Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Wehret den Anfängen - Indicators Flashing Red

"To reduce a complex argument to its bare bones, since the Depression, the twin forces of managed democracy and Superpower have opened the way for something new under the sun: 'inverted totalitarianism,' a form every bit as totalistic as the classical version but one based on internalized co-optation, the appearance of freedom, political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, and relying more on “private media” than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda that reinforces the official version of events.

It is inverted because it does not require the use of coercion, police power and a messianic ideology as in the Nazi, Fascist and Stalinist versions (although note that the United States has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison — 751 per 100,000 people — of any nation on Earth). According to Wolin, inverted totalitarianism has 'emerged imperceptibly, unpremeditatedly, and in seeming unbroken continuity with the nation’s political traditions.'

The main objectives of managed democracy are to increase the profits of large corporations, dismantle the institutions of social democracy (Social Security, unions, welfare, public health services, public housing and so forth), and roll back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. Its primary tool is privatization [and deregulation].

Chalmers Johnson, Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled


“Be the person that your dog thinks you are.”

George Eliot aka Mary Ann Evans

This is what they call the 'dog days' of summer market trading.

Even the spokesmodels pom-poms were drooping today along with volumes, although they did manage a 'new highs' exclamation after the close.

And yes, stocks were marginally higher on light volumes.

Gold and silver were pretty much unchanged as the Dollar and Bonds moved a tad higher.

What is the old saying of Jesse Livermore? 'Never short a dull market.'

Citibank turned in lackluster results today, with profits based largely on one timers and cost cutting. The banking sector was a drag all day, although Citi managed to gain some ground finally. Go figure.

Gold continues to wind within a symmetrical triangle. Stocks continue to drift higher on lazy algo pumping.

The darkness continues to spread and gain force, as the unspeakable slowly becomes customary, and then finally acceptable.   If you to wish to never see that madness again, then wehret den anfängen, stop it in the beginning. 

I have included two charts immediately below that suggest that a global recession is on the horizon.

I was busy with people working here all day.  I really don't like to have anyone come over and do these things, but sometimes you just have to do it.

I had not expected them to come today, but they called early this morning and said they had a cancellation so would I like to have them come over.   It was ok with me.  I like to get these things done and over.

But besides directing traffic,  I did manage to keep busy with many little things that have been on my 'to do' list, now that most of the big things have been done.

But as you well know, when working outside in this kind of heat and humidity it does not take long before the thought of an ice cold glass of tonic water and lime on ice becomes an almost irresistible attraction.

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

AC /on.

Have a cool and pleasant evening.

Financial Crisis III: Stores of Precious Metals in Trusts and Funds - Junk Bond and Credit Market Concerns

Here is the state of the gold and silver holdings in trusts and funds.

In other matters, there were two articles about risks in the credit markets that caught my eye this weekend.

These *could be* stories spread by market operators who are hoping for turmoil in the junk bond markets.

Or on the other hand this could be signs of something which some have feared would be approaching, as we seem to keep repeating the behaviours that prompted the last two financial crises this century.

The truth is hard to discern these days— it has few friends, and even fewer willing to stand for it.

Nevertheless, I thought it would be appropriate to bring them to your attention, for what it is worth.

Greenwich Time, A New Credit Bubble Gets Ready to Burst, May 31, 2019

The Street, U.S. Officials Meet in Secret Over Junk-Loan Frenzy as Recession Alarms Flash, June 1, 2019

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - An Apéritif to a Banquet of Consequences - Dow Industrials Drop 700+ Points

"What is most offensive is not their lying— one can always forgive lying— lying can be a delightful thing, for it leads to truth.  What is offensive is that they lie, and worship their own lying."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment


“A true opium of [worldly] people is a belief in nothingness after death— the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, and murders that we are not going to be judged.”

Czesław Miłosz

Stocks continued selling today. What was particularly discouraging for the bulls is that there was no afternoon rally.   In fact, the selling accelerated in the last hours of trading, and the major indices went out on the lows, and on heavier volume.

One might point to the new tariffs to come on China, and fears of a trade war. Earlier this week one would look to the Fed, and talk about the rising interest rates, probably the most carefully telegraphed monetary decision in history.

Perhaps it was the latest antics of Facebook, in the general growth of the abuse of privacy of the public by government and their corporations. One might also look to the dysfunction in Washington, and the misguided policies that have been crippling the middle and lower classes to the advantage of the one percent.

Let's skip the usual bullshit exercise of identifying the reasons for this sell off for the moment shall we?

Certain financial assets, like the major stock indices, led narrowly by the FANG tech stocks and the financials, had been lifted to new heights by what certainly looked like the utter mispricing risks.

And as we have seen in the last two asset bubbles and subsequent financial crises, prices continued rising to even greater over-valuations.  They were lifted on a cloud of misrepresentations and  the purposeful weakening of transparency and regulation, from the purveyors of stocks and their many purveyors of the big lie designed to support the economic status quo.

