light shines out to you in the darkness.

So stop wallowing in misery, feeding the uncaring swine.   

Your father loves you, and yearns to welcome you into his house.

Time to come home.

As a reminder, US markets will be closed in observance of President's Day on Monday February 17^th. 

I will see you again on Tuesday.

Have a pleasant weekend.