Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Old Switcheroo - Empire of Lawlessness

 

“I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich.  The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough.  I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.”

Howard Zinn

"There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success."

Lord Acton

“People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.  They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

"A lot of white-collar criminals are psychopaths. But they flourish because the characteristics that define the disorder are actually valued. When they get caught, what happens? A slap on the wrist, a six-month ban from trading, and don't give us the $100 million back. I've always looked at white-collar crime as being as bad or worse than some of the physically violent crimes that are committed."

Robert Hare

"The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well. Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them. Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Plunder, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus


The ongoing current of statements from the spokesmodels and talking heads over the past week, as well as a number of market indicators I have learned to watch over the past thirty years or so had me thinking that we would see a terrible jobs number this morning, and a fantastic reversal and rally in equities and the metals.  And I structured my trading positions accordingly, with a hedge for uncertainty.

And this morning when I heard the monster overshoot in the Jobs number I thought, 'oh no, I was wrong.'  Thank God for the hedge, but I wish it was larger.

But little did I know.  I'm glad I did nothing as the little set piece we call the 'free markets' played out.  Am I getting more patiently wily or just lazy?  Oh me of little faith. 

But what else might we expect from empire building jokers who make a blasphemous religion of greed out of victimizing the innocent.  

It is probably a mistake to ever underestimate the shamelessness and greed of the power elite.

And so the Dollar this morning rocketed higher, and then dropped precipitously and ended slightly lower into the close.

Stocks did the opposite, with a monster rally crushing the shorts and hedges.

The VIX fell sharply after spiking higher.

Wash-rinse-repeat.

My eyesight continues to return, if all too slowly but surely.  Whenever I might feel like getting too comfortably complacent He always seems to knock me down hard off my perch.  Thank God for His loving kindness and tender mercies.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Feeding Moloch - Waschen und Spülen

 

"We were standing at a window of my room in the Foreign Office.  It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking.  My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words:  'The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.'"

Edward Grey, Twenty-Five Years 1892–1916, 1925

“Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.”

Henri Barbusse, Le Feu: journal d'une escouade, 1916

"I believed that our public intelligentsia had succumbed to an amazing series of cognitive failures; that time after time they had gotten the facts wrong, ignored the clanging bullshit detector, made the sort of mistakes that would disqualify them.

What I didn't understand was that these weren't cognitive failures at all; they were moral failures, mistakes that were hard-wired into the belief systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in question. As such they were mistakes that, from the point of view of those organizations or professions or classes, shed no discredit on the individual chowderheads who made them.

Holding them accountable was out of the question, and it remains off the table today. These people ignored every flashing red signal, refused to listen to the whistleblowers, blew off the obvious screaming indicators that something was going wrong in the boardrooms of the nation, even talked us into an unnecessary war, and the bailout apparatus still stands ready."

Thomas Frank, Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly, March 26, 2012

"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell

“Let us learn our lessons.  Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that any one who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.  The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.  Antiquated War Offices, incompetent or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations— all take their seat at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war."

Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission, Thornton Butterworth Ltd, London 1930


As it is with conventional war, so too with economic wars, wars fought with banking systems, trade sanctions, and currency.

The Jobs number came in smoking hot this morning, and the Labor Participation Rate ticked higher.

But unemployment rate rose, so of course stocks focused on that and went into a risk on stampede higher.   

Gold and silver were crushed.

What a surprise.  Not.

 And of course the VIX fell to a low we have not seen since 2021.

Market bubbles, false flags, cartel pricing, manufactured wars?   It's all good for profits.

Maybe we'll see the flip side to this next week.  

Rinse follows wash in the endless harvesting of a nation's wealth.

Have a pleasant weekend.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Payrolls Pops Powell Pivot - Tremors in the Financial Metaverse

 

"The received wisdom is mistaken on how recessions are made.  They are not simply caused by shocks. They are caused by a window of vulnerability in the economic cycle where the cyclical drivers of the economy have weakened to the point where it’s susceptible to a negative shock.  Within that window of vulnerability, virtually any reasonable shock becomes a recessionary shock.  That’s how you get a recession."

