Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Gates of Hell Are Terrible to Behold

 

"And he exhorted them with many words and argument saying, 'Save yourselves from this perverse and wicked generation.'"

Acts 2:40

"We are coming apart as a society, and inequality is right at the core of that. When the 90 percent are getting worse off and they’re trying to figure out what happened, they’re not people like me who get to spend four or five hours a day studying these things and then writing about them — they’re people who have to make a living and get through life. And they’re going to be swayed by demagogues and filled with fear about the other, rather than bringing us together.

I think it would be easy for someone to arrive in the near future and really create forces that would lead to trouble in this country.  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

They will not see. They will not listen. Blindly they follow their seducers into ruin."

The White Rose, Fifth Leaflet, Munich 1943

"The Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true. He is not an agent, but merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as a symptom.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles."

Hillaire Belloc, This That and the Other, 1912

“The narcissist devours people, consumes their output, and casts the empty, writhing shells aside."

Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self Love, 1999

"No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge customers, shortchange workers and erect barriers to fair play.  A big reason is that so little of the news, which informs us about the world around us, addresses the private, government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward.

All this was done under the guise of 'deregulation,' but the harsh truth is that there’s really no such thing.  Everything has rules.  Deregulation is just a disingenuous name for new regulation, too often under rules that favor corporations over their customers.”

David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print, November 2011

"The gates of Hell are terrible to behold, are they not? The lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making. If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves."

E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World, 2008

"War is a super-human force that will make an agent of those who foolishly and recklessly believe in their own agency. 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."

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

It was a day for optimistic bounces, as the CPI data came in this morning behind.  

And at least for today the disaster that is looming in the Middle East can be forgotten.

Stocks bounced.

Gold and silver bounced.

The Dollar crept just a little higher to sink its fingernails in the 100 handle.

Bitcoin dropped a bit again.

SpaceX continues its recent rally off the low.  They are reloading after the most recent wash and rinse.

The current market is based on a howler of a new era tech story that ranks right up there with the best of them.  

Even the gerbils they were shooting out of cannons in 2007 had more gravitas and credibility than the numbers which the AI companies and their spokesmodels are shooting at the wall.

Typically on Wall Street the only guys who make money in tech bubble are the suppliers of the picks and shovels, and then even they are eventually pulled under when it all comes crashing back to earth.

But, by all mean, let us blind ourselves in the finest tradition of crash and burn business models.

Until someone roots the moral hazard out of the markets, they will keep coming back for more.

Stock up.  Stack up. 

Run. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Here Ends My Previous Existence

 

"Very few people ever state properly the strong argument in favour of marrying for love or against marrying for money.  The argument is not that all lovers are heroes and heroines, nor is it that all dukes are profligates or all millionaires cads.  The argument is this, that the differences between a man and a woman are at the best so obstinate and exasperating that they practically cannot be got over unless there is an atmosphere of exaggerated tenderness and mutual interest.

To put the matter in one metaphor, the sexes are two stubborn pieces of iron; if they are to be welded together, it must be while they are red-hot.  Every woman has to find out that her husband is a selfish beast, because every man is a selfish beast by the standard of a woman.  But let her find out the beast while they are both still in the story of 'Beauty and the Beast.' 

Every man has to find out that his wife is cross—that is to say, sensitive to the point of madness: for every woman is mad by the masculine standard.  But let him find out that she is mad while her madness is more worth considering than anyone else's sanity."

G. K. Chesterton, The Common Man, 1950

"The first time he spent an evening at the Bloggs there was no one there. That is to say there was a worn but fiery little lady in a grey dress who didn’t approve of ‘catastrophic solutions of social problems.’  That, he understood, was Mrs. Blogg.  But the second time he went there he was plumped down on a sofa beside a being of whom he had a vague impression that brown hair grew at intervals all down her like a caterpillar.

Once in the course of conversation she looked straight at him and he said to himself as plainly as if he had read it in a book: 'If I had anything to do with this girl I should go on my knees to her: if I spoke with her she would never deceive me: if I depended on her she would never deny me: if I loved her she would never play with me: if I trusted her she would never go back on me: if I remembered her she would never forget me.'

There are four lamps of thanksgiving always before him.  The first is for his creation out of the same earth with such a woman as you.  The second is that he has not, with all his faults, ‘gone after strange women.’  You cannot think how a man’s self restraint is rewarded in this.  The third is that he has tried to love everything alive: a dim preparation for loving you.  And the fourth is – but no words can express that. 

