Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Servants of Blood and Power

 

"It would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse."

William Dodd, US Ambassador to Germany, Speech in Berlin, October 5, 1933

"Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's need to think. I may have made an error in judgement — but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up to leader of a people of almost 80 million. His success alone proved that I should subordinate myself to him."

Adolph Eichmann, quoted by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 1977

“The last moments before damnation are not often so dramatic. Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him. But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself. Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy, seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction. 

With eyes wide open, seeing that the endless terror is just about to begin and yet, for the moment, unable to feel terrified, he watches passively, not moving a finger for his own rescue, while the last links with joy and reason are severed, and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul.”

C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945


Do not be overly concerned about the coming of the beast.

The beast may yet come or not in time, but his servants are already here, aggressively doing his will in their lust for money and power. 

And they are offering prominent seats at a banquet of everlasting suffering and death. 

Stocks rebounded today, although they faded markedly into the close.

Antics for the stock option expiration.

Risks remain mispriced, and the underpinnings of the risk markets are ephemeral. 

Gold and silver were smacked around into the close. 

This is not the normal action of efficient markets.   

The markets reflect the current power elite of the US, which is unprincipled, unstable, and predatory.

So take this into account as you make your short term investment decisions.  Or better yet, don't make them, and take a longer term horizon.

The most important thing is that, when the time of reckoning comes, that you will not be found standing with them.

So let's see what the next, holiday-shortened week, will bring.

I remain defensive, since there are so many potential exogenous events looming on the horizon, and how capricious in their decisions that the powerful have become. 

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 - Tacitus & Company

 

"Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.”

Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book XI, Chapter 26, AD 166

“But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the fire was on imperial order.   Consequently, to get rid of the rumor, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the people.

Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, checked for the moment, broke out again not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.”

Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, Book XV, Chapter 44, AD 116

"The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well. Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them. Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Plunder, rape, and murder they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus, Agricola, AD 98

"Julius Martialis was the officer of the day in the camp.  Terrified by the enormity of the sudden crime, ignorant of the extent to which the camp was disloyal, and fearing death if he opposed, he made the majority suspect him of complicity.  All the rest of the tribunes also and the centurions preferred present safety to a doubtful but honourable course.  And such was the attitude of their minds that the foulest of crimes was dared by a few, desired by more, and acquiesced in by all."

Tacitus, Histories: The Rise of Otho, Book I, Chapter 28

"You have people in power that just don't understand reality. They're delusional, whether it's their own arrogance, whether it's their vain glory, their simple-minded understanding of the world, their greed, whatever it is. They are continuing to pursue a ruinous policy that day by day gets much worse."

Matt Hoh, Judging Freedom, October 28, 2025

"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

Stock futures did a moonshot after hours last night, off the better than expected profit news from Nvidia.

Earlier in the day I cautioned on X that Nvidia's 'good news' was going to get seriously reconsidered after the announcement because of some accounting gimmicks.

I stepped in after the market close last night and shorted the Nvidia rocket hard across the board. Added more this morning and then took a nap. And here we are. 

Healthy markets do not move in bipolar swings like this. This is late stage bubble action. We are on the edge.

Stocks went out on lows into the close.

Silver gave up some ground in sympathy with stocks, and gold held steady.

VIX shot up higher.

The Dollar chopped around and closed exactly where it had been last night.

Bitcoin continues to get sold, and is on the kind of support I call the threshold of the House of Pain.

The cascade effect, whether it be margin calls or rules based selling, is the poisoned chalice of bubble tops.

Tomorrow's market action on the stock market option expiration is important.  And we need to see how the markets go into the weekend, and the character of their action on Monday. 

The classic sequence to watch for is Bad Friday, Blue Monday, and then a Black Tuesday. 

But all crashes are always long odds, and multi-week events. 

Greed kills, and FOMO kills absolutely. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - To Those Who Are Not, in the Rigorous Sense, Damned

 

"A crowd of many thousands had gathered, so that they were jostling against one another.  Jesus began to speak first to his disciples, saying: ‘Beware the leaven of the Pharisees, which is their hypocrisy.  There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be made known.  What has been said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what has been whispered in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the rooftops.

‘I tell you my brothers, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more.  But rather you should fear him who, after your body has been killed, has the authority to cast you into hell.   Amen, I tell you, fear his judgement."

Luke 12:1-6

"Those among the comfortably rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand the emptiness of poverty, because they are empty themselves, after a fashion; but they cannot understand true impoverishment.  Capable of giving alms, perhaps, but incapable of stripping themselves bare, the comfortable will be moved to the sound of beautiful music, at the thought of Jesus’s sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will horrify them.  They want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, and hanging from a beautiful woman’s throat."

Léon Bloy

"They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control. They will be cruel and hate what is good.  They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God.  They will act religious, but they will refuse the grace that could make them righteous."

2 Timothy 3:3-5

"In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God.  Thereafter, any attack even on the least of men is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all.  Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1937


Just charts tonight.

The market is perched on the edge of the abyss.

How can those who have come before us see how compliant we are now, as the high principles and freedoms for which they fought and died are trampled carelessly into the dirt.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Led Down a Blind Alley and Strangled

 

"Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity."

John Dalberg Lord Acton, Letter to Richard Simpson, 23 January 1861

"Banking and corporations have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society.  They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labour, entrepreneur-management skills and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production.  

The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they control: capital.  Thus capital intensification has destroyed food, manufacturing, farming and communities.  All these processes result in the instability and disorder we see around everyday."

Carroll Quigley, The Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Georgetown University 1978

"Over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance."

Hyman Minsky, The Financial Instability Hypothesis, May 1992

“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability."

Arundhati Roy, War Talk, 2003

“Blood and power intoxicate; they help to develop callousness and debauchery. The mind then becomes capable of the most abnormal cruelty, which it regards pleasure; the man and the citizen are swallowed up in the tyrant; and the return to human dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the House of the Dead, 1862

"You shall not offer your children as a sacrifice to the fires of Moloch, and profane the name of your Lord."

Leviticus 18:21


Stocks continued to wobble today, stabilizing a bit into the last hour but still finishing in the red.

VIX rose but then backed off a bit. 

The Dollar chopped sideways.

Gold and silver were smacked around as usual.

It is well to remember that the most important precious metals option expiration on the Comex for this year will be on Monday, the 24^th.  

These are not regulated markets.   There are levels of lawlessness being tolerated because it benefits a rich and powerful few, the public and the health of the economy be damned. 

And this is why the Congress and White House continue to twist themselves into knots to cover up and hide the sexual, political, and financial corruption of the Epstein scandal. 

And how, over time, we have come to tolerate war crimes including genocide, and extra-judicial murder.  We are truly exceptional. 

“So much for Caligula the Emperor.  The rest of this history must deal with the Monster."
  Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars

Have a pleasant evening.