Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - La Belle Aurore - We'll Always Have Paris

 

"You might think that parking your money in a big bank like JP Morgan Chase would insulate you from fraud.  It’s just the opposite.  The big banks are the biggest perpetrators of financial fraud – fraud that affects millions of us, either directly or indirectly, on an ongoing basis.  While they are wrist slaps when properly scaled, you can see the list of 'settlements' made between the government and the big banks here.  These 'settlements,' the aftermath of Wall Street's near production of a second Great Depression, entailed not a single criminal indictment.  The top two repositories of banksters, based on the number of settlements, are Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase.

The banks engage in fraud for two reasons.  First, they profit from swindling the public.  Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique.  They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions."

Laurence Kotlikoff, When Banksters Buy Regulators and Prosecutors, Forbes, October 21, 2014


"It’s bad enough that two trial lawyers have written a book [cited above] comparing Dimon’s leadership of the bank to the Gambino crime family, and Bloomberg News spilling the secrets coming out of the Chicago precious metals trial, but now Dimon is likely to see new headlines linking his name to questionable payments to Tony Blair and unknown others."

Pam and Russ Martens, JPM Whistleblower Cites Payments to Tony Blair, Wall Street on Parade, August 3, 2022


“Berlin.  I used to love this old city.  But that was before it had caught sight of its own reflection and taken to wearing corsets laced so tight that it could hardly breathe.  I loved the easy, carefree philosophies, the cheap jazz, the vulgar cabarets and all of the other cultural excesses that characterized the Weimar years, and made Berlin seem like one of the most exciting cities in the world.”

Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir: March Violets


“We'll always have Paris.”

Howard Koch, screenwriter, Casablanca

 

Stocks were in risk on mode today, for whatever reason one wishes to imagine in order to rationalize its irrationality.

The Dollar was up marginally.

Gold and silver were hit lower again as is customary ahead of a non-farm payrolls report.

The amount of criminality and corruption in the US financial system should never be underestimated.

Why the American people allow themselves to be so easily distracted by divisive social controversies while being robbed blind by the kleptocracy is almost amazing.  

But there is historical precedent.  We know it, but we just cannot see it in ourselves, yet.

We are canning tomatoes tonight, and I did the blanching and peeling on eight quarts of San Marzanos.

Even with all the lack of rain, a proper drought in the past month, the garden is doing very well.

I have a huge pot of green beans that I am making 'West Virginia style.'  My wife's maternal grandmother was from there and she always called them that.    

Basically you fry bacon and saute an onion in a big pot and then steam the green beans down into them all, cooking out the liquid so that the beans are sauteed as well.   Its very good especially if you have more mature beans that are not suitable for steaming.  Try to pull off the strings before cooking.

My mind kept returning to Paris today.   The last time I was there was in 1992, when I was attending a graduate business seminar at ESSEC concerning the proposed European Union.  I think the slogan at the time was 'EU 92.'

The queen was tagging along on this trip and had a grand time, although she never went on a business trip again with me, as leaving the newly born young man with her parents was jarring for her.

Daisy gave the young man his first face licks today  He was beaming.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Blue Skies - Forget 'Plastics' Wall Street Says 'Pivot'

 

"J. P. Morgan and Andrew Mellon made their billions through inter locking directorates and outright ownership of hundreds of nationally prominent enterprises.  Glass-Steagall is one crucial piece of a litany of legislation designed to place checks and balances on the concentration of financial resources. To repeal it would be tantamount to bringing back the days of the robber barons.   The unbridled activities of those gifted financiers crumbled under the dynamic forces of the capital marketplace.  If you take away the checks, the market forces will eventually knock the system off balance."

Mark D. Samber, End Bank Law and Robber Barons Ride Again, NY Times, March 5, 1995


"In 1999, on signing Gramm-Leach-Bliley into law, Clinton said, 'This is a day we can celebrate as an American day' and that 'the Glass-Steagall law is no longer appropriate for the economy in which we live' and 'today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down these antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority' and 'This is a very good day for the United States.'"

Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Clinton on Deregulation


"There is no reason to believe either equity swaps or credit derivatives can influence the price of the underlying assets any more than conventional securities trading does."

Alan Greenspan, July 24, 1998, Testimony on the Regulation of OTC Derivatives


"But bad economics was only a symptom of the real problem: secrecy. Smart people are more likely to do stupid things when they close themselves off from outside criticism and advice."

Joseph Stiglitz, What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis, April 17, 2000


"It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud.   The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident."

Charles H. Ferguson


“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair


"We feel that fundamentally Wall Street is sound, and that for people who can afford to pay for them outright, good stocks are cheap at these prices."

Goodbody and Company, The New York Times, October 25, 1929

The market read between the lines of the FOMC decision and in particular Chairman Powell's remarks and assumed that the Fed is in a pivot to a less hawkish stance on interest rates.

