Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Truth and the Elite Badge of Deceit

 

“One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.”

John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times, 1981

"Legitimate power always includes attentiveness to justice, When power is not attentive to justice it cannot endure.  This is a summons to us to keep the agenda of justice for the vulnerable alive and front and center to maintain a kind of subversive stance toward power.

Power is the capacity to organize and administer social goods and social access.  Truth is the structure of reality that is in the nature of things that cannot be violated by our capacity to administer it.  Power can sometimes be administered in harmony with such truthfulness, but very often power is seduced so that it runs contradictory to truth.

Truth is not a set of propositions in the Bible, but a cluster of relationships. Those are relationships of dignity, well-being, security and respect. When power violates those, then those who administer such power learn is that they cannot finally withstand the force of truth.  So, the truthfulness of God’s commitment to neighborliness does not give in, in the long run.

Moses is designated at the burning bush to be the carrier of God’s truth, which in that narrative is that God does not want people to be enslaved to the economy of Pharaoh.  God does not want exploitative labor or excessively cheap labor. Pharaoh never catches on as obtuse power usually does not. 

The truth carried by Moses is always coming from below in the cries of the slaves, but it always turns out that power from above never has the capacity to silence the cries from below.  It is the cry from below that is finally generative of the historical possibility.  Pharaoh is very slowly diminished and his power wanes and he does not catch on until it is too late—which I think is probably a right rendering of how that tends to work.

Early on in the gospel traditions, the power elite in Jesus’ society who were colluding with the Roman Empire, recognized him as a threat and began to conspire to kill him.  I think he was presented in the gospel narratives as being a huge threat to the established order of the Roman Empire. 

Whether, in fact, the Roman authorities perceived him that way or not, that is clearly how the gospel writers present him.  There is a passage in the gospel of Luke that summarizes it by saying the leadership tried to find ways to kill him but they could not, because the people were mesmerized by his teaching.   Jesus became a reference point for much of the hostility and resistance to the power of the empire because he refused to accommodate, and told another story of reality that the empire could not co-opt.

It [the pursuit of political power] is very seductive for all of us.  And I suppose it has been the seduction of the Jesus movement since Constantine, when Christians gained access to power and have loved having it.  I think the collusion of the church with political order in almost any society causes the church to lose its edge and have failure of nerve about the gospel that has been entrusted to it.

We labor and labor and labor for stuff that never satisfies us.  The market ideology is now the new form of imperial power and many of us, without any critical reflection, have signed onto that and organized our lives in that way so we do not have any time, energy or capacity for the things that are rightly important to us.  So, I think what I would want a modern congregation to reflect on are the causes of stress, lack of time, and anything that is devouring our human-ness."

Jonathan Meerritt, Walter Brueggemann: Truth Speaks to Power, 26 June 2014

"He has shown you what is good.  The Lord requires you to act justly, and to love kindness and mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."

Micah 6:8


It seems that the more elaborate the externalities and drama of any sort of devotion, whether it be religion or nationalism or any other secular ideology, the more impoverished and empty is the heart that presents it.  As Paul says so famously, even if one has prophecy, and understanding, and a wide array of other gifts, in the end all that matters is love.  For love is God, and God is love, and the only tragedy is not to have found Him in the end.

But for most of us, and this certainly includes me, a Way has been made and marked out for us, and that path is more certain, less prone to self-delusion and folly.  It is perfect, but alas, those who try to follow it as best as they can are not.  And so going forward is always a struggle, even on this road we have been shown.

And so we must be wary of the grandiose and elaborately ostentatious prayers of the Pharisees, compared to the simple, sincere offerings of the innocent.  If you have all the ritual, all the knowledge, all the pomp of power and influence of the world, all the followers even to a countless multitude, but have no love, you may seem to have the world, but you have nothing.

Last night the usual message came out from the White House that they remain 'open to negotiations with Iran.'   And the stock futures rallied.

So stocks rallied today, early on, as is their custom on Monday mornings.