As I have cautioned,  when this mispricing of risk continued to expand,the 'trigger event' needed to knock the market off its blocks would decrease in required magnitude, until something incidental, or a cluster of rather minor incidents, would be enough to send prices down, and with a vengeance.

So far this latest market decline is what I would call a 'market break' and not a 'crash.'   As a reminder, there was a disquieting market break in March 1929 that was quickly forgotten, until the market breaks of September, culminating in a bloody October.

The Father of Lies

It will not take much for some semi-official group to turn the markets around by buying the SP 500 futures at a key moment.  There is not much fundamental stock picking in this market;  it is all index ETFs and narrowing momentum.

Buying the futures to turn things around could be done by the Fed or some other NGO that is working with their compadres of the revolving door.   One group wants to get rich, and the other wants to not be run out of town on a rail. 

That has been a 'go to' solution since the mid-1990's. It is very possible that stocks will find a bottom, perhaps in a true selling capitulation, and then turn and run back up to perhaps a new high later this year, led by the usual suspects and their aficionados.

But if there is no financial reform, if there is no return to good governance and honesty in the major mechanisms of the financial system which, after all, is the capital allocation heart of any capitalist economy, there will once again be a crash, a staggering correction in prices, for the third time since the year 2000.

There was a very minor flight to safety today. The US Dollar managed to drift slightly higher within its recent trading range. And in the usual manner of the recent currency trading of the precious metals, gold and silver were off a bit in response.

And let us not forget that there will be an option expiration for gold and silver on Monday.

Government bonds caught a bid, which was a bit odd in this interest-raising environment needed because things are just that good in the real economy right?   We certainly don't want any overheating, as in higher wages for working people.

Wall Street will be dropping another IPO into the markets tomorrow in Dropbox, unless they call it off for reason of market conditions.    I suspect that they will try to stabilize the markets while Wall Street squeezes this latest creation out.

This is not going to end well. But if we get another rally, all of this gloom will be forgotten, and it will be bread and circuses and the latest scandals of the rich and frivolous all over again.

And when it really hits the wall, when the financial system is thoroughly knackered, we can always blame Trump, or Russia.

Have a pleasant evening.

David Cay Johnston: On Crony Capitalism, Control Frauds, and the Gods of Greed and Power

David Cay Johnston is an investigative journalist and author, a specialist in economics and tax issues, and winner of a 2001 Pulitzer Prize.

Since 2009 he has been a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer who teaches the tax, property and regulatory law of the ancient world at Syracuse University College of Law and Whitman School of Management.

Why have you never heard of David Cay Johnston or his ideas before? Why is he almost never interviewed on the mainstream media.

Because in times of general deception, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. And we are in those times, and are caught in a credibility trap.

It is not the same as a coup d'état, but has many of the same appearances and characteristics.

It is the convergence of like minded kleptocrats and the amoral careerists who support whatever status quo that happens to exist. It is the banality of the willing functionary and the bureaucrat, and the inability of a moral center to withstand it.  

Neither austerity or stimulus will work until there is meaningful reform.

Unfettered Capitalism and the Great Crash of 1929

“The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced.

The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not...

When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality.

The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed...

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

"To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society.

For the alleged commodity "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity "man" attached to that tag.

Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation.

Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed...

Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance, as well as its business organization, was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill."

Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944

Clive Boddy: Two Papers on the Destructiveness of Psychopathy in Business and Government

"The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it...For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing."

Simon Wiesenthal

While there are always a certain small portion of the population who have the sorts of destructive bent as described here, normally society acts to restrain them and their more vile impulses.

However, from time to time, the small percentage can gain enough power through ruthlessness and deception to foster an atmosphere that not only tolerates their excesses, but actually holds them up as an example for the young as well.

I think some of this is the winner's curse. A society that enjoys a long period of prosperity begins to think of itself as exceptional. They become so enchanted with who they think they are, that they just simply forget their own past, and begin to believe in myths and illusions. And human memory and education being what they are, they fall victim to the frauds and deceptions and darker impulses that have plagued them in the past.

Conversely, a society that has been through a series of terrible ordeals can often become simply desperate, almost bestial. They make take a similar path but much more cynically. It is not that they are deluded, they simply do not care.

When the power of greed in business finds a suitable match in the lust for power in the political arena, that partnership can seem almost unstoppable for quite some time. It becomes increasingly difficult to effect reform from within because so many of the more effective elements of society become corrupted and cynical to the point of apathy.

In a word, the governance of society becomes an organized hypocrisy engaged in systematic destruction, of not only others but also of society itself, especially as the others either resist more effectively or collapse from sheer exhaustion.

As I have mentioned before, in discussing this with some older fellows who have a bit of a broader personal perspective, and in reading deeply in history and its cycles, it seems as though the West entered into such a cycle, in the 1980's. It is merely reaching its full flower today.

The consequences on society as a whole, if history is any guide, will be profound, even moreso than we have seen so far.

The Implications of Corporate Psychopaths for Business And
Society: An Initial Examination And A Call To Arms
By Clive Boddy

Corporate Psychopaths are managers with no conscience who are willing to lie and are able to present a charming façade in order to gain managerial promotion via a ruthlessly opportunistic and manipulative approach to career advancement.

