Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - That City of Pride, Crime, Wickedness, and Lust for Power

 

"Our Lord has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which He looks with compassion on this world, yours are the feet with which He walks to do good. Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world."

Teresa of Avila

“God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken. The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Love endures everything, love is stronger than death, love fears nothing. Help me,  Lord, that my eyes may see all with mercy, so that I may never suspect or judge from appearances, but look deeper for what is good and beautiful in others' souls, and then come to their aid.  Let all my nothingness be drowned in the ocean of your mercy.”

Maria Faustyna Kowalska

"Lost friend, lost child, lost parent, sister, brother, husband, wife, we will not so discard you. You shall hold your cherished places in our Christmas hearts, and by our Christmas fires; and in the season of immortal hope, and on the birthday of immortal mercy, we will shut out nothing."

Charles Dickens, What Christmas Is As We Grow Older, Household Words, 1851

"And Peter understood that neither Nero, nor all his legions, could overcome the living truth — that they could not overwhelm it with tears or blood, and that now its victory was beginning. He understood with equal force why the Lord had turned him back on the road to Rome. That city of pride, of crime, of wickedness, and of a lust for power, was beginning to be His city."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero

Where is Nero now, what remains?   A piece of dirt, perhaps, under the fingernail of a little child, to be wiped away by their loving mother. 

The Dollar attempted to rally, but slipped back off the 98 handle in the closing hour.

Gold and silver continued to rally higher, setting new closing highs.

This has been a remarkable year for the precious metals, as they finally broke free of the bounds of sustained price suppression by the Western governments and their banks, for a variety of self-serving reasons.

I tip my hat for all who stood the long watch, patient while being derided and discouraged by the mouthpieces of the financial establishment, waiting with hope even against sharp reversals and abuses.

We have been proven right.  Enjoy it.  

Remember that this is the time of year for giving and mercy.  Bear in mind the message of Matthew 25.

There are too many suffering needlessly from hunger, and hate, and oppression, and a campaign of hate and greed by the foolish and the damned, unrighteous before the nations gathered by the hand of God. 

This is the time of year when we remember our most wondrous victory,the greatest gift beyond all compare that we have been freely given, in the mystery of the Incarnation of the Son of God.

So do not be discouraged by those who seems formidable to us now.  

They too will fall, and be forgotten.   Sooner than they might even imagine.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Gold and Silver rally to New Highs

 

“Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts, perhaps fear of a loss of power?”

John Steinbeick, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, 1957

"Most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help to create its 'inevitability,' want it in order to shift the locus of their problems."

C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III, 1960

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: power attracts pathological personalities.  It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.  Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse Dune, March 1985

"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

Thomas Clement Douglas, Canadian MP

“It could be argued that we are now in the midst of a coup d’état in slow motion. Democracy is weakening; few people would disagree. Corporatism is strengthening; you only have to look around you. Yet none of us has chosen this route for our society, in spite of which our elites quite happily continue down it. Certainly corporatism is creating a conformist society. It is a modern form of feudalism.”

John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, 1995

"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. 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, April 4, 2016

VIX is now in the very complacent range as noted in the chart below.

Santa Claus staged a little equity rally today.

The Dollar dumped.  

Gold and silver soared higher.

 Impressive performance for the year.  

Silver is a beta monster of volatility.

There will be a gold futures option expiration for the January contract tomorrow. 

We'll get some economic data tomorrow.  

But this should be a fairly quiet week, barring some exogenous event.

The markets will be closed for Christmas on Thursday.

The young man is in China with his bride.  

Daisy and I abide. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Only Love Creates

 

“No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The most deadly poison of our times is indifference. Only love creates."

Maximilian Kolbe, Martyr for Love, Auschwitz, August 14, 1941

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”

Theodore Roosevelt, The Progressive Platform, April 19, 1906

“Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”

Edward Bernays, The New Propaganda,

"We are slow to master the great truth that even now Christ is, as it were, walking among us, and by His hand, or eye, or voice, bidding us to follow Him. We do not understand that His call is a thing that takes place now. We think it took place in the Apostles' days, but we do not believe in it; we do not look for it in our own case.

