Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Deceiving, and Being Deceived

 

"Many will become addicted to hateful and malicious thoughts and hateful words.  Slaves to their desires, they will be ferocious, angry despisers of what is good and right.  With brutal treachery they will act without restraint, bigoted and blinded by clouds of conceit.  They will demand and find their delight in the pleasures of this world, and ignore their need to serve God.  They may act religious, but they want to serve themselves."

2 Timothy 3:1-5

"Long ago I broke the yoke that oppressed you
     and tore away the chains of your slavery,
but still you said,
     ‘I will not serve.’
On every hill and under every green tree,
     you have become corrupt, bowing down to idols."

Jeremiah 2:20

"Narcissists are unstable and go through repeated cycles of self-destruction, with other people usually paying the heft of the price.  They are aware of what they are doing to others — but they do not care.  Narcissists tend to be divisive, vindictive, confrontational, aggressive, hate-filled, raging, incoherent, judgment-impaired, and irrational."

Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self-Love, 2003

"I see dead people. Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know that they're dead."

Cole Sear: The Sixth Sense

"The most urgent problem facing the US and the Western nations is the pernicious corruption in the financial system that has captured the politicians of both parties. This corruption distorts the public conversation by buying influence in the media and 'experts' through the power of big money.  The people are held hostage in a Bastille of deceit.  What a condemnation it is that so few love the truth, and willfully turn from it, being led by the lies that favor their particular flavor of greed, and rotten self-interest."

Jesse, A Bastille of Deceit, 21 November 2012

"In the last days perilous times shall come.  For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, traitors, heady, high-minded having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.  Evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived."

John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons II 20, 1836

"If you want to be important—wonderful.  If you want to be recognized—wonderful.  If you want to be great—wonderful.  But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant.  That's a new definition of greatness.  And this morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve."

Martin Luther King, The Drum Major Instinct, February 4, 1968


The markets tried to shrug off the growing risks of war in multiple locations around the world, although equities were off a bit from their new all time highs.

 VIX ticked up a bit, but still remains subdued.   Until it is not.

The Dollar continued to gain some strength after Chairman Powell and the FOMC seemed to waffle about future rate cuts.

The US government remains closed by an intractable GOP in Congress and the Executive.

Gold and silver were under pressure most of the day.  It's a 'denial of risks for the exceptional' thing.

Trump is acting in a rather erratic, and some would say bizarre, manner.  I don't think this is as much of a departure from his past performance as some of his apologists may offer. 

It's important to remember how strongly his priorities are centered around what he most wants at the moment.  

He is intellectually lazy to a fault, and intolerant of any information that does not suit his preconceived notions which are remarkably uninformed.  He makes things up as naturally as the average person breathes, and his sycophants imitate him.

His respect for the Constitution and the rule of law is almost nil.  And he appeals to others with the same sort of limited perspective.

A recipe for disaster to be sure.  And that's what makes it significant for us as investors.  Ignore it if you wish, but at some point Cloud Cuckoo-land is going to come crashing down with severe real world consequences for the people are just trying to get by and make a living.

But a significant portion of the American public is caught up in their rebellious fit, and seems determined to bring a wreckage of devices to fruition.  This is what motivates a defiance of a reality they reject, preferring to substitute their own.

There is plenty of blame to go around on both sides of the aisle.  Make no mistake.  But the impulse to reform is being strangled in a fog of engineered distractions and adversarial deceits. 

For a 250 year old, America has been acting like a petulant brat, for some time. 

Have a pleasant weekend. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - You Who Murder the Prophets

 

“The greatest evil is not done now in sordid dens of crime. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices by quiet men, with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks, who do not need to raise their voice."

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1942

"On 30 June, von Rundstedt found an urgent plea from Schweppenburg, who was commanding the armoured force at Caen, to be allowed to withdraw his units out of range of Allied naval gunfire, which was decimating his forces.  Rundstedt at once agreed, and notified OKW of this decision.  On 1 July he received a message from OKW countermanding his orders. 

