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.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - This Dying Art

 

"Beauty is but a flower,
That wrinkles will devour.
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died, young and fair.
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord have mercy on us."

Thomas Nashe, A Litany in Time of Plague, 1593

“The dead will lie on open fields,
   like sheaves behind the reaper,
   with no one to gather them.
So let not the wise boast of their wisdom
   or the strong boast of their strength
   or the wealthy boast of their riches,
but let the one who boasts boast about this:
   that they have sought the understanding of my ways."

Jeremiah 9:22-24

"The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead."

W. B. Yeats, Leda and the Swan, 1933

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

"In the end the only real tragedy is not to have been a saint."

Léon Bloy, La Femme Pauvre, 1897


Some days I just don't have the word.

The next 24 months will be pivotal.

I hope I live to see a virtuous resolution for this noisome morass of political and financial corruption. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Writhing Monstrosity

 

"Diary of a Man in Despair is Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen’s prophetic insight into the turmoil caused by the destruction of the ancient Prussian soul.  Lingering on after the deposing of the Kaiser, it was inexorably demolished by the carnal frenzy of the Nazi ideology which gave power to the German middle classes.  In this heady cocktail of sexual lust, greed and idealism, the Volk or ‘mass-man’ was relentlessly driven to its suicidal cause.  Not even today has the terror of totalitarianism been described in such powerful writing."

Norman Stone, Introduction: Diary of a Man in Despair (trans), 1970

Germany 1936

As in our case, a misbegotten failure conceived, so to speak, in the gutter, became the great prophet, and the opposition simply disintegrated, while the rest of the world looked on in astonishment and incomprehension.  As with us hysterical females, schoolmasters, renegade priests, the dregs and outsiders from everywhere formed the main supports of the regime.  A thin sauce of ideology covered lewdness, greed, sadism, and fathomless lust for power, and whoever would not completely accept the new teaching was turned over to the executioner.  

As with us, Spartan laws were promulgated to control the miserable plebs, but these did not apply to him and his followers.  As with us, there were street meetings and ‘voluntary contributions’, refusal of which meant proscription.  As with us, the masses were drugged: folk festivals, useless construction, anything and everything, to keep the man in the street from a moment’s pause to reflect. 

I suffocate in the knowledge that I am the prisoner of a horde of vicious apes, and I rack my brains over the perpetual riddle of how this same people which so jealously watched over its rights a few years ago can have sunk into this stupor, in which it not only allows itself to be dominated by the street-corner idlers of yesterday, but actually, height of shame, is incapable any longer of perceiving its shame for the shame that it is.

I am neither an occult nor a mystic.  I am a child of my time despite all forebodings, and I hold strictly to what I see.  But there is a frightful riddle here, and I come back again and again to what appears to me to be the only answer to it.  What I saw gliding by there, behind the fence of his mamelukes, like the Prince of Darkness himself, was no human being.  That was a figure out of a ghost story.

Doesn't this explain how all of this could have happened to a basically orderly and hardworking people, without resistance from those dedicated to the good in life, in the same kind of grim and incalculably vast cosmic convulsion which from the first day of the Hitler regime has not only brought strange crawling things to afflict this old earth, but has also in some unfathomable way turned on its head concepts like mine and thine, right and wrong, virtue and vice, God and the Devil?

I had poured out over me every one of the political platitudes in his book.  I know you will appreciate my sparing you, future reader, all the dogma.  It was that little-man Machiavellianism by which German foreign policy became a series of legalised burglaries and the activity of its leaders a succession of embezzlements, forgeries, and treaty breaches, all designed to make him appeal to the assortment of schoolteachers, bureaucrats, and stenographers who have since become the true support and bastion of his regime as a fabulous fellow, a real political Genghis Khan.

With his oily hair falling into his face as he ranted, he had the look of a man trying to seduce the cook. I got the impression of basic stupidity, the same kind of stupidity as that of his crony, von Papen — the kind of stupidity which equates statesmanship with cheating at a horse trade.

Notwithstanding his meteoric rise, there is absolutely nothing that has happened in the twenty years since I first saw him to make me change my first view of him.  The fact remains that he was, and is, without the slightest self-awareness and pleasure in himself, that he basically hates himself, and that his opportunism, his immeasurable need for recognition, and his now-apocalyptic vanity are all based on one thing - a consuming drive to drown out the pain in his psyche, the trauma of a monstrosity.

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

Time is a flat circle.

Once again we are in a time when monstrosities walk the land, with the appearance of that which is human, but with an emptiness that exists only to consume.

Stocks slumped and came back.

Gold and silver were under pressure.

VIX fell.

Oil rallied sharply this morning and then was sold off back into the red during the day.

When their hands come for us, for their bailouts as they always do, what will we do when they come next for our children and our grandchildren, as history suggests they will.  

Nothing is never enough for history's insatiable monstrosities. 

Have a pleasant evening.