Lakshman Achuthan, Economic Cycle Research Institute, June 3, 2019


"We suspect strongly that another trigger event will shake the global financial system to its foundations, and that the Central Bankers are losing a great deal of sleep as they wonder where the Anglo-American financial hegemony has brought them.  This will end badly.  But it will end."

Jesse, 15 June 2008


"So you are lean and mean and resourceful, and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipice, because over the years you have become fascinated by how close you can walk without losing your balance."

Richard Nixon


"In the absence of an event, I would expect us to continue on with the status quo, the regular back and forth, wash and rinse rigging of almost every market as the pretenses and facades wear ever more thin.  It is very difficult to forecast a market break.  But it is quite possible to analyze the structure of the market, and to judge it to be inherently unstable and fragile.  'Prone to accidents' if you will.

The political and financial class are way out over their skis, with moral hazard and the colossal winds of hubris at their backs.   It is a question of what exogenous event may trigger the next great crisis, and who will the moneyed interests try to blame."

Jesse, 3 September 2014


"Every market decline has its own specific course of events, but they do tend to have some things in common.   There is generally a build up of conditions that make it the right kind of market, and then some trigger event occurs to set things in motion.  It is much like what occurs in the build up to an avalanche, or a wildfire

And there are the many confrontational hotspots around the world, in the Mideast of course, in the South China Sea, and in the Ukraine among others.

I extend this watch to October, and will keep looking for changes.  I do not expect much to come of this.  This is just a caution, but given a trigger event of sufficient magnitude, this could become a problematic market even during the dog days of Summer.   Our leadership and financial management is just that bad, reckless and irresponsible.

One thing I learned, most painfully, is that the Fed can and will keep an obvious asset bubble going much longer than one might expect, given the lack of a major trigger event.  And they have absolutely demonstrated a disregard for the consequences from doing so several times in the past fifteen years."

Jesse, 1 May 2015


"Having fallen from the eternal, the evil one's desires are endless, insatiable.  Having fallen from pure Being, he is driven by the desire to possess, to fill his emptiness.  But the problem is insoluble, always.  He is compelled to have and to hold, to possess and consume, and nothing else.  All he takes, he destroys.  Certainly he rules the material, as he is called the Prince of this World in the gospels."

Denis de Rougemont

As you have probably already heard the Non-Farm Payrolls report came in with a huge upside surprise this morning.

This basically popped the fantasy about the Fed's pivot to dovishness.

And so the Dollar spiked straight up and gold and silver were smacked down.

Stocks cratered and then wobbled back a bit into the close.

I published an update of the CrashTrak profile with some additional historical data this morning.  You can scroll down to see it.

And then I left and spent the rest of the day with Daisy and my son.  And I am very glad that I did.

It looked like the Banksters and their affiliated knuckleheads would be playing tag with the public in the American financial metaverse for the rest of the day.

And they did.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - This Great Masquerade of Evil - Hypocrisy and Madness

 

 "Never again will we try to persuade a foolish person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous.  In conversation with them, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of them.  They are under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in their very being.’ 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

 

“I fooled myself.  I had to.  I didn't want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent.  I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community.” 

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

 

"The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” 

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

 

"The foolish ask nothing better than not to have to understand anything, and they even used to get together and try not to understand, because the last thing of which a person is capable is to be malicious and foolish all by themselves.  Without understanding, they form spontaneously into herds, not according to any particular affinities but in obedience to the petty ideology, which swallowed up the whole of their small lives, allotted them by birth or chance.  They would far rather kill than have to think."

George Bernanos, Under the Sun of Satan

 

“This great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, compassion, historical necessity or even social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Word, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.  Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior.  Christians are called to compassion and to action. " 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer 

 

Gold and silver were utterly hammered today, in honor of the usual rigging that occurs around the Non-Farm Payrolls report. 

Even though I was in cash and waiting for it, the sheer brazenness of the running of the stop loss orders was amazing. 

But we live in exceptionally brazen times. 

Stocks ignored everything else and rallied to new highs. 

There is an exceptional amount of hysteria and foolishness in public discourse today. 

Look deeply into your own hearts. 

Disengage from the sites that keep reinforcing the lawlessness and hysteria which may have overtaken your hearts with brazen and incendiary lies.  Or not.

