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.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Plus ça change

 

Germany, October 1940

The latest is that the Great Man himself now has a mistress, named Eva Braun.  Of course, we all know what the circumstances are, and the lady should really be described as a maitresse en titre. 

A prankish official who eavesdropped on a long-distance telephone conversation between the two of them has reported that Hitler figuratively cried on the blonde bosom of his girlfriend about the huge quantities of hormones and injections of vitamins being put into him.

The average German now registers developments as he would the scores of the Sunday football games, shouts happily over the results and has forgotten all about them by next morning.  He has got into the habit of victory, and takes each successive triumph more and more for granted, which is charmingly simple of him - except that he is becoming more and more brutalized, and the level of his greed is constantly going up.  I can hear the rumbling of a terrible storm in the distance.

Truly, with the Germans it is as I have said: every nation normally puts its demons, its delusions, its impossible desires away into the cellars and vaults and underground prisons of its unconscious; the Germans have reversed the process, and have let them loose.  The contents have escaped like the winds out of Pandora’s box. 

A storm is raging across this long-suffering old earth. Germany, drunk with victory, is sick.  The language one hears, the speech of the war commentators, the talk in the coffee-houses, together with the German of the military, has degenerated into a kind of street jargon that makes the blood run cold. 

And behind it all are the ‘deals’.  People sell stolen paintings and sculptures and wine cellars, which may or may not exist — they ‘deal’ in securities, silk stockings, ownerless French factories - with stolen machines, with soup spoons, toilet soap, and rubber goods. In Berlin, absolutely everybody ‘deals’ — I was there recently, and saw it.  The ladies of noble Prussian families are busy transacting business, and so are waitresses, drugstore clerks, high-school students. 

But what good does it do?  Industry pulls the strings; it has controlled the General Staff since the days of Ludendorff.  The instrument of power is terror, and the industrialists hold tight to it.  They control every means of influencing public opinion, and have thereby stupefied the great unproductive mass-salaried people, office workers, most of the lower ranking government employees - to the point of idiocy. 

The rest is a mixture of business people and nobility come down in the world, melted into a middle-class lump with the newly created officers and quick- turnover fellows.  These people are more materialistic than the Bolshevik Russians, live from day to day, and haven’t the slightest conception of the grim little game that has been begun here.

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

The market today gave me a good chuckle.  While the price of Crude Oil on the Comex Futures were rallying, the market was pricing down the real instruments of energy.

Stocks were in rally mode today starting with the futures soaring in the late Sunday trade.

Gold and silver were meh. 

VIX fell.

The wiseguys are doing their short term, we-can-do-what-we-want-because-we-can boogie woogie. 

Breaking: The US has carried out strikes on Iran's Konarak Naval Base on the southeastern coast, wounding two Iranian soldiers, per Al Jazeera. It is the first US strike on Iran in nearly 7 weeks. Iran will likely retaliate tonight.

This is going to get interesting if you watch your leverage and personal supplies situation.

The theme for 2027 will be 'How are the mighty fallen.' 

As popular TV documentarian A J Benza used to say, 'Fame, ain't it a bitch.' 

I may have to dig out the popcorn hot air popper. 

Have a pleasant evening.