And they gave up those gains by the end of the day.  That is a bit new.

You can fool some of the people all of the time...

Gold and silver bounced around, largely marking time.

Despite bedazzling the White House with shiny trinkets, there should be little doubt that this Administration is no friend of 'honest money.' 

The Dollar chopped sideways.

 VIX fell at first, and then came back up again.

The wars in the Ukraine and Iran are intensifying.   

Have no doubt about this.  If you are surprised by this, find another source for your news.

Lies are being more generally accepted, what they call 'normalized.'  

It seems as though every time a politician opens their mouth these lies come out.  It is considered normal, almost fashionable.  They often to not even try to hide it.  

But it sets an example for the rest of the power elite that is horribly corrosive not only to the health of the nation but the rest of the world.   

It erodes trust, peace, commerce, and confidence.

There is still time to stock up and prepare for the worst, even as we hope for the best.

What matters the most is your soul, for that is what this is all about. 

Have a pleasant evening.  

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Deceitfulness of the Proud Will Destroy Them

 

"They do not see the image of Almighty God before them, and ask themselves what He wishes. And, for the same reason that they do not please Him, they succeed in pleasing themselves. Hence, they become both self-satisfied and self-sufficient; – they think they know just what they ought to do, and that they do it all; and in consequence they are very well content with themselves, and rate their merit very high, and have no fear at all of any future scrutiny into their conduct. which may befall them, though their religion mainly lies in certain outward observances, and not a great number even of them.

So it was with the Pharisee in this day's gospel. He looked upon himself with great complacency. He used, or misused, the traditions in which he had been brought up, to the purpose of persuading himself that perfection lay in merely answering the demands of society. He professed to pay thanks to God, but he hardly apprehended the existence of any direct duties on his part towards his Maker.

He thought he did all that God required, if he satisfied public opinion. To be religious, in the Pharisee's sense, was to keep the peace towards others, to take his share in the burdens of the poor, to abstain from gross vice, and to set a good example. His alms and fastings were not done in penance, but because the world asked for them; penance would have implied the consciousness of sin; whereas it was only Publicans, and such as they, who had anything to be forgiven. And these indeed were the outcasts of society, and despicable; but no account lay against men of well-regulated minds such as his: men who were well-behaved, decorous, consistent, and respectable. He thanked God he was a Pharisee, and not a penitent."

John Henry Newman, The Religion of the Pharisees, Dublin 1856

"Beware the leaven of the Pharisees, which is their hypocrisy."

Luke 12:1

"I really fear that most men called Christians, whatever they may profess, whatever they may think they feel, whatever warmth and illumination and love they may claim as their own, would go on almost as they do, neither much better nor much worse, if they believed Christianity to be a fable. When young, they indulge their lusts, or at least pursue the world's vanities; as time goes on, they get into a fair way of business, or other mode of making money; then they marry and settle; and their interest coinciding with their duty, they seem to be, and think themselves, respectable and religious men; they grow attached to things as they are; they begin to have a zeal against vice and error; and they follow after peace with all men.

Such conduct indeed, as far as it goes, is right and praiseworthy. Only I say, it has not necessarily any thing to do with religion at all; there is nothing in it which is any proof of the presence of religious principle in those who adopt it; there is nothing they would not do still, though they had nothing to gain from it, except what they gain from it now: they do gain something now, they do gratify their present wishes, they are quiet and orderly, because it is their interest and taste to be so; but they venture nothing, they risk, they sacrifice, they abandon nothing on the faith of Christ's word."

John Henry Newman, The Ventures of Faith, St. Mary's Oxford, 25 July 1836

"The problem Newman addresses here is with those long time believers who have grown in the faith, and may exhibit many of its gifts, but stop there without bearing the kind of fruit of which they are capable. And why do they do this? Simply because they never grow to fully love Him and His, more than they love their own fears, desires, and selves.

