22 February 2022

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Audacious Oligarchy

 

"Kaplan was a voting member of the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in 2020, where he had access to market-moving information throughout the unprecedented first year of the pandemic. There was no good reason for a man in this position to be trading in S&P 500 futures for his own account.

Powell’s response ignores the fact that Kaplan’s trading dates were legally required to be provided on his financial disclosure forms from 2015 through 2020 and weren’t.  That’s public information that Kaplan failed to provide. It’s long overdue to the public.  Having that information before the Senate votes to confirm Powell for another four years as Fed Chairman would allow the public to decide just how incompetently the Fed was being run under Powell.

Wall Street on Parade, Fed Just Added Short Selling and Margin Leverage to List of Restricted Trades

 

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future.  When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

 

"Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear." 

Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup, May 2009

 

Stocks slumped again today over geopolitical and other exogenous concerns that are exposing the fault lines in the supply chains, public works, and financial asset valuations.

The pundits were crowing and smirking their delight this morning when stock futures managed to come back off the shocking lows of the holiday weekend.  

"It's priced in, and the markets are ready for it."

Gold and silver had rallied hard on the geo-jitters, but came back from the highs, and lows, to finished just a bit higher.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

In all this contradictory noise there is only one struggle that is worth your concern.  

Too many are distracted and ignore what is most important, exhausted by worries and seduced by wealth.

And so the love of most grows cold.

Have a pleasant evening.


"'Help, Lord, for no one loyal remains;
the faithful have vanished from the children of men.
They tell lies to one another;
they speak with deceiving lips and hypocritical hearts.

May the Lord silence their flattering lips
and close their boastful mouths that say.
'Through our words we have power;
we say whatever we wish—who can be our master?'

'Because of the oppression of the afflicted
and the groaning of the poor,
I will now come,' says the Lord.
'I will put the one who longs for it in a safe place.'"

Psalm 12:1-6