Here ends my previous existence.  Take it: it led me to you.”

G. K. Chesterton, Marriage Proposal, Letter to his fiance Frances Blogg, 1899

 

Stocks had the wobbles today as Iran is trolling the Don and making it clear that an easy deal on Hormuz is no longer within his grasp.

The Dollar chopped around and finished unchanged.

Bitcoin gave up a bit.

Gold and silver were off.

VIX got over some of its jitters from yesterday.

Oil crept up a bit.  At some point I suspect it is going to become quite energetic to the upside.

I had to take a trip into New York today to collect the visa for a trip I hope to take at later this year or the next.   

The Chinese consulate is very efficient and easy to do business with.  And it is in a neighborhood convenient to the Lincoln Tunnel.  

Let's see how the geopolitical situation progresses.  Yeah we have some economic data like CPI and PPI coming out, but the big story moving the markets is oil and its enterprise wide impact.

Nvidia announced a huge debt sale of $500 billion to raise the money for their vendor financing arrangements.

I don't want to sound snippy but this is 1999 all over again.

Vendor financing can be legit.   But it also start looking like a Ponzi scheme.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Gathering of Vultures

 

"And Jesus said, 'Where death is, there a gathering of vultures will be.'”

Luke 17:37

"We need these parables to remind us how dangerous it is to speak the truth generally, and the Christian truth in particular: I mean dangerous for the one who speaks it.  Kierkegaard never stopped repeating this in all his works: if you want to be Christians, well and good, but know the price.  For nineteen centuries that price has been fixed.

The Devil’s first trick, remarks Andre Gide, is to make us believe that he does not exist. This trick has never better succeeded than in the modern epoch. All America has fallen into the snare. Kierkegaard alone had perhaps recognized the Devil with accuracy in the ink of the newspapers, when he noted that one cannot preach Christianity any longer in a world dominated by the daily press. 

The dazzling and consuming act of pride that transformed the angel of light into an angel and prince of darkness condemned him to an insatiable, and therefore desperate, need to acquire. The loss of the wellspring of life gives rise to an essentially inextinguishable thirst. The entire world can not fill the emptiness which the awareness of having left their rightful place in the world forms in the heart of a creature.

Having fallen from the eternal, Satan's desires are endless and insatiable. Having fallen from pure Being, he seeks to possess. But the problem is forever insoluble. For in order to have and possess, it would be necessary to have life, to Be, and he is connected to life no longer. All he takes into himself he destroys.

And to be sure, he can have it, since he is called Prince of this World in Scripture— but he will never have anything but the things of this world. He will never regain Heaven, which is properly the soul of this world, and the essence of existence. He knows this full well. This is why his desire and his rabid jealousy fasten on our individual souls. He prowls around like a roaring lion in quest of his prey, says the Bible. He prowls around us, like a criminal, obsessed by kidnapping. But his victories will always be sterile.

One does not become a father by stealing a child. One can steal the child, but not the paternity. One can steal power, but not authority. Satan can steal this world, but not its divine essence. And yet we humans can lose all of these things, which are our heritage as children of God. It is the Devil's only chance. He does not intend to miss it.

The France of 1939 was on the whole democratic, and almost every Frenchman sincerely called himself anti-Nazi, and believed himself proof against this kind of temptation. He had his good conscience as a democrat. Hitler came, France capitulated, and today the 'anti-fascist intellectuals' of Paris suddenly discover that at bottom Nazism is not so bad as all that, that, on the whole, they had always desired something passably resembling it, and that after all, 'the Nazis are men like us, so let us work together.'

That is the danger that American democracy is exposed to, as were the others.  She too believed and still believes that the Nazis are animals of an altogether different race from Americans.  She too risks discovering some day that 'after all, they are men like us.' And it is quite true that they are men like us, in the sense that their sin is also in us, secretly.

It seems to me that the clearest lesson which emerges from European events is this: The sentimental hatred of the evil that is in others may blind one to the evil that one bears in himself and to the gravity of evil in general.  The overly facile condemnation of the wicked man on the opposite side may conceal and favor much inward complaisance toward that very wickedness.  