What the implications of their presence in business organisations are is an area that is relatively new to the area of business and behavioural research. However the presence of Corporate Psychopaths has several implications for work in business research. This paper reviews the concept of Corporate Psychopaths, describes how they may theoretically be present in organisations at senior managerial levels in much larger numbers than their approximately 1% incidence in the general population would suggest and discusses the implications of this for business and society.

The paper defines Corporate Psychopaths as those people working in corporations who are self-serving, opportunistic, ego-centric, ruthless and shameless but who can be charming, manipulative and ambitious. It reviews the recent series of papers and news articles on Corporate Psychopaths and discusses how and why Corporate Psychopaths are drawn to corporations as sources of power, prestige and money. The paper suggests that Corporate Psychopaths are a threat to business performance and longevity because they put their own interests before those of the firm. It also discusses how they are a threat to the development of a sense of corporate social responsibility because they have no sense of guilt, shame or remorse about the consequences of their decisions...

Read the entire paper here.


Journal of Business Ethics
The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis
By Clive Boddy

An understanding of Corporate Psychopaths as expressed in a recent series of papers in this journal and in others, and based on empirical research, has helped to answer the question of how organizations end up with impostors as leaders and how those
organizations are then destroyed from within (Boddy, 2005, 2010a, Boddy et al., 2010a, b).

The event of the Global Financial Crisis has hastened an already changing climate in business research. Commentators are no longer willing to assume that all managers are working selflessly and entirely for the benefit of the organization that employees them, and the study of dark, dysfunctional, or bad leadership has emerged as a theme in
management research (Allio, 2007; Batra, 2007; Boddy, 2006; Clements and Washbrush, 1999).

The onset of the Global Financial Crisis has thus led management researchers to be increasingly interested in researching various aspects of dark leadership in an
attempt to explain the current financial and organizational turmoil around the world. Numerous papers on dark leadership have, for example, been recently reviewed by this author for this journal and it is evident that there are commentators with a deep
knowledge of individual types of dark and dysfunctional leadership and with views on how these people have contributed to the current crisis.

Corporate Psychopaths are one such type of dark manager, and this paper investigates their possible influence on the companies involved in the Global Financial Crisis. This is important because when large financial corporations are destroyed by the
actions of their senior directors, employees lose their jobs and sometimes their livelihoods, shareholders lose their investments and sometimes their
life savings and societies lose key parts of their economic infrastructure. Capitalism also loses some of its credibility.

These corporate collapses have gathered pace in recent years, especially in the western world, and have culminated in the Global Financial Crisis that we are now in. In watching these events unfold it often appears that the senior directors involved walk away with a clean conscience and huge amounts of money.

Further, they seem to be unaffected by the corporate collapses they have created. They present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings, and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done.

They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events are very persuasive in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own continued worth and value. They are happy to walk away from the economic disaster that they have managed to bring about, with huge payoffs and with new roles advising governments how to prevent such economic disasters.

Many of these people display several of the characteristics of psychopaths and some of them are undoubtedly true psychopaths. Psychopaths are the 1% of people who have no conscience or empathy and who do not care for anyone other than themselves.

Some psychopaths are violent and end up in jail, others forge careers in corporations. The latter group who forge successful corporate careers is called Corporate Psychopaths. Who psychopaths are and who Corporate Psychopaths are, is discussed further below...

Read the entire paper here.

Evil does exist, and its power ebbs and flows. Or rather, evil exists, but as the absence of something else, the deficiency of goodness and humanity. So it can remain resilient through long droughts because it has no substance of its own to sustain, but awaits only for the weakness or indolent apathy of society to rise again.

One can see this clearly in history, although the skeptic will be quick to point out that all seems dismal, since nothing human is ever perfect.

Still, there are degrees in all things, and the weight of goodness often restrains the impulse of evil, although evil seems to remain ever resilient, never conquered, only sleeping to take a turn another day.   Consider the instances of genocide and widespread impoverishment in the last century alone for example, if you will like to see the corridors in which true darkness dwells and the madness is unleashed upon the world.  And then tell us of the natural goodness of men and their works.

Goodness is not a constant state, or even an end in this world, but a way to an end. It is not an objective to be reached, but a way of life that requires continual attention and remembering.

"...Far be it from any of us to be of those simple ones, who are taken in that snare which is circling around us! Far be it from us to be seduced with the fair promises in which Satan is sure to hide his poison!

Do you think he is so unskillful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the truth? No; he offers you baits to tempt you. He promises you civil liberty; he promises you equality; he promises you trade and wealth; he promises you a remission of taxes; he promises you reform.

This is the way in which he conceals from you the kind of work to which he is putting you; he tempts you to rail against your rulers and superiors; he does so himself, and induces you to imitate him; or he promises you illumination, he offers you knowledge, science, philosophy, enlargement of mind. He scoffs at times gone by; he scoffs at every institution which reveres them.

He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

J.H.Newman, The Times of Antichrist