Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - My Soul Is Sorrowful, Even Unto Death

"Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament.  He has wished to ‘be himself,’ and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted.  To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."

C. S. Lewis

"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

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.  Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.  Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening.  Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.  As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers, with approving smiles."

Simone Weil

"Leur aveuglement est le châtiment du crime d'idolâtrie.” (Their blindness is the punishment for their Idolatry.)

Simone Weil, L'enracinement 1943


Today was a fairly uneventful option expiration on the Comex today.   Gold rallied and even silver got into the act.

Tomorrow will be an FOMC day. 

The VIX fell and stocks rallied.

Sans souci. 

Brace for impact.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Heart of the Gospel

 

"You shall not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you too were foreigners in the land of Egypt.

You shall not take advantage of the widow or the orphan.  If you mistreat them and they cry out to me for help, I will surely hear their cry.  And my just fury will burn, and descend upon you like a sword. Your wives will be widows and your children will be orphans.

If you lend money to any of the poor among my people, you will not act as a creditor toward him nor will you take any interest.  If you take your neighbor’s mantle as a pledge, you shall restore it to him at sunset, for it is his covering.  It is the cloak for his body.  What else would cover him when he sleeps?  Otherwise, when he cries out to me, I will listen to his cry, for I am merciful and compassionate."

Exodus 22:20-26

"When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together and one of them, a scholar of the law, sought to test him by asking, 'Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?'  And Jesus said, 'You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

The whole of the law and the prophets stands upon these two commandments.'”

Matthew 22:34-40

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the damnation prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’

Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’ He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’ And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Matthew 25:31-46

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven."

Matthew 7:21


The priority of the good news is remarkably clear and easy to remember.

People put forward a great deal of effort to confuse and disregard it.

But at the end of the day, there it is, in supreme simplicity. 

There is a minor precious metals futures market option expiration tomorrow. 

The big contract is now December.

Today was a typical Monday, with rumors of peace deals on Sunday driving stock futures higher and oil prices lower.

I think there will be an important election in Israel tomorrow.   Some of this play-acting may have been in support of that.

Macro events will continue to drive the markets and to a significant extent the economy until there is a resolution.

Donnie has his own important midterm elevations coming up shortly. 

Keep an eye on events in the Middle East and the Ukraine.   

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Vulgar Acolytes of Lawlessness

 

"There can no longer, except for reasons of game-playing or more deliberate intellectual evasion, be any separation by economists between economics and politics.  When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state, power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in form and degree but not in kind from the state itself.  To hold otherwise—to deny the political character of the modern corporation—is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality.

The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error.  The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise.  Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of an arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he is, or will be, governed."

John Kenneth Galbraith, Power and the Useful Economist, March 1973

"The Roman politician and philosopher Cicero once said: ‘Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.'

Economics is a political argument.  It is not — and can never be — a science; there are no objective truths in economics that can be established independently of political, and frequently moral, judgements.  Therefore, when faced with an economic argument, you must ask the age-old question cui bono, who benefits?  Ninety-five per cent of economics is common sense — made to look difficult, with the use of jargon and mathematics.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter emphasized that all analysis in economics is preceded by a pre-analytical cognitive act, called vision, in which the analyst ‘visualises a distinct set of coherent phenomena as a worth-while object of his analytic efforts’. He pointed out that ‘this vision is ideological almost by definition’, as ‘the way in which we see things can hardly be distinguished from the way in which we wish to see them’.

The free market doesn't exist.  Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict the freedom of choice.  A market looks free only because we so totally accept the regulations and underlying restrictions that are propping them up that they become invisible.  How 'free' a market is cannot be objectively defined.  It is a political definition.  There is a human tendency to be seduced by a theory that supposedly explains everything.

Markets do weed out inefficient practices, but only when no one has sufficient power to manipulate them.

Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich as what they are — a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.  

 Since the 1980s, we have given the rich a bigger slice of our pie in the belief that they would create more wealth, making the pie bigger than otherwise possible in the long run. The rich got the bigger slice of the pie all right, but they have actually reduced the pace at which the pie is growing.  The best way to boost the economy is to redistribute wealth downward, as poorer people tend to spend a higher proportion of their income.

The widely accepted assertion that, only if you let markets be will everyone be paid correctly and thus fairly, according to his worth, is a myth.  Only when we part with this myth and grasp the political nature of the market and the collective nature of individual productivity will we be able to build a more just society in which historical legacies and collective actions, and not just individual talents and efforts, are properly taken into account in deciding how to reward people.

Why do we need to make the rich richer to make them work harder, but make the poor poorer for the same purpose?

When some people have to run a 100 metre race with sandbags on their legs, the fact that no one is allowed to have a head start does not make the race fair.  Equality of opportunity is absolutely necessary but not sufficient in building a genuinely fair and efficient society.

We need to design an economic system that, while acknowledging that people are often selfish, exploits other human motives to the full and gets the best out of people.  The likelihood is that, if we assume the worst about people, we will get the worst out of them."

