Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Crushing the Power of the Parasites

 

"Then Jesus was led, by the Spirit, into the wilderness, to be tempted by the devil. After fasting for forty days and forty nights, he hungered.  And the Tempter came to try him."

Mark 4:1-2

This also recalls another passage so familiar that we also do not think of its implications. 'And lead us not into temptation...'

Doesn't it seem odd and out of place that God would lead His own people into harm's way? Isn't temptation a very negative thing that we are told to avoid at all costs?

Temptation is certainly not something we should seek out, given the risks in taking that proposition as our own choice. But if we think instead of temptation as a 'trial' or a preparation for our calling, as in the case of our Lord whose time in the wilderness preceded his public ministry, it is something that can strengthen us, make us stronger in our faith through that trial, that testing, in the practical applications of what we believe.

It is not intended that spiritually we remain an untested bunch of cream puffs, riding to heaven on feather beds, with God attending to all our needs like the staff on a cruise ship.

Like warriors we must train for the contests, but it is in the contest itself that we do most of our learning and growing and extending ourselves to the limits. Such exercises are always marked by pain, in the muscles, and in the core of our being.  We are 'the Church militant' here and only later, one would hope, triumphant at long last.

And it is one of the most sublime ironies of God's economy that the greatest weapon in our battle is not the violence and power of the world, but the service and self-effacement of God's love. As the pilgrim of the absolute Léon Bloy said,

“Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it.”

The power of love and forgiveness is unfathomable and bewildering to the principalities and powers of this world, and the spiritual darkness that rules them. And this then is to be their failure and their demise.

Jesse, Try a Little Tenderness, 20 February 2018

“Pride thinks its own happiness shines the brighter, by comparing it with the misfortunes of other persons; that by displaying its own wealth they may feel their poverty the more sensibly. This infernal serpent, pervading the human heart, keeps people from reforming their lives, holding them back like a parasite.”

Thomas More, Utopia

"And whenever you may stand to prayer, forgive, if you hold anything against any one, so that your Father in the heavens may also forgive you."

Mark 11:25

The markets are grinding slowly against the headwinds of geopolitical risks and an unproductive, extractive economic system in the West.

Gold and silver were hit hard again.

The Dollar DX index which is really the inverse of the euro rose to 103.

If the leadership in the US is ineffective and corrupt, in most of Europe it is tragic. 

Stocks opened lower but held their ground.

Things appear to be heating up in the mideast despite the assurances of 'peace, peace where there is no peace.'

VIX is doing VIX like things.

The conspicuous mispricing of risk in the markets is purposeful, and not some accident, act of God, or inadvertent misapprehension of animal spirits.

It has been cultivated and encouraged by the moral hazard of political and intellectual corruption.

And it will continue, as history shows us, until we very firmly do something to stop it.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Papier-mâché

 

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he said, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ And Jesus said to him, ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ And the lawyer answered, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.’

But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbour?’

"As you know, this passage above is the introduction to one of the greatest and most memorable of the parables from our Lord's own lips, the story of The Good Samaritan.

Our Lord did not offer us an exemption from sin if we call on His name, but forgiveness, if that request is offered in true repentance, a recognition of our faults, and faith, and an active response to His command to 'go and sin no more.'

We are a generation made drunk with power and its illusions, a perverse individualism that has been foretold for increasingly dark times.  Examine your own actions and thoughts and behaviors first.  For you will not be called upon to answer for what others do, but what you yourself has done."

Jesse, To a Power Drunk Generation, the Vista of Eternity, 19 January 2015

"Today idols arise and demand our worship: success at any cost, money, an obsession with appearance, popularity, or the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. Sometimes, in order to win the approval of others, we may go so far as to lie, betray, or humiliate someone on social media.  Do not bow down before anything that cannot give you life. And if you have ever fallen, get back up.  Do not allow anything or anyone to take away the freedom God has given you.

Christ loves us as we are, but His love is too great to leave us prisoners of sin, of what destroys us.  The fire He came to bring has the power to break our chains and restore our freedom to love.  There are wounds to be healed, failings to be acknowledged, and, whenever possible, wrongs to be made right.  Allow Christ to transform you"

Pope Leo XIV, Address from Argentina, 10 November 2026

“Then the rich man said, ‘I beg you, Father Abraham, send Lazarus to my father’s house. For I have five brothers for him to warn, so that they also will not come to this place of desolation and torment.’ But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets. Let them listen to them.’

But the rich man again said, ‘No, Father Abraham, but if someone from the dead comes back and speaks to them, they will repent.’ And Abraham said, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, neither will they listen if someone warns them who has risen from the dead.’”

Luke 16:27-31 

I see dead people.  Walking around like regular people.  They don't see each other.  They only see what they want to see.  They don't know they're dead.

Stocks rallied with a hard push from the powerful again, attempting to breathe a semblance of vitality back into the bubble economy.

Gold and oil were once again being capped.  Those who cherish illusions find their physicality to be unnerving.

Their papier-mâché markets and painted valuations cannot bear the reality which they hide.

Weighed, and found wanting. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Surviving Among the Destroyers

 

“Only fraud and falsehood dread examination. Truth invites it.”

Samuel Johnson

"A kleptocracy is sucking the life out of working men and women by force and fraud. A group of sociopaths, who have committed one of the great crimes in history, not only blithely walk away with their loot unpunished, but come back to rob their victims once again, to finish the job. And they gorge themselves on the public trust even while begrudging the widow her pittance, or trying to steal it. They pervert and corrupt so many, filling their hearts with their passionate lies, appealing to what is the very worst in them. They are truly a den of vipers and thieves."

Jesse, September 2012

"The banks [and large hedge and private equity funds] engage in fraud for two reasons. First, they profit from swindling the public. Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique. They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions."

Laurence Kotlikoff, When Banksters Buy Regulators and Prosecutors, Forbes, October 21, 2014

"All the most noted destroyers and deceivers of our species, all the founders of arbitrary governments and false religions have been extraordinary people; and nine tenths of the calamities that have befallen the human race had no other origin than the union of high intelligence with low desires."

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Francis Bacon, Edinburgh Review, 1837

"It should be a matter of greater shame to learned men that their knowledge may be like winged angels, but their desires truly are like serpents that crawl on the ground."

Francis Bacon, The Foundation of Learning, 1605

"We cannot look to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep."

Carl von Ossietzky, Das besiegte Deutschland, Berliner Volks-Zeitung, 1920


The markets are holding their collective breath to see what happens next.

I am too.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Shouts of a Ruler of Fools

 

"The quiet words of the wise are worth more than the shouts of a ruler of fools.  Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinful man can destroy much that is good."

Ecclesiastes 9:17-18

"Now the end is at hand. Now it is our task to find one another again, to spread information from person to person, to keep a steady purpose, and to allow ourselves no rest until the last man is persuaded of the urgent need of his struggle against this system."

The White Rose, Second Leaflet, Munich 1942

"The Hitler Party likes to emphasize its uniqueness, and it really should not be measured against conventional yardsticks. Even if it were to explode into smithereens today, the fact would remain that it recently won fifteen million voters. Its brutality, loud-mouthedness and brainlessness have acted not as a deterrent but rather as an attraction, and have generated unconditional and subservient followers."

Carl von Ossietzky, Die Weltbühne, January, 1933

"The barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. 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; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

Hilaire Belloc, This That and the Other, 1912

“If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.”

G. K. Chesterton, The Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914

Oil was slammed.

Stocks rallied.

Gold and silver rallied.

Bitcoin continued to slump.

The US markets have become an opera buffa.

There is much work to be done.

Have a pleasant evening.