I suspect a profound ambivalence in certain democratic denunciations of Hitlerism, for in the violence of the tone and the obstinate simplicity of the judgments, we betray our bad conscience, our secret anxiety, our unacknowledged temptation.  In regard to anti-fascists who wish only to be anti, I cannot help thinking that sooner or later the pro which slumbers in a corner of their soul will suddenly awaken and overwhelm them.

I believe that I know whereof I speak when I say to honest democrats: Look at the Devil that is among us! Stop believing that he can only resemble Hitler, or Stalin, for it is you yourself that he will always contrive to resemble the most.  If you want to catch him, I am going to tell you where you will most surely find him—seated in your own armchair.  It is in you alone that you will catch him in the very act.  And then only will you be in a state to track him down in others.  And then only will you be cured of your almost incredible naiveté before the totalitarian danger and be able to escape hypnosis. 

We were lacking a modern picture of the Demon.  We had therefore stopped believing in him. Then we imagined that the Devil was Hitler.  And the Devil rejoiced.  It would be more fruitful, more realistic, and finally more truthful, to try picturing the Devil to ourselves as having the features of a dynamic and optimistic playboy, lacking all thought.  Or, if we are liberal intellectuals for example, as having the features of a liberal intellectual who does not believe in the Devil."

Denis de Rougemont, La Part du Diable, Switzerland, 1944
 

Stocks failed to rally today, despite some weekend prompting by Messrs. Bessent and Trump.

I think Iran dropping a missile on a wayward tankard this morning punctuated their statements about who is begging for what deal.

Stocks were under some pressure, but not much compared to the headwinds the economy is clearly facing in the not too distant future.

Oil popped higher as one might have expected.  Once demand hits the wall of physical supply at price we may see some energetic action.

VIX rose very little, in keeping with the current complacency among the West's power elite.

Iran decided to troll the Don and his crew in a news release today. 

"Iran has completely ruled out any future negotiations with the Trump administration, declaring it will wait out Donald Trump's term until January 20, 2029, per Iranian outlets and Ghalibaf advisor's post."

The Dollar ticked a little higher, but really in a more consistent sideways chop which is more apparent on the longer term chart.

Gold and silver both bolted higher, continuing to take out the artificial suppression which the Street put upon them for 'technical reasons' of fairly blatant price manipulation. 

“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it gathers to itself such explosive power that on the day it bursts it will blow up everything in its way."    Émile François Zola

There will be a lot more of these eruptions of the obvious going around over the next six months. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - So Shall They Reap

 

"It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing.  Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one— the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1942 

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists. 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 Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.  Suddenly it all comes to be, all at once.  You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done.  For that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing.  You remember everything now, and your heart breaks.  Too late.  You are compromised beyond repair."

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, 1955

"Anyone can be misled by a clever person, and no one likes to readily admit that they have been had.  It is a sign of character and maturity to realize this, and admit your were deceived. But some cannot, even when the facts of the deception are revealed.  The more incorrect that the truth shows them to be, the louder and more strident they become in shouting down and denying reality.  At the extremes, it is no longer about justice, but about the objectification of the individual, the elevation of ideology over truth, and the dehumanisation of 'the other.'"

Jesse, The Economics of Demagogues, 18 June 2012

"One of his heads appeared to have been wounded, but its wound had been healed.  The whole world then became fascinated with the Beast, and gave their allegiance to him.  And they worshiped the serpent, for giving such power to him, as they also worshiped the Beast.  'Who is as great as the Beast?' they shouted. 'And who is able to resist him?'  And the Beast was allowed to speak proud boasts and words offensive to God, and was given authority and power for forty-two months."

Revelation 13:3-5

“We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics. The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address at Madison Square Garden, New York, October 31, 1936

A late selling of oil and buying of stocks came a little ahead of this latest announcement.

"US to lift its blockade on Iran once a deal is announced between Iran and Oman over the Strait of Hormuz, adding that the US expects this deal very soon, a US official tells Reuters. This is another major US concession to Iran, coming after Iran added the lifting of the US naval blockade as one of its 4 new demands earlier this week."

The Dollar declined after the lower than expected Jobs number significantly decreased the probability of a Fed rate hike later this year.

Gold and silver bounced.

SpaceX managed a bounced.   Well done, Elon and punters.

VIX fell as peace descends over the markets.

Bitcoin continued in its trading range doing the crypto cha-cha.

Let's see what new and amazing signs and wonders the rest of August brings.

Have a pleasant weekend.