Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - An Endless Series of Disillusionments

 

"The infant’s tongue sticks to the roof
      of its mouth with thirst;
the children cry for bread,
      but no one will feed them."

Lamentations 4:4

"Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand poverty, because they are poor themselves, after a fashion; but they cannot understand destitution.  They will be moved, to the sound of beautiful music, at Jesus’s sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will horrify them.  They want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, hanging from a woman’s beautiful throat."

Léon Bloy, Le Sang du Pauvre, 1909

“Addiction might be the best word to explain the lostness that so deeply permeates society.  Our addiction make us cling to what the world proclaims as the keys to self-fulfillment: accumulation of wealth and power; attainment of status and admiration; lavish consumption of food and drink, and sexual gratification without distinguishing between lust and love.  

These addictions create expectations that cannot but fail to satisfy our deepest needs. As long as we live within the world's delusions, our addictions condemn us to futile quests leaving us to face an endless series of disillusionments while our sense of self remains unfulfilled.”

Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, 1991

"And in the worst cases, they become self-righteous, being proud in their gifts and their election as they think it in their own minds.  They may even harbor private hatreds, sins against the Spirit, judging others and seeing admonitions to take up the cross of His obedience with love as intended for all those others, but not for themselves.  They are imbued with the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy and spiritual pride.  And it is the road to a dwindling of the spiritual life, and a gradual erosion of faith as a vital element of our every action.

Jesse, Obedience Without Love - The Leaven of the Pharisees, 5 April 2017

"You believe in the one God, and that is good.  But even the demons believe this, and tremble."

James 2:18-19

Stocks were on a bit of a roller coaster today, closing fairly hard towards the lows, until a last minute statement from Trump about extending the ceasefire tomorrow lifted them a bit into the close.  

I have never seen a sitting US President grifting the very heart of our own economic system this hard through the use of exaggerations, schemes, and outright lies.

This is a sign of our times: an endless series of disillusionments.

Gold and silver were hammered lower by selling programs.  The financial system is extracting its pound of flesh for going along with this official dishonesty of the political.  The corruption in our system is profound.

They famously have no morals.   They would be as gods, but make themselves into beasts.

"To the politician and administrator laissez-faire was simply a principle of the insurance of law and order, with the minimum cost and effort.  Let the market be given charge of the poor, and things will look after themselves. Hobbes had argued the need for a despot because men were like beasts; Townsend insisted that they were actually beasts and that, precisely for that reason, only a minimum of government was required."   Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944

The IDF is recreating Gaza in southern Lebanon.  They are dropping all pretenses. 

VIX lifted a little.  As did the Dollar.

Let's see if anything happens tomorrow before the ceasefire expires late in the day.

When I am reminded that God is just, I tremble for His mercy. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Ardent Self-Deception

 

"All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome."

George Orwell, London Letter, Partisan Review, Winter 1945

“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 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1973

“You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds. Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them. God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason."

Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, 1963

"Anyone can be misled by a clever person, and no one likes to readily admit that they have been had.  It is a sign of character and maturity to realize this, and admit your were deceived, and to demand change and reform. But some cannot, even when the facts of the deception are revealed.  The more incorrect that the truth shows them to be, the louder and more strident they become in shouting down and denying reality: cognitive dissonance.

The more extremely held the views, left or right, the more ardent the self-deception and surrender of individual identity.  Because at the extremes, it is no longer about justice, but about the objectification and irrelevance of the individual, the elevation of ideology over truth, and the dehumanisation and demonisation of 'the other.'"

Jesse, The Economics of Demagogues, 18 June 2012

"Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not.  This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and 'weaponizing' the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents.  The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”

Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 2018

Stock futures opened in the red last night, but miraculously as usual they took back a good chunk of those losses to finish closer to the bubble top of Friday close.

VIX rose.  I'm surprised that it noticed that we are tottering towards another phase of destructive war.

The Dollar slipped a bit.

Gold and silver were under pressure, and ended with losses, but off the opening lows.

NY-London is selling paper, and Asia is buying metal at higher prices.   Same old, same old.

The 'cease-fire' with Iran will formally expire on Wednesday evening Washington DC time.

This is the dominant factor in the markets at this time.

Let's see what happens.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Racketeers

 

“Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die.  No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason.  No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits.  They were just told it was to be a 'glorious adventure'.