In a fury, von Rundstet phoned Keitel, urging him to go to Hitler and get the decision reversed.  A distraught Keitel pleaded that this was impossible. He asked, 'Was sollen wir tun?' What shall we do?  Von Rundstedt replied 'Macht Schluss mit dem Krieg, ihr Idioten!' End the war, you idiot!  Keitel conveyed to Hitler that Rundstedt felt unable to cope with the increased demands, and Hitler relieved him of his command."

Charles Messenger, The Last Prussian, 2011

"Seneca had made the bargain that many good men have made when agreeing to aid bad regimes.  For many, this has been a bargain worth making, even if it has cost them — as it may have cost Seneca — their immortal soul.  The Rome he has been trained to serve, the Rome of Augustus and Germanicus, was gone.  In its place stood Neropolis, ruled by a megalomaniac brat.”

James Romm, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, 2014

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that murders the prophets, and stones those whom God has sent to you.  How I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings.  But you would not let me.  As you have willed it, so your house is now yours to command — but is made desolate.  And I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, 'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

Luke 13:34-35

Just the basic charts tonight.  I have somewhere to be.

This was a classic bounce after an FOMC related takedown.

I played it, but I honestly didn't think they had it in them this time.

They started early and hit it hard.

The Scott Bessent touch?

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Causes of World War III

 

"For the corporation executives the military enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money.  It is a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based.

An expensive arms race, under cover of the military and in a paranoid atmosphere of fright, is an economically attractive business.  

They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines.  They have come to believe that there is no way out—except war—which would remove all the bewildering paradoxes of their tedious and now misguided attempts to construct peace.  For they still believe that 'winning' means something, although they never tell us what.

The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.

Some men want war for sordid, others for idealistic, reasons; some for personal gain, others for impersonal principle. But most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help to create its 'inevitability,' want it in order to shift the locus of their problems."

C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III, 1960

"America appears now before the world a naked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men of decision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality.  These men have replaced mind with platitude, and the dogmas by which they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counterbalance of mind prevails against them.  They have replaced the responsible interpretation of events with the disguise of events by a maze of public relations.

The American elite does not have any real image of peace — other than as an uneasy interlude existing precariously by virtue of the balance of mutual fright. The only seriously accepted plan for peace is the full loaded pistol.  In short, war or a high state of war-preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.

For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end.  Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own."

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956

"This is the conundrum.  You have people in power,  whether they be in the circle around Donald Trump or throughout our Congress, certainly in our media, but also in similar capacities in Europe, that just don't understand reality.

They're delusional, whether it's their own arrogance, whether it's their vain glory,  their simple-minded understanding of the world, their greed, whatever it is.  They are continuing to pursue a ruinous policy that day by day gets much worse, particularly for the people of Ukraine, but for the entire region, and perhaps the entire world." 

Matt Hoh, Judging Freedom, October 28, 2025

If one understands the past, as it truly was, then understanding the present becomes more straightforward, despite the lies and false representations that the worldly often use to disguise what they try to do behind their façade of deception.

Stocks rallied again today.  A higher stock market seems to be important to our current leaders, since it is an emblem of success and American exceptionalism and as a useful platform for looting, transferring money from the public to favored insiders.

Gold and silver had another bout of selling but with a rebound into the late afternoon.

The precious metals are important, since they tend to shine a light on truths about valuation. 

Those who choose to resist the abuses of the Anglo-American banking cartel will continue to employ alternative means, which include gold and silver, as safe havens and of currency instruments of last resort.

VIX ticked up a bit.  The mispricing of risk is becoming untenable.  But it will go on while the music is playing.

The Dollar dipped a bit.

Bitcoin took a shot lower in the closer hour.  It is an ephemeral thing, a construct of the modern imagination.  

But people will do what they will.   Until they cannot.

If you listen to this interview from today which is shown below it will help to connect the dots from what C. Wright Mills and others have been writing years ago to today.   