God's presence is not discerned at the time when it is upon us, but afterwards, when we look back upon what is gone and over. The world seems to go on as usual. There is nothing of heaven in the face of society, in the news of the day. And yet the ever-blessed Spirit of God is there, ten times more glorious, more powerful than when He trod the earth in our flesh."

John Henry Newman

"We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed."

2 Corinthians 4:8-9


We lost power and the internet this afternoon.   A somewhat vigorous line of thunderstorms ripped through the area.

Daisy and I curled up with a book by the fire.   It was certainly no hardship.  We are creatures of leisure.

Silver it must be observed, seems to have no problem putting physical foot to bullion banker behinds these days.

The young man is leaving for China next week, to spend the holidays with his bride who is a well-respected professor at a prestigious university.  Their quest for a spousal green card is failing to gain traction.  This may be for the best, all things considered.  Such are the times.  

But Christmas approaches and the extended family will all be here, with their growing horde of little ones.  They are growing in both size and energy.  Remarkable.

So just the charts for now.

Have a pleasant weekend

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - No Best Case Scenario

 

"The common refrain is that war is a breeding ground of unintended consequences.  It is greater than that.  War is a super-human force that will make an agent of those who foolishly and recklessly believe in their own agency.  That truth will be revealed again in the coming war in Venezuela.

The last two years, I have been affected by the intersection of the biblical Massacre of the Holy Innocents with the genocide in Gaza.  It is the story of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt, their lives as refugees and as strangers in a foreign land, and the persecution of refugees and immigrants in our land today that possesses me this Christmas season."

Matthew Hoh, No Best Case Scenario, December 17, 2025

A third approach, the one dominant among economists and policy pundits, is based on the notion that the rulers of Egypt simply don’t know what is needed to make their country prosperous, and have followed incorrect policies and strategies in the past.  If these rulers would only get the right advice from the right advisers, the thinking goes, prosperity would follow.  To these academics and pundits, the fact that Egypt has been ruled by narrow elites feathering their nests at the expense of society seems irrelevant to understanding the country’s economic problems.

Egypt is poor precisely because it has been ruled by a narrow elite that have organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people.  Political power has been narrowly concentrated, and has been used to create great wealth for those who possess it. The losers have been the Egyptian people, as they only too well understand. Whether it is North Korea, Sierra Leone, or Zimbabwe, we’ll show that poor countries are poor for the same reason that Egypt is poor.

Countries such as Great Britain and the United States became rich because their citizens overthrew the elites who controlled power and created a society where political rights were much more broadly distributed, where the government was accountable and responsive to citizens, and where the great mass of people could take advantage of economic opportunities.

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail, 2012

"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,"

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

"Pride, and a love of self and of power, makes families homeless — and in its rage murders innocents, as it was then and it is now.  The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained recovery."

Jesse, The Holy Innocents, 28 December 2018


We know what is the best case scenario.  We were given it, in some detail, over 2000 years ago.  But it involves the veneration of the light of the Holy Spirit among us — and goodness has its enemies.

Without meaningful reform, freedom will continue to diminish in the encroachment of fraudulent abuse, the financial system will falter with malinvestment, and the general prosperity of the nation will narrow, until it fails.

As a reminder tomorrow is the stock option expiration for December.

I suspect the big drama about Trump's speech last night, based on 'leaks' from supposedly informed government representatives, was pretty much a setup for a wash and rinse.

Stocks popped a bit and then faded into the close a bit.

The economic news on inflation this morning was positive.  Most people positively did not believe them because their discounting of inflated items was there to see.

Gold and silver popped up to new highs overnight, with silver topped $67 for the first time.

But as is customary, the wiseguys sold them in the London-NY trade.

They'll keep playing this scenario until there pools collapses of exhaustion.

VIX fell of course.

The Dollar chopped around in the mid 98 area.

What happened to German soldiers who refused to follow the order to murder innocent civilians and unarmed prisoners?   Sometimes the law prevailed. 

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

Have a pleasant evening.