I wonder about weapons and restraints, like zip ties, that some of the protesters were said to be carrying as they attempted to breach the House, with 80 hostage-ready Congressmen sheltering therein.  That could have been quite a spectacle. 

Change is coming.   I am not optimistic for areas of deep concern to me such as financial and political campaign funding reform.

And yet, through it all, there is always His loving kindness and tender mercies, like shafts of light in a dark and cloudy day.

By their fruits you will know them.  

Little children, beware the love and service of idols.

Have a pleasant weekend. 

 

The Recovery™ - Stagnant Wages, Lowest Labor Participation Rate in 37 Years

"While it has taken a long time, and extraordinary monetary policy actions, the U.S. economy is now close to full employment..."

Stanley Fischer, Vice Chairman Federal Reserve, Monetary Policy In the US and Developing Countries, 30 June 2015

 

While officialdom celebrates the unemployment rate falling to 5.3%, even a cursory look at the numbers today tells the real story for those who would look at them.

Wage growth in the latest month was 0.0%. That is consistent with a long trend of wage stagnation.

Non-Farm payrolls came in light, and the prior month was revised sharply lower from 280,000 to 254,000.  But it made for a good cheery headline last month.

For a more contemporary number, new unemployment claims rose to 281,000 and continuing unemployment claims rose to 2,264,000.

The reason that the unemployment percentage is falling is that as more unemployed workers fall off the roles of unemployment compensation the government stops counting them as ready to work. 

People become discouraged by the bleak prospects of finding gainful employment, and they even fall further into the 'off the books' economy that is a portion of the decay caused by policy errors of fiscal blockheadedness and monetary largesse for the one percent.

And the sign of economic vigor and the breadth of economic recovery, the labor participation rate has fallen to a 37 year low.

And the spokesperson comes down from the big house and assures us that the President is thinking about what to do about this terrible situation every day.  He has certainly been mulling this over for a long time.  And in fairness, most of the Congress could care less about what happens to anyone who does not have a lackey sitting in their waiting room without a sack full of 'campaign donations' and honorariums.  Oh they may talk a good game, but at the end of the day, they are getting paid.

 

We are now in the seventh year of  The Recovery™.

 

I know, let's shove a corporatist trade agreement, trading jobs for corporate profits, down the nation's throat over the people's strong objections, and call it a jobs creator in true Orwellian fashion, while transforming the US into a nation of insecure, underpaid servants.

 

Oh, well done.

Non-Farm Payrolls Report for October - Birth Death Model to the Rescue

As you may have already heard there was a 'miss' in the new jobs added in the October Non-Farm Payrolls Report.

There were some other troubling aspects in that report that I will discuss in the stock commentary tonight, but I did wish to point out an outlier in the way in which the number was constructed.

As you can see in the first chart below, the number of jobs added in the BLS Birth-Death Model was higher than the usual number we have seen for the past six years. 

This is certainly not the worst outlier.  As you can see, April 2008 was a banner month for imaginary jobs, with which to welcome the new President.

This number is the estimate of how many jobs were added or subtracted by new or small businesses not captured in ordinary reporting.   In my mind, it is such a creature of estimation as to just be a 'plug.'

In the second chart I show the 'headline number' of jobs added with the seasonalized number of imaginary jobs from the Birth Death model subtracted out.

As a reminder, the month to month variations in the headline number are of primary interest to politicians and the stock markets, and will likely be changed and revised quite a bit in the future, when no one seems to care. A more meaningful number is the twelve month moving average. But that gives less opportunity to game stocks and grab headlines.

And as an aside, the headline unemployment rate, which continued 'to improve' is a disgraceful indicator that ought to be ashamed to go out in public, as it so grossly misstates the underlying economic reality of things.  It is like the Dow Jones Industrial Average of economic indicators.  They both throw out all that they define as 'losers' to make their numbers look better.

It does add some volatility which is why I think that the Birth-Death estimate is just a plug created by the BLS statisticians.

And in this report, it appears they were very generous in assuming the number of jobs that were added.  I wonder how they justify this?

Non-Farm Payrolls Report - Small Business Creation Boomed In October

Did new small business jobs creation boom in October during the government shutdown/default crisis?

Well, you might think so by looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics 'Birth-Death' model report contained in today's October Non-Farm Payrolls Report.