They always hold some better portion of themselves back and in reserve. They love God as they think that they must only in order to avoid punishment and to be comfortable, while being blinded to their own sinful shortcomings, never fully growing into the love which is the substance and the salvation of their true selves.

And in the worst case they become self-righteous, being proud in their gifts and their selection as they think of it in their own minds. They may harbor private hatreds, sins against the Spirit, judging others and seeing admonitions to take up the cross of His obedience with love as intended for all those others, but not for themselves. 

They are imbued with the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy and spiritual pride. They seek to manage God's reach, and fix His presence down and manage it like a butterfly pinned in a collection, and call it a 'traditional' preference for things as they think they have been and ought to be.  They wish to calcify the life of the Spirit in His church.  And this is the road to a dwindling of the spiritual life, and a gradual erosion of faith as a vital element of our every action."

Jesse, Obedience Without Love, 5 April 2017

Confidence faltered in the markets today, and stocks fell.

What caused this break? On the whole people are being to see through the fraud, and the lies, which have been the mainstay of the financial system for some time now.

Gold and silver bounced a bit, in their traditional observance of an option expiration in stocks releasing the miners from the grift.

VIX rose sharply.  There is the faltering confidence part.

The Dollar chopped around, but finished unchanged once again.  

The DXY strength is mostly an artifact of the hapless incompetency of European leadership.  

The war in the Mideast is not going to plan.   It never did, despite the bluster and bravado of the Pirates of Perfidy.

We seem to be heading into a very difficult situation, made significantly worse by official corruption, theft and increasingly clumsy deception.

This too shall pass, but not easily.

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 - God May Yet Reign in Our Hearts

 

“It is better to be a child of God than the king of the whole world.”

Virgil Cepari, Vita del Beato Luigi Gonzaga, 1606

"Granted that the easygoing optimism of yesterday is impossible.  Granted that those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face uncomfortable jail terms, painful threats of death; they will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to the nagging feeling that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden, and the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life.  Granted that we face a world crisis which leaves us standing so often amid the surging murmur of life’s restless sea. But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities.  It can spell either salvation or doom.  In a dark confused world the kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men."

Martin Luther King, Nobel Peace Prize Address, Oslo 11 December 1964

"Above all, don't lie to yourself.  The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.  And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continually lying to other men and to himself.

The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than any one.  You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn't it?  A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill—he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vengefulness."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880

“You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, or play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind.  Your cravings for 'justice,' 'love,' or 'peace' can all too easily become a mask for personal vanity."

Dag Hammarskjöld, Nobel Peace Prize (posthumous) 1961

“Now he had learnt to see the great, the eternal, the infinite in everything; and therefore – to see it and revel in its contemplation – he naturally threw away the telescope through which he had hitherto been gazing over men’s heads, and joyfully feasted his eyes on the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable and infinite life around him.  

And the closer he looked, the more tranquil and happier he was.  The awful question that had shattered all his mental edifices in the past – the question: Why? What for? – no longer existed for him.”

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book 3, Part 4, Chapter 12, 1867

“Come to me, all you who are weary and overburdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Matthew 11:28-30

Stocks fell today, ahead of the stock option expiration tomorrow.

The Dollar edged a little higher.

Gold and silver were hammered, in the traditional pre-expiration action.

VIX rose.

Trump speaks on national TV tonight.  

Here is a surprising bit of news.

Trump Media to sell 'faster millisecond access' branded 'Truth API' to Trump's Truth Social posts starting August 1, letting traders, hedge funds, and high-frequency trading firms pay for real-time millisecond access to Trump's Truth Social posts where he often breaks government news that can move markets.

Brazenly selling privileged access to government information for the purposes of trading the financial markets?   I still find this hard to believe.

 Risks are abounding.

Let's see how we go into the weekend.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Among the People of the Lie

 

"Pride is the beginning of all sin. Every sin is a contempt of God, and every contempt of God is pride. It is pride which brought down the angel into devil. It is the origin of sin when with malice and envy the devil pursued man, who was yet standing in his natural innocence. It subverted him in the same way in which he himself fell. For the serpent sought for the door of pride through which to enter when he said, 'You shall be as gods.'"

