Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - As a Testimony to the Nations

 

"Financial predators, on the other hand, are usually narcissistic and audacious criminals.  They regularly have an extreme sense of entitlement coupled with high self-efficacy.  Many of them have a charismatic quality and are preternaturally persuasive.  Financial predators are commonly shameless and quite adept serial liars.  They perceive themselves having near unlimited guile and resourcefulness to extricate themselves out of any compromising situations."

Russ Alan Prince, Unmasking Financial Predators, Forbes 2017

"...over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful (though sometimes badly mismanaged) industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry.

If allowed to continue, this process will turn the United States into a declining, unfair society with an impoverished, angry, uneducated population under the control of a small, ultrawealthy elite. Such a society would be not only immoral but also eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism.

Thus far, both political parties have been remarkably clever and effective in concealing this new reality. In fact, the two parties have formed an innovative kind of cartel — an arrangement I have termed America’s political duopoly. Both parties lie about the fact that they have each sold out to the financial sector and the wealthy.  So far both have largely gotten away with the lie, helped in part by the enormous amount of money now spent on deceptive, manipulative political advertising.  But that can’t last indefinitely; Americans are getting angry, and even when they’re misguided or poorly informed, people have a deep, visceral sense that they’re being screwed.

I have no problem with people becoming billionaires — if they got there by winning a fair race, if their accomplishments merit it, if they pay their fair share of taxes, and if they don’t corrupt their society.  But that’s not how most of the people mentioned in this book became wealthy.  Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked.  And they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy have the opportunity to become successful.  That’s what I have a problem with.  And I think most people agree with me." 

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation, 2012

"It is never really between them and you, but between you and yourself, between you and your God.  No act of kindness is wasted.  You store them in your heart, and these are the only things that you will take with you when the day is done.  It is how you rise above the darkness, and become human."

Jesse, Even In a Time of Vanity and Greed, 5 May 2013

"Do not be deceived, for God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, that will he also reap."

Galatians 6:7


Trump sparked the equity markets today with yet another whopper about taking a pause from bombing Iran to work on a peace Memorandum of Understanding. 

More likely this is a courtesy to Elon Musk, who is squeezing out a whopping pig of an IPO tomorrow for SpaceX at a wildly confabulated evaluation of $135 a share, in his never-ending quest to become a trillionaire. 

The Street knows this. They absolutely know what is what about all of it.  Trump and the Congress know that he is lying through his teeth.

They don't care.  They just want to get paid. They all have the same moral sensibility, which essentially none.

"Iran directly rejects Trump's new claim that he reached an agreement to "cancel tonight's strikes" on Iran as baseless, saying no agreement has been approved at all, and all of Trump's words should be disregarded like all his previous 38 times deal-imminent announcements over two months, per Tasnim. A senior Israeli official also tells Channel 12 they are 'not aware of any agreement being reached'."

So, stocks rallied hard after Trump made his 39th announcement of an imminent peace deal.

Gold and silver rallied.  Bitcoin rallied a bit.

VIX fell.

SpaceX is coming out tomorrow.

"You are the very cause of your ignorance, yourselves.  You put away the light, yourselves; you first pluck out both your own eyes, yourselves; and after that other men’s too, so that the blind may lead the blind, until you both fall into the pit.”    Thomas More, 1535

And the Band played on. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Witness to Injustice - True Nihilism

 

"We cannot speak to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep."

Carl von Ossietzky, editor of Die Weltbühne, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935


"During the years of the Weimar Republic Carl von Ossietzky's political commentaries gained him a reputation as a fervent supporter of democracy and a pluralistic society.  He was convicted in 1931 of revealing state secrets, the illegal German militarization, and served 18 months in prison.  He was released in 1932.

Ossietzky continued to be a constant warning voice against militarism and Nazism when, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor and the Nazi dictatorship began.  Ossietzky was one of a very small group of public figures who continued to speak out against the now ruling Nazi Party.

On 28 February 1933, after the Reichstag fire, he was taken by the police and held without trial in Spandau prison.  He was detained afterwards at the concentration camp KZ Esterwegen near Oldenburg.

He was visited while in the camp by Swiss historian Carl Jacob Burkhardt, as a representative of the International Red Cross.  Burkhardt described Ossietzky as 'a deadly pale broken creature, who seemed numb, with one eye swollen over, and his teeth broken.'

Carl von Ossietzky's international rise to fame began in 1936 when, already suffering from serious illness that was not being treated, he was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize after an international campaign of people who hoped to achieve his release through this recognition and honor. 

 The award divided public opinion, and was generally condemned by conservative forces.  The leading conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten argued in an editorial that Ossietzky was a criminal.

He was largely forgotten during the period of favorable international regard for the Third Reich, sparked in part by the propaganda campaign for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the German 'economic miracle.'

Ossietzky died in the Nordend hospital in Berlin-Pankow, still in police custody, on 4 May 1938, of tuberculosis and from the after-effects of the abuse he suffered in the concentration camps.  In 1938 Time Magazine named Adolf Hitler as their 'Man of the Year.'"

Jesse, In memory of Journalist Carl von Ossietzky, 16 June 2012


"Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute?  They put to death those who foretold the coming of the righteous one, whose betrayers and murderers you have become."

Acts 7:52


“Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love."