The assassinations of the 1960s have set the stage for where we now.

This is no recent development, no aberration of a single man.   It is about a systematic corruption that is gaining strength. 

It is for money and power, of serving the golden calf and the unredeemed world.

It's an old story.  

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.    Ephesians 6:12

It's hard to accept because the brutal cruelty of murder en masse, including women and children, for land and money is morally unthinkable for the normal human mind.

And yet we see it now.  But it is so repellent that the manufactured deceptions and ideologies can provide an attractive alternative.  

It is a comfort — the screen we use to avoid seeing the abyss into which we are peacefully sliding. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Fall of the Man of Sin

 

"A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship."

Chalmers Johnson, Interview on Democracy Now, February 27, 2007

"History teaches us that the capacity of things to get worse is limitless.  Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end.  [the US will probably] maintain a facade of constitutional government and drift along until financial bankruptcy overtakes it.  Of course, bankruptcy will not mean the literal end of the United States any more than it did for Germany in 1923, China in 1948, or Argentina in 2002-03.

It might, in fact, open the way for an unexpected restoration of the American system, or for military rule or simply for some development we cannot yet imagine.  Certainly, such a bankruptcy would mean a drastic lowering of our standard of living, a loss of control over international affairs, a process of adjusting to the rise of other powers, including China and India."

Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, 2007

"Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and vengeance, the punisher of pride and hubris, waits impatiently for her meeting with us,"

Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, 2006

"So, what do I suggest probably will happen? I think we will stagger along under a façade of constitutional government, as we are now, until we’re overcome by bankruptcy.  

Bankruptcy would not mean the literal end of the United States, any more than it did for Germany in 1923, or China in 1948, or Argentina just a few years ago, in 2001 and 2002. But it would certainly mean a catastrophic recession, the collapse of our stock exchange, the end of our level of living, and a vast series of new attitudes that would now be appropriate to a much poorer country.  

Once you go down the path of empire, you inevitably start a process of overstretch, of tendencies toward bankruptcy, and, in the rest of the world, a tendency toward the uniting of people who are opposed to your imperialism simply on grounds that it’s yours, but maybe also on the grounds that you’re incompetent at it.  

There was a time when the rest of the world did trust the United States a good deal as a result of the Marshall Plan, foreign aid, things of this sort.  They probably trusted it more than they should have. Today that is almost entirely dissipated At some point, we must either reduce our empire of bases from 737 to maybe 37—although I’d just as soon get rid of all of them.  If we don’t start doing that, then we will go the way of the former Soviet Union." 

Harvey Kreisler, Talking with Chalmers Johnson, Counterpunch, May 6, 2010

"Jesus told this parable to those who were proud of their own righteousness, and looked at others with contempt.

Two men went up to the temple to pray.  One was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector.  The Pharisee took up his place, and spoke this prayer to himself:  ‘I thank you, God, that I am not like other people — greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or worse, like this tax collector.  I fast twice a week and pay tithes on all my income.’ But the tax collector stood off at a distance, and would not even raise his eyes to heaven.   He simply beat his breast and prayed, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’  

This man, I tell you, went home justified, but the Pharisee did not.  For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Luke 18:9-14 


"Pride leads to destruction, and arrogance goes before a fall."

They are going to push these markets until they break.  And then loot the wreckage.  

Gaza seems to be the model for modern Neo-colonialism.   

And the Western elite are more like the British rule in colonial India, rather than the elected representatives of the people.   

The US financial system seems to be reaching peak hubris, and is heading for a nasty tumble.

Stocks rallied hard on a 'framework' for a solution to the trade dispute with China.

Gold and silver were hammered with program short selling hitting the miners.

The Dollar fell.

VIX has dropped to a low level.  It could go lower, but its nearing the area of a correction.

Try not to be among the fallen. 

I have been watching the new series based on Stephen King's book The Institute.  

It is classic King, and is very engaging. 

Have a pleasant evening.