And so gold and particularly silver rallied.

Stocks went stratospheric.

The Dollar dumped back to the 106 handle.

Whether this interpretation of the Fed's intentions is valid or not remains to be seen.  

Certainly eyes will be on the data,  

After hours the corporate earnings reports were a very mixed bag.

Tomorrow we will be getting an advance look at 2Q GDP.

Regardless of this backward look, history suggests that we are heading into a recession. 

Unless this time is different.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Aspirations

 

"It is the time of the harvest, and the reaper cuts into the ripe grain with wide strokes.  Mourning takes up her abode in the country cottages, and there is no one to dry the tears of the mothers.  Yet Hitler feeds those people whose most precious belongings he has stolen and whom he has driven to a meaningless death with lies.

Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie.  When he says peace, he means war, and when he blasphemously uses the name of the Almighty, he means the power of evil, the fallen angel, Satan.  His mouth is the foul maw of Hell, and his power is at bottom accursed.  True, we must conduct a struggle against the Nazi terrorist state with rational means; but whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war.

Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element:  The struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist.

Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate.

Everywhere, and at times of greatest trials, men have appeared, prophets and saints who cherished their freedom, who preached the One God and who with His help brought the people to a reversal of their downward course.  Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenseless against the principle of evil.  He is a like rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air."

Please distribute this as widely as possible.

The White Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich, 1942

“"It is very easy to get drunk with hate. Hate is like the glass of whisky which is given to the soldiers before a bayonet charge. Whisky stimulates but does not nourish. Hate is not creative, only love is creative.

No one in the world can change truth.  What we can do and and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it.  The real conflict is the inner conflict.  Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love.  And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”

Maximilian Kolbe, executed at Auschwitz, 14 August 1941


"The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is all about."

Fulton J. Sheen

 

Stocks tried to shake off the bad earnings report from Snap, which cast doubt on the health of the online advertising milieu.

And some of the big tech regulars are announcing hiring freezes.

Next week the big tech heavyweights will be rolling out their earnings reports.  That may likely set the tone for the week.

And the Fed will be meeting again.   

Gold and silver rose with the continuing Dollar drift lower.

Gold managed to hold on to some of its gains, but silver fell with equities and finished up flat on the week.

Most investors will find it more practical to play the long game with gold and silver, and hold it without leverage for the longer term. 

Wall Street is a corrupting and poorly policed casino.

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

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Shall We Stop This Bleeding? - A Shining City on a Hill

 

"It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue, and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice.  Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character."

Joseph Heller, Catch 22


"Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress.  By attempting to gratify their desires we have in the results of our legislation arrayed section against section, interest against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commotion which threatens to shake the foundations of our Union."

Andrew Jackson, Message to the Senate On the Veto of the Second Bank of the United States, 1832


"Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires.   You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration.  We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel


"I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.   I do not mean that they may not wish to come out of hell, but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good.   They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved."

C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Stocks slumped badly today, purportedly on a warning from SNAP and the economic data from this morning, which fell a bit short on the PMI.

Unsurprisingly, they managed to take back quite a bit of their losses in the afternoon trade. 

The Dollar fell further, dropping into the 101 handle. 

Gold and silver rallied, and held most of it. 

Tomorrow is a not inconsequential option expiration for precious metals on the Comex. 

Dolly will be going in for surgery tomorrow, and her return will most likely happen at the end of the day. 

Old age is no joke, even for good little dogs. 

So unless something unexpected happens, there will likely be no commentary tomorrow night. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Old As Babylon, And Evil As Sin - Comex Option Expiration

 

"The whole town and all its inhabitants are quite drowned in carnival din, masks and confetti.  And on top of that the news of the Reichstag fire.  Dancing on a volcano."

Alban Berg, Letter from Berlin, September 1, 1933


“When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically.  They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission.  Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom


"There are so many ways of escaping from that which one fears, and not the least of these is hatred.”

Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir


"When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.  

The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population.  It limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination."

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works

"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

Thomas Clement Douglas


"Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all the objective, logical considerations, we find that which goes beyond the merely rational: the struggle against evil, against the servants of the antichrist. 

Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; and when he yields to the forces of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on and on to the next and to the next, at a furiously accelerating rate."

Die Weiße Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich, 1942


“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”

C. S. Lewis


Stocks were able to rally today, and managed to hold on to the gains and go out near the highs.

The Dollar declined back to the bottom of the 102 handle.

Gold and silver rallied well, but were sold back down during the afternoon, still managing to hold on to some of their gains.

There will be a fairly significant precious metals option expiration on the Comex this Wednesday the 25^th.

 Pricing shenanigans are customary.    It's what they do.

Have a pleasant evening.