Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Slaking Moloch

 

“The lamp for the body is the eye.  If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be filled with light. But when your eye is unhealthy, your whole body is filled with darkness.  And if the light that you think you have is actually darkness, how great that darkness will be.

No one can serve two masters.  For they will hate one and love the other, and will be devoted to one and despise the other.  You cannot serve both God and Mammon."

Matthew 6:22-24

"All men, of course, desire pleasure and safety.  But all men also desire power and all men desire the mere sense of being ‘in the know’ or the ‘inner ring’, of not being‘outsiders’: a passion insufficiently studied and the chief theme of my story.  When the state of society is such that money is the passport to all these prizes, then of course money will be the prime temptation.  But when the passport changes, the desires will remain.

If Mammon were the only devil, it would be another matter.  But where Mammon vacates the throne, how if Moloch takes his place?  As Aristotle said, ‘Men do not become tyrants in order to keep warm.’"

C.S. Lewis, A Reply to Professor Haldane, 1966

"The oligarchs are flush with victory, and feel that they are firmly in control, able to subvert and direct any popular movement to the support of their own fascist ends and unslakable will to power.  But my model says that the oligarchs will continue to press their advantages, being flushed with victory, until they provoke a strong reaction that frightens everyone, like a wake up call, and the tide then turns to genuine reform."

Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup, August 2010

"A life is either spiritual or not spiritual at all.  No man can serve two masters.  Your life is shaped by the end that you live for.  You are made in the image of what you desire."

Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, 1956


And so we have another day of Operation Economic Outcast.

The Dollar did its usual sideways chop, going nowhere.  

Gold inched higher.  The money lenders view gold with deep suspicion.

Silver rallied after its option expiration beat-down.

Oil rallied higher, straining against the manipulation on paper.

I don't know if they can hold it off until after the midterm elections, but this is a very explosive situation fraught with economic risk that is being willfully mispriced.

These snakes do not care about you, your family, or their oaths and honorable obligations to God and country.

We are in a time of darkness rising, and it ends in disillusion and blood.

The leaders consecrate their nations to voracious, unloving gods through vile abominations and child sacrifice. 

Stock up, stack up, and remember what is, in the end, most important.

The faith and the church is not an exclusive club, or a mark of honor and privilege.  Strike the idea of being 'select' and better than your neighbor from your hearts.  That is the leaven of the Pharisees.

We are to be a field hospital for the kingdom of God, for his innocent and the broken, in the midst of worldly darkness and despair. 

You know what you have been called to do. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Day of the Beast

 

"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

"God will send them a deceiving power so that they may believe the lie, that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have taken pleasure in their lawlessness."

2 Thessalonians 2:3-12

"Once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder. As soon as men know they that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles."

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947

"Satan has been in the Heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan. 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. The Hell he carries with him is, in one sense, a Hell of infinite boredom."

C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942

"If heaven is seeing and in turn being seen, transformed and made new, by the beatific face of Pure Love in resplendent glory, then hell must be seeing, at the last and forever, one's own dark and miserable soul, as it really is, alone."

Jesse, Death By Overdose, 24 February 2015

"Great and sustained destruction requires great ambition. It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order, and although the idea behind that new order may be criminal and objectively very stupid, it must also be compellingly simple and at the same time absolute.  The ideology of genocide is all of those things.”

Philip Gourevitch, Tomorrow We Will Be Killed, 1998

“Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.”

Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon, 1952

"Those who have faith had better keep in the state of grace, and those who have neither had better find out what they mean, for in the coming age there will be only one way to stop your trembling knees, and that will be to get down on them and pray.  The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about."

Fulton J. Sheen, The Day of the Beast, 1947

Bessent's economic war plan, Operation Economic Outcast, continues as the US attempts to control the soaring interest rates of its sovereign debt, the price of a shrinking global supply of oil, and the crippled confidence in the full faith and credit of the US Dollar.

But in the short term if you have the will and the cash you can cast a fairly broad fig leaf over the desiccated corpse of your strategic position.

The Dollar continues to chop sideways.  Again, DXY is not all that relevant given its heavy weighting to the Euro.

VIX fell.

Oil took a heavy handed hit that was a blatant price manipulation with the primary effect of enabling traders connected to Bessent and Trump to make easy illicit profits.  

It has little to no effect on global oil supplies, and no significant benefit to the American people.

There was a precious metals futures option expiration on the Comex today. 

It was more significant for silver than for gold.