War is a racket.  It always has been.  It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

Smedley Butler, War Is a Racket, 1935

"Investors placed a bet worth about $760 million on a falling oil price around 20 minutes before Iran's foreign minister announced on Friday that the Strait of Hormuz was open, ‌another sizeable wager on the world's most traded commodity ahead of major announcements in the course of the Middle East war. Large, well‑timed trades in recent months ​have drawn concern from U.S. lawmakers and legal experts that decisions around war and diplomacy can give some traders an ⁠edge in volatile and opaque derivatives markets."

Amanda Cooper, Traders Place Big Bet On Falling Oil, Reuters, 17 April 2026

"Seyyed Mohammad Mehdi Tabatabaei, a spokesperson for the Iranian presidency, dismissed claims made by U.S. President Donald Trump as 'baseless statements of the enemy,' including his claim that Iran agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again. Tabatabaei added that if the U.S. reneges on its promises, they will face 'dire consequences'."

Al Jazeera, 17 April 2026

"Wars do not usually result from just causes but from pretexts. There probably never was a just cause why men should slaughter each other by wholesale, but there are such things as ambition, selfishness, folly, madness, in communities as in individuals, which become blind and bloodthirsty, not to be appeased save by havoc, and generally by the killing of somebody else than themselves."

William Tecumseh Sherman, Michigan Military Academy, 19 June 1879

"This week, I am introducing legislation to end a war that should have ended long ago, the war in Afghanistan. The United States has been fighting The War on Terror since October of 2001 and it has cost 6 trillion dollars."

Senator Rand Paul, Repeal the 2001 Authorization for Military Force, March 5, 2019

“The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the structure of society intact. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”

George Orwell, 1984, June 1949 

 

Today was a stock market index option expiration. 

Markets exploded higher on the news that Iran is offering to continue to discuss the cessation of hostilities given the recent ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, which was one of their key negotiating conditions.

There seems to be some discontinuity between what has been agreed and what is being reported.

But apparently an enormous short position on the price of oil was placed about 20 minutes before this latest development was announced.

Gold and silver rallied and then fell back a bit.

The Dollar slumped and then recovered.

Bitcoin rallied and may have broken out of its trading range, again.

VIX wallowed in a tide of good feelings.

Let's hope that a lasting peace is being slowly cobbled out of this pernicious 'fog of war.' 

We'll know more as this continues to unfold.  Watch their actions, moreso than listen to their words.

Some new realities seem to be emerging, with striking roots in the wisdom of the ages.

"The humility of the righteous will guide them, but the deceitfulness of the proud will destroy them."    Proverbs 11:3

Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in God abide in love, and love in them. 

Have a pleasant weekend. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Who Are the Children of God?

 

"I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does.  When that happens, it is the end of the world.  When the author walks on to the stage the play is over.  What is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else - something it never entered your head to conceive - comes crashing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left?

For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not.  Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side.  God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever."

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1944

"This is how we know who are the children of God and who are the children of Satan: anyone who does not do what is good is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their neighbor."

1 John 3:10

"The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy.  Yet often a lifetime is often not enough to rebuild.  They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing, on devastation.  Yet the resources needed for healing, education, and restoration are nowhere to be found.

The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters.  Jesus told us, 'Blessed are the peacemakers.'  But woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic, or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.

Those who rob your land of its resources, generally invest much of the profit in weapons, thus perpetuating an endless cycle of destabilization and death.   It is a world turned upside down, an exploitation of God's creation that must be denounced and rejected by every honest conscience.

We must make a decisive change of course, a true conversion that will lead us in the opposite direction onto a sustainable path rich in human fraternity. in this region that has suffered so greatly. Yes, my sisters and brothers, you who hunger and thirst for justice, who are poor, merciful, meek, and pure of heart, you who have wept.  You are the light of the world." 

Leo XIV, Cameroon, 16 April 2024

“Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the ones who do the will of my Father in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name?  Did we not drive out demons in your name?  Did we not accomplish mighty things in your name?’ Then I will declare to them solemnly, ‘I never knew you.  Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.’"

Matthew 7:21-23


Stocks continued to levitate today, disconnected from reality, harnessed in service to the prevailing narrative of peace and prosperity.  I have never seen anything this brazenly adapted to propaganda before.

The Dollar chopped around the lower end of the 98 handle.

VIX fell again.  It is running on lipstick and lies. 

Gold and silver were under a bit of pressure.

Bitcoin chopped sideways along the upper end of its trading range.

As you may have noted from the calendar we have been posting below, tomorrow is the stock index option expiration for April.  Important, but not a triple witch which occur at the end of the quarters.

Trump is touting peace and breakthroughs with Iran on the nuclear question, which are clearly fabrications, even while the troop buildups continue for 'the big decisive strike.'

And because of the increase in wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.

Have a pleasant evening.