According to the Birth Death Adjustment there were 126,000 jobs added in October. And what an October it was apparently. These are the most new jobs added for any October going back to 2003, which is as far back as my own spreadsheet goes.

A more usual number might be around 103,000 or less. So, someone thinks it was a strong October jobs market.

You can look at the historical Birth-Death Model numbers from 2000-2012 here. And there is a list of Frequently Asked Questions here.

As I have cautioned in the past, the Birth Death number is added to the Non-Seasonally adjusted number, and then seasonally adjusted. So it is not a 'pure addition.'

The Non-Farm Payrolls report contains very large numbers, on the order of 137+ million jobs which are estimated and deseasonalized, and then further revised for the next two months. So reacting strongly to a particular monthly jobs report is a bit of a Wall Street and political game.

What is more important is the trend in the number of jobs, and the quality of the jobs, both in hours worked and hourly compensation.

Another statistics worth noting is the Labor Force Participation Rate.  There is a fairly good commentary on that data from this Payrolls report here.  There was a similar issue with the Households Report since it dealt with the layoffs from the government shutdown differently than the headline NFP report. 

As an aside, when I hear some financier talking about 'the new normal,' as they were on financial television today, it makes me want to gag.  They are attempting to justify the results of their fraud and financial repression as a necessity, just business as usual. There is nothing 'normal' about this current economic environment.  We are in a financialized society where big money dominates public policy for its own ends.

Getting back to the Non-Farm Payrolls number, the big hoohah question is always, 'Is the government lying?' I think it is fair to say that they are certainly putting their best foot forward, in this and quite a number of things.

I am a little more concerned about the lies that take the US into wars of aggression to be frank. But economic deception can have very bad long term effects when coupled with bad economic policy decisions such as those we are seeing today, that are propagating and even increasing an inherently unstable economy.

All things considered, and not just the numbers in this report,  the recovery is weak, and real median wages do not support any sustainable recovery.  Inequity is increasing, and policy supports and subsidizes this growing inequality in both political and economic power.

Keep an eye on the real median wage, and you will have some indication on how the American public is faring. Although the calculation of inflation is fraught with the fog of politics. John Williams of Shadowstats has done some excellent work in this area.

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery.

And that is the bottom line.

In this case the smaller the seasonality factor the bigger the jobs increase because the raw number is being divided by and reduced in September and October to arrive at the seasonal adjustment.  But there are so many estimates involved that the answer really lies in the trends and even more importantly the quality of the jobs.

Non-Farm Payrolls Report - Dodgy Seasonality In Search of Goldilocks

Today's Non-Farm Payrolls report was interesting because with the revision to last month we have two months of almost exactly 195,000 jobs added, with 199,000 in the month prior to that.

This is remarkable 'regularity' for three months in hitting what might be termed a 'goldilocks' number: not too hot, not too cold.

There was something that jumped out of the numbers.  The seasonality adjustment deviated enough from the past two June actual adjustments to add 75,000 jobs to the headline number.

As you may recall, at this time of the year, the jobs growth is on the high side in the non-adjusted number because of the huge amount of summer jobs that are added, whether they be in the form of working students or construction work, or the favorite, leisure and hospitality sector for a nation where an increasing number of people will be 'in service.'

A low side factor in adjusting those high numbers in seasonality will result in a much higher 'headline number,' and it does not take all that much since the raw numbers are in the millions and the headline number is in the thousands.

As you may recall I do not sweat the small deviations in the statistics, because that is in the nature of the beast, and averages are simply averages.

But it does appear with this latest rather large deviation that the headline numbers are being 'managed' to some extent.  How much is hard to say because there are certainly a number of variables in deciding what seasonality factor is to be used.  But it smells like the pursuit of a goldilocks result.

This does reinforce my more consistent message that it is the trend that is important, and not the numbers du jour, that are of primary benefit to those who use them to shove prices around in the financial markets. 

And rather than just count the number of jobs of any quality or type, it is probably more useful to look at the median wage.  

There will be no sustainable recovery until most people have jobs that pay a livable wage, and are not subject to the fees and hidden 'bite' of a corrupt financial system and a corporatized healthcare system.
 

h/t ZH