We may get another gut check by the wiseguys on those holders of new futures contracts from their 'in-the-money' longs.

This is going to end badly.

The responsibility for this is not on one man, but those in the Congress and the Courts who have enabled this chronic abuses of the Constitution and the national interest.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Don Tzu

 

"Gentleness brings victory to him who attacks, and safety to him who defends. Those whom Heaven would save, it fences round with gentleness.

There is no calamity greater than lavish desires, there is no greater guilt than discontentment, and there is no greater disaster than greed. He who is contented with contentment is always contented."

Lao tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans by Wing Tsit Chan, 1963

"The Court is corrupt,
The fields are overgrown with weeds,
The granaries are empty,
Yet there are those dressed in fineries,
With swords at their sides,
Filled with food and drink,
And possessed of much wealth.

This is taking the lead in robbery,
Far indeed is this from the Way."

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

I have somewhere to be.

Just charts tonight.

This is madness.  All of it.

Madness. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Peak Currency War

 

"Today, we are launching Operation Economic Outcast to foreclose every other option available to the Iranian regime.  Treasury has mapped every node, every facilitator, and every network that Iran has used to smuggle oil and evade sanctions.

Beginning today, the actions of Treasury and other agencies will tighten the noose and block every potential source of revenue that funds the IRGC and the Iranian regime.  We are enforcing a zero-leakage approach.  There will be no minimal breathing space for the regime to rebuild its capacity to inflict terror against America and the world.

Iran’s enablers purchase and transport its petroleum.  They facilitate the flow of its finances through exchange houses and free trade zones.  They welcome Iran’s flights and maintain registries on its behalf.  They turn a blind eye to seaborne fuel transfers and to overland transits. And they condone the illicit use of their banks, all while concealing the extent of their complicity.  The President is making phone calls to world leaders with specific requests to cease their interactions with the regime.  Those who stand with the United States will reap the rewards of our partnership.  Those who tether themselves to Tehran should expect to share in the isolation of a withering regime.

Teams from the Treasury, State Department, and the U.S. military are now meeting with their global counterparts to tell them that the United States expects action.  Every country has a defined timeline to shut down activities we have identified.  If they do not take action, we will do so unilaterally through Treasury authorities.  For example, every Bank Melli branch must be shuttered.

And let me be clear: any entity that facilitates money laundering on behalf of Iran will be removed from the U.S. dollar system. The new sectoral sanctions determinations issued today target five of Iran’s most vital lifelines that it exploits in other countries: digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping.

These measures broaden secondary sanctions risk for anyone foolish enough to continue conducting business with this regime—and accelerate the speed with which we pursue them.

As I speak, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control is also sanctioning over 60 entities, individuals, and vessels across the world that enable the Iranian regime to procure illicit nuclear and missile technology, conduct cyber operations, and generate oil revenue. This is a sustained campaign to collapse every last option for Iran. Let there be no ambiguity as to the position of the United States: An economic engagement of any kind with this murderous regime will expose those responsible to the full reach of American power.

For decades, this regime has drawn strength from a calculus that regards Iranian retaliation as certain and American enforcement as negotiable. Under President Trump, that era is over. To the ordinary soldiers supporting this regime: as more and more of your paychecks stop or are supposedly “just delayed,” ask whether your commanders are leading your country to triumph or to ruin. And recall that the Berlin Wall fell when ordinary soldiers decided not to shoot.

And to those who enable Tehran: Do not discount the cost of testing Washington. No nation should expect to enjoy the rewards of our system while helping those who seek to destroy it. It is now time for world leaders to make a decision. Between prosperity and isolation. Peace and terror. America and Iran."

Scott Bessent, US Treasury Secretary, Operation Economic Outcast, 24 August 2026


Well, this is certainly going to get interesting.

The Dollar ticked up a bit.

Gold rallied, silver was off.

Bitcoin gained again but is starting to feel toppy at this high end of its trading range.

VIX bounced higher.

Stocks fell.

The proposed Operation Economic Outcast is puzzling to me on a number of levels.

Strategically it does not look well-aimed.  That is, it seems more likely to put the stake in the heart of the reign of the US Dollar.

D-Day was a meticulously planned operation involving a broad coalition of allied nations. 

This latest economic sanctions operation seems more like a rage-fueled 'release the hounds' decree by Mr. Burns of The Simpsons, backed primarily by his faithful retainer Waylon Smithers.

This does not appear to be constructive for the US dollar and the economy. 

Have a pleasant evening.