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. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Long Goodbye

 

"A pretty, spoiled and not very bight little girl who had gone very, very wrong, and nobody was doing anything about it."

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

"One of the primary characteristics of narcissists is their exaggerated sense of entitlement. It's hardly surprising then that so many politicians somehow think they 'deserve' to game the system. After all, from their self-interested perspective, isn't that what the system is for? In their heavily self-biased opinion, if they want something, by rights it should be theirs. So, nothing if not opportunistic, they take from public and private coffers alike whatever they think they can get away with.

And given their grandiose sense of self, they're inclined to believe they can get away with most anything. Exploiting their privileged position in such a manner hardly leaves them plagued with guilt. In general, guilt isn't an emotion they're prone to. How could they be if they feel entitled to the objects of their desire? In their minds their very ability to attain something must certainly mean it was merited."

Leon F. Seltzer, Narcissism: Why It's Rampant in Politics

"There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

"There is no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.  Maybe the head man thinks his hands are clean,but somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut from under them, decent people lost their jobs, stocks got rigged on the market, and the five per-centers and the big law firms got paid hundred-grand fees. 

Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong.   The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean."

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

"The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterwards with more awful effect.”

Robert W. Chambers, The King In Yellow

"Then the kings of the earth, their nobles and their commanders, the rich, the powerful, and every one of their willing slaves and free men, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains. And they cried to the mountains and the rocks, 'Fall on us, and hide us from the face of the one who sits on the throne, and from the righteous anger of the Lamb.'"

Revelation 6:15-16

"At bottom, what should you do to avoid being an idiot or a swine? You should become resigned to the fact that you will seem ridiculous to a race of janitors and bureaucrats if you enter the service of Splendor.

Then you will know what it means to be the friend of God. Think of it. The Friend of God!"

Léon Bloy, The Secret of Léon Bloy, by Jacques Maritain, 1912


Most of the usual things do not matter much for the markets at this point. 

We are on the cusp of another collapsing bubble, woven out of betrayal and corruption.

Larger events are weighing on the near term.    The death and destruction that financiers have always sought to turn to their advantage have come to bear on events with an ominous and overwhelming inevitability.

As the principalities of the world have always come to find out, the madness serves none but itself.

After the Bell:

"The US has just issued new security alerts for Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Lebanon, warning all Americans of sudden escalation in the Middle East causing severe flight cancellations, airspace closures and travel disruptions.  The alert also warns of an 'increased threat of armed attacks by Iran targeting US government officials in the region.'  The alerts come after a US fighter jet strike on an Iranian missile launcher on Qeshm Island a short while ago, and Iran's issuance of Code 100, its highest level of alert, for all armed forces."

"Fall on us, and hide from the righteous anger of the Lamb."

Have a pleasant weekend. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Velvet Coup d'Etat

 

"The reconfigured software became known as the spreadsheet. The functionality of the spreadsheet would enable CGML to sell a very large quantity of bonds rapidly and close to the mid­market price. In an electronic message sent between the Traders the trading strategy, utilising the spreadsheet, was nicknamed "Dr Evil" after a fictional character."

FSA Statement on Fining Citigroup for the Willful Manipulation of the European Bond Market, 28 June 2005

“Its superfast, supersecret oil trading software was called the Hammer.  The markets used to be about capital formation,” said Mr. Quast, the consultant. “Now 80 percent of trading is driven by some form of statistical arbitrage.  We are buying into a statistical house of cards that could unravel very quickly.”   

Manipulation of the Oil Market, NY Times, 3 September 2009

The manipulation itself is nothing new.  Large Wall Street banks and hedge funds have been using their size to push the markets around for many years, as in the case of Citigroup which was caught manipulating prices in European bond trading. Citigroup Fined Over 'Dr. Evil Bond Strategy

They turned manipulation of the gold and silver markets into a money machine for many years.

The difference is that in the past the manipulation was implemented using the size of the trades and the deep pockets backing them. Size mattered, and the techniques were not elegant, more like an old-fashioned smash and grab.

Today the bias is towards stealth and speed, and colocation of your trading daemons with the Exchange to obtain an edge on information and execution. Having key regulators and politicians on your payroll is always a plus in any organized criminal activity.  It has more of the appearance of organized crime than it does of an efficient system of price discovery and capital allocation.

NY Times
Inquiry Stokes Unease Over Trading Firms That Shape Markets
By Landon Thomas Jr.
Published: September 3, 2009

LONDON — Its superfast, supersecret oil trading software was called the Hammer.

Transcripts and taped conversations of actions that took place in 2007, included in the commission’s case, reveal the secretive workings of high-frequency trading, a fast-growing Wall Street business that is suddenly drawing scrutiny in Washington. Critics say this high-speed form of computerized trading, which is used in a wide range of financial markets, enables its practitioners to profit at other investors’ expense.

Traders openly talked among themselves of “whacking” and “bullying up” the price of oil. But when called to account by officials of the New York Mercantile Exchange, they described their actions as just “providing liquidity....”

“The markets used to be about capital formation,” said Mr. Quast, the consultant. “Now 80 percent of trading is driven by some form of statistical arbitrage. We are buying into a statistical house of cards that could unravel very quickly.”

 

That run up in equities yesterday after the election was a pretty heavy handed gimmicky setup, which led to a bulltrap today.

A number of seasoned traders were seeing this, so its no special talent of mine.  Just experience.

That smackdown in oil was ludicrous.  

And the rally in Bitcoin was obvious.

This has more of the appearance of organized crime than of an efficient system of price discovery. Until we undertake reform with a serious commitment, there will be no relief from an extractive faux capitalist system.

Have a pleasant evening.