Augustine of Hippo, On Nature and Grace, 415 AD

"Evil is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life. When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder.  Evil is that which kills spirit.  

The evil deny the painful awareness of their sin, inadequacy, and imperfection by casting their pain onto others through projection and scapegoating.  They themselves may not suffer, but those around them do.  Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it.

Malignant narcissism is characterized by an unsubmitted will.  All adults who are mentally healthy submit themselves one way or another to something higher than themselves, be it God or truth or love or some other ideal. They believe in what is true rather than what they would like to be true. 

To a greater or lesser degree, all mentally healthy individuals submit themselves to the demands of their own conscience. Not so the evil, however.  In the conflict between their guilt and their will, it is the guilt that must go and the will that must win.

This willful failure of submission that characterizes malignant narcissism is depicted in both the stories of Satan and of Cain and Abel. Satan refused to submit to God's judgment.  For Satan to have accepted God's judgment, he would have had to accept his own imperfection. This he could not or would not do. It was unthinkable that he was imperfect. Consequently submission was impossible and both the rebellion and fall inevitable.

It is no accident that Church authorities have generally considered pride first among the sins. By the sin of pride they do not generally mean the sense of legitimate achievement one might enjoy after a job well done. What is meant is rather a kind of pride that unrealistically denies our inherent sinfulness and imperfection — a kind of overweening pride or arrogance that prompts people to reject and even attack the judgment implied by the evidence of their own inadequacy.

The fact of the matter is that some of us are very good and some of us very evil, and most of us are somewhere in between.  We might therefore think of human good and evil as a kind of continuum.  As individuals we can move ourselves one way or another along the continuum.  Just as there is a tendency for the rich to get richer, however, and the poor to get poorer, so there seems to be a tendency for the good to get better and the bad to get worse.  Erich Fromm spoke of these matters at some length:

"The longer we continue to make the wrong decisions, the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decision, the more our heart softens—or better perhaps, comes alive.  Most people fail  because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide.  With each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for them to admit that they are on the wrong road."   Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good or Evil

As a result of their refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness, the evil ones become uncorrectable grab bags of sin. They are, in my experience, remarkably greedy people. All sins betray — and isolate us from — both the divine and our fellow creatures.

It is almost common knowledge that the best way to cement group cohesiveness is to ferment the group's hatred of an external enemy.  Deficiencies within the group can be easily and painlessly overlooked by focusing attention on the deficiencies or 'sins' of the out-group.  

Evil individuals will flee self-examination and guilt by blaming and attempting to destroy whatever or whoever highlights their deficiencies. Group leaders in all places and ages have therefore routinely bolstered group cohesiveness in times of failure by whipping the group's hatred for foreigners or 'the enemy.'

Since the evil, deep down, feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will invariably perceive the conflict as the world's fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil; on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others.

We are all in combat against evil.  In the heat of the fray it is tempting to take hold of some seemingly simple solution—such as 'what we ought to do is just bomb the hell out of those people.'  But we run up against the old problem that the end does not justify the means.  If we kill those who are evil, we will become evil ourselves; we will be killers.  If we attempt to deal with evil by destroying it, we will also end up destroying ourselves, spiritually if not physically.

Evil people feel themselves to be perfect. At the same time, however, I think they have an unacknowledged sense of their own evil nature.  It is this very sense from which they are frantically trying to flee. The essential component of evil is not the absence of a sense of sin or imperfection but the unwillingness to tolerate that sense.  At one and the same time, the evil are aware of their evil and desperately trying to avoid the awareness.

Utterly dedicated to preserving their self-image of perfection, those I call 'evil' are unceasingly engaged in the effort to maintain the appearance of moral purity. While they seem to lack any motivation to be good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their goodness is all on a level of pretense.  It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are 'the people of the lie.'"