Ha Joon Chang, Economics and the Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Economics and financial reporting can become just another facet of the long con in a highly artificial speculative bubble.

It serves the purposes of the power elite and their acolytes. 

We will have an option expiration for the Comex precious metals futures on Tuesday, the 27th.

Oil was spiking on widespread rumors of a military confrontation in the Middle East this weekend.

An election very important for Netanyahu is coming up in Israel.   

Trump is sweating the midterm elections.

Stocks are on the edge.

Gold and silver and Bitcoin have been beaten down.

VIX is elevating.

Let's see what actually happens.

The last resorts of scoundrels is the fog of war. 

Have a pleasant weekend. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - 'We Sit Down In Tears'

 

March 1938, Anschluss

And now, Austria.

We have seen it coming for weeks.  Naturally, we sensed what it all meant, these threats and staged riots ... the whole shabby performance designed to provide an excuse for intervention.  And now tank and artillery columns are rolling down every street, under the command of agitated young SS men, and in my village, exactly as though this were a battle of life and death, the half- grown louts in the Hitler Youth are playing at being heroes, and volunteering for the Army as though the enemy was a European Great Power, and not a tiny nation of seven million inhabitants.

Swarms of Berlin League of German Maidens girls have been directed here for the moment, and they wave ecstatically at the tank columns rattling through the old streets. In the next issue of the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung they will be pictured as ‘Local Inhabitants, Who Greeted Their German Liberators with Wild Ovations’.... We know all about the talent for stagecraft of Goebbels, the limping haberdashery salesman.

The frightening and incredible thing is that these Prussian officers, bearers of great and famous names, have no conception of the degraded roles they have been led to play here.  It is this erasure of a feeling of honour, this ethical defect, this godless denial that boundaries exist between right and wrong that forces me to believe in a final and ignominious depth of the German spirit.

The bordering countries watched this miserable rape of a little nation, and shrugged their shoulders. Nobody is moving to stop this before it is too late.  It almost seems that they prefer to stand back and wait until the cobra breaks out.

But I foresee a day when the nations will regret their cowardly passivity.  The cost is beyond measuring; but they will have to pay, someday.  In this first great breach of the peace, the criminal has been let go unpunished and is thus made to appear more powerful than he is.  And as he is made more powerful, we, who are his last opponents inside Germany, are made weaker and more impotent.

If five years ago, at the time of the so-called Assumption of Power, the European nations had taken action — everything would have ended with a police raid, with the gang being hustled off to jail by the collars.  But what did everyone do? They stood by and watched, and thus made impossible any resistance from inside Germany.  What are they doing now? They are standing by and watching, preoccupied with figuring out a way to avoid irritating Herr Hitler - and so making any resistance even more impossible.

There will come a day when you will come face to face with this reproach, and this accusation.

As I write, an immense flight of bombers is droning past over- head. For a whole hour the drone has gone on above, as though these planes were flying against a world power.  I know that this land is the living, beating heart of the world.  I will go on believing in this heartbeat, despite all the covering layers of blood and dirt.  But I know also that the thing up there that rumbles and thunders is the denial of right and justice, of truth and faith and everything that makes life worth living. I believe that this is a caricature of Germany, smeared by a malignant ape escaped from the leash.

You, up there: I hate you waking and sleeping.  I will hate and curse you in the hour of my death.  I will hate and curse you from my grave, and it will be your children and your children’s children who will have to bear my curse.  I have no other weapon against you but this curse, I know that it withers the heart of him who utters it, I do not know if I will survive your downfall.

But this I know, that a man must hate this Germany with all his heart if he really loves it. I would ten times rather die than see you triumph.

Writing this, I shrink inside myself. Soon it will be Easter, and as though in derision the final chorus of the St Matthew Passion rings out from the radio at just this moment - ‘ Wir setzen uns in Tranen nieder ...’

Germany, my Germany ... yes, this chorus, once this spoke for us.

Now, still, overhead, these white savages steer their moronic automatons, flying toward brutality and crime, drowning out the peaceful stillness of this spring day.  I am crying.  But it is more out of fury and shame than out of sadness.

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair, 1947


It is almost eerie how the words of Reck-Malleczewen from 1930's Germany resonate with us today.

Have you noticed the ongoing theme of this site, for the past 10 years or so?  

History moves in recurrent waves. 

Trump and crew are frontrunning their own news-making decisions and opportunities.

This include a Wall Street contingent of Bessent and Kushner cronies.

So the wild swings will continue until political reality, both domestic and international, forces some sort of resolution.

Gold and silver were utterly hammered today, a bit ahead of the Comex futures options expiration on Tuesday the 27th.

Oil was hit hard yesterday, and rallied on the war news today.

Wax on, wax off.

Still time to stock up.   Trust nothing that comes from the fog of war.

Have a pleasant evening.