Julian Assange, Witnessing


Commodities were slammed today, with oil, gold and silver taking a hard sell-off, purportedly because of a 'disappointment' on Wall Street at the level of Chinese economic stimulus.

Smells like teen spirit.

Stocks themselves were trading weakly despite the much better than expected housing data.

A true opium of the people is the belief that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our lawlessness, our selfishness, and even murders that we are not going to be judged.

Historically the cup is filling,  and this is when we might see a reversal begin to unfold, call it karma, nemesis, fortune, judgement, or natural consequence as you prefer.

But for now, let's see what the rest of the week brings.

Have a pleasant evening.

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 - The Cycle of Selfish Indifference and Objectifying The Other

 

“By intensity of hatred nations create in themselves the characters they imagine in their enemies.  Hence it is that all passionate conflicts result in the interchange of characteristics.”

George William Russell

"What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed people will not know who is responsible, and when the problems get bad enough some one person will come forward and say: ‘Give me total power and I will solve this problem.’"

David Souter, US Supreme Court Justice

“We cannot understand Fascism, but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard, because what happened can happen again.  For this reason, it is everyone's duty to reflect on what happened. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.  More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

Primo Levi

"Communism and fascism or naziism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority."

James A. C. Brown

"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

"A small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom.”

Paul A. Lombardo, Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell

"The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police and the health and workers’ administration.   The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious or in need of help.  They came from psychiatric clinics and childrens' hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps."

 Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin, Commemorative Tablet

Stocks did the usual drop and then drift back up, going out nearly unchanged at the close.

Earnings are starting to come in more heavily now.

The VIX has fallen to a level not seen since the beginning of 2022.

Gold and silver were slammed this morning in a preliminary observance of the upcoming stock options expiration.

They recovered into the close.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

The Dollar did a similar pop and drop.

Proceed with caution. 

To paraphrase George William Russell, we become what we hate.

And then we sacrifice the weak and the helpless and the other to the Moloch of our passionate emptiness. 

The Iowa Senate decided in an early morning decision to roll back their anti-abuse of child labor laws on behalf of the Molochs of business. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Cult of Mammon - Old as Babylon and Evil as Sin

 

"McKinsey advised Purdue how to avoid FDA and pharmacy restrictions. They later advised Purdue on how to enter the market for opioid rescue and treatment medications, because McKinsey knew that people were overdosing and dying and getting sick from OxyContin.  So, McKinsey's fingers are all over this.   It's exactly that, profit at all costs.

McKinsey consultants were about the business of advising their clients on how to make as much money as possible from this deadly epidemic.  It shows a callousness that really is beyond the pale.   The fact that they knew — I mean, they knew how dangerous these opioids were, that they went so far as to try to propose to Purdue how it could pay insurance companies rebates for every patient who O.D.ed on OxyContin is gross.  It's disturbing."

Maura Healey, A Powerful Corporate Consulting Firm Helped to Create the Opioid Crisis

"In their heavily self-biased opinion, if they want something, by rights it should be their's.  So, nothing if not opportunistic, they take from public and private coffers alike whatever they think they can get away with.  And given their grandiose sense of self, they're inclined to believe they can get away with most anything."

Leon F. Seltzer

"Market Fundamentalism has its own economic orthodoxy that, for the most part, is unquestioningly accepted.  It is an idolatrous religion, because it makes a god out of the Market.  It puts money above all else.  This religion has its own high priests, those economic advisors, corporate executives, and government officials who make the rules and oversee the functioning of the economic system as a whole.  It has its own saints, people who have attained the success that the system promises."

Sharon Delgado, Shaking the Gates of Hell

"As everything in what used to be called creation becomes a commodity, human beings begin to look at one another, and at themselves, in a funny way, and they see price tags."

Harvey Cox, The Market As God

"Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of The Unspeakable.  This is what too few are willing to see."

Thomas Merton

"It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us: the lesson of the fearsome word and thought defying banality of evil.”

Hannah Arendt

"You put away the light, yourselves; you first pluck out both your own eyes, yourselves; and after that other men’s too, so that the blind may lead the blind, until you both fall into the pit.”

Thomas More, The Sadness of Christ


This prevalence of self-deception and disregard for truth and ethical considerationss amongst the world's elite is nothing new.  It is the old and cyclical ascendancy of Mammon, which seems to rise in every 'gilded age,'  

It infects the whole of society, and is marked by the rising prominence of disordered minds and hardened hearts, who are drawn into shameless servitude to Moloch and the darkness of this world.

And with the darkness comes madness, and the madness serves none but itself.

Even among the faithful, the taint of the gospel of prosperity has caused the love of many hearts to draw inwards, lose their way, and grow cold with worldly pride and selfishness.

Do not be deceived, for God is not mocked.  Whatever a man sows, so shall he reap.

Today was highlighted by economic weakness and uncertainty in Europe and especially in the UK.

As such the Dollar, the douleur du monde, moved sharply higher by comparison and of course the design and weighting of the DX index.

Stocks managed to turn their usual morning slump around and finished a little higher in the green.

Gold and silver were whipped lower again.

Some of the miners were starting to show a little resilience by the afternoon.

Friday will be a stock index option expiration.

Next week on the 25th there will be option expirations for the metals on the Comex.

I watched the HBO documentary, Four Hours at the Capitol, today. 

It was well done and informative.  Well worth watching if you can.

The madness serves none but itself.

Have a pleasant evening.