M. Scott Peck, The People of the Lie, 1983

“When pride comes, then comes disgrace. But with disgrace comes humility, and with humility comes wisdom. The humility of the righteous will guide them, but the deceitfulness of the proud will destroy them."

Proverbs 11:2-3

Trump tried to promote some news about Iran desperately seeking ceasefire talks again today, but most normal people just saw it for what it was.  

In addition to their usual dismissal of this sort of whopper, Iran also came out with a funny statement, saying that they estimate that Trump et al. have made billions of dollars in manipulating markets, and would like to have a cut of the profits.

Sorry guys.  You have to go along with the grift to get paid.   

The Dollar fell.

Bitcoin bounced a little, but is still in its trading range.

VIX fell of course.   There is no risk when you are the masters of the world.

Gold gained a little, with its biggest gain early in the day.

Silver was hit fairly hard but managed to gain back much of its losses.

Did I mention that there is an option expiration on Friday?

Even in time of war, the pampered elite are fully capable of multi-dimensional profiteering.

It's how they maintain their privileged lifestyles and standards.

'Quote sites' on the internet and ChatGPT are abundant sources of red herrings about quotations, many of which are self-referential and utterly spurious.  It takes patience and a willingness to look for the originals and search them to find out what it real and what is not.

It is very much like making sense of the 'news' about the economy and the markets these days, with plenty of spurious nonsense being put out by the financial spokesmodels and ChatDJT.

And after the bell, Argentina 2 - England 1. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Life of an Existential Void

 

“He speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”

Marcus Tullii Ciceronis, Orationum Pars I, Venice, 1554

"But God said to the worldly man, ‘You fool, this very night your life will be demanded of you, and the things which you have prepared, to whom will they belong?’ Thus will it be for all who store up worldly instruments for themselves, but are not rich in the things that matter to God.”

Luke 12:20-21

"It’s not just America. The whole world has sort of turned muddy. By and large, the world is increasingly run by ignoramuses, wackos and psychotics. This was long before Donald Trump. But we’ve got more crazy people running the world now than ever. Do you really want me to try and make you feel better? Because I want you to make me feel better. This is where we are. It is incredibly messy. If I were the Democrats I would stop worrying about Donald Trump and start talking to the American people about jobs and health care.  I think it’s inevitable that you don’t get truth-tellers. I want the American people to stop believing everything they hear and to ask more questions, to become more skeptical."

Chauncey Devega, Interview with Seymour Hersh, Salon, July 23, 2019

"Having fallen from the eternal, the evil one's desires are endless, insatiable. Having fallen from pure Being, he is driven by the desire to possess, to fill his emptiness. But the problem is insoluble, always. He is compelled to have and to hold, to possess and consume, and nothing else. All he takes, he destroys. He can create nothing, because he has no being. Therefore he can only copy, distort, or steal. His greatest masterpiece is a flawless counterfeit of reality, a mirage designed to make us believe that the void is full, and that death is life."

Denis de Rougemont, La Part du Diable, 1942

"Listen then to what the parable of the sower means. When anyone hears the good news and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in their heart. This is the seed sown along the path. The seed falling on rocky ground refers to someone who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since they have no firm roots, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.’

Matthew 13:18-22

The Consumer Price Index data came in 'better than expected' this morning.   They were particularly irrelevant, even given their dubious authenticity, because of the recent spikes in the price of oil which it does not even begin to capture.

So stocks bounced, the Dollar eased.

Gold and silver rallied back, Bitcoin bounced.

VIX of course fell.

There will be an option expiration on Friday.

I think the pricing discovery mechanics of the US risk markets is broken.

Nothing too surprising if you believe that we are in a late stage asset bubble.

The conflict in the Persian Gulf is intensifying.  The Ukraine is as well.

What's odd is that most of the involved parties are attempting to avoid climbing the escalation ladder, with a few notable exceptions from those who it appears are on the losing end of things at least for now.

How long can this be sustained? 

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

Have a pleasant evening.