Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Mais où sont les neiges d'antan? - Holiday Weekend

 

"'He asked him for the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?'  Peter's feelings were hurt because Jesus asked him for a third time, ‘Do you love me?’  And Peter said, ‘Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you.’  Jesus said, ‘Feed my sheep.'

'Verily, verily, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself, and walked where you liked.  But when you are old, you will stretch out your your hands, and another will dress you, and will take you where you would not like to go.'

Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.  Then he said to him at last, ‘Follow me.’

John 21:17-19

"Where are the princes of this world, and those who lorded it over the creatures of the earth?  Those who made sport of the birds of the air, and hoarded up riches in which they trusted.  Those for whom there is no limit to their greed, those who schemed to get more wealth, and were always anxious about their possessions.

Now there is no trace of them. They have vanished down into the bowels of the earth, and others have risen to take their place."

Baruch 3:16-19

"Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine,
Qu'Anglois bruslerent à Rouen;
Où sont-ilz, Vierge souveraine?
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan."

François Villon, Ballade des dames du temps jadis

And where are they now, the magnificent lords of the world, if nothing but a memory, returned to the earth as dust.   Perhaps they are mixed with dirt under the fingernails of a child, to be plucked out and discarded, with a 'tut tut' from a doting mother. 

The mighty rise and are fallen, but the Word and the Spirit endure. 

 Stocks managed to extend their gains today, with big cap tech leading the charge higher.

The spokesmodels had their pom-poms out, but the chant has changed, from blockchain, blockchain, to AI, AI.

Gold and silver took a bounce back after their recent pummeling for the Comex option expiration.

The inflation indicator PCE came in hot this morning, but the markets ignored it.

After all, AI!

And so VIX fell in the face of such ardent, if clueless and contrived, optimism.

Three day weekend here as the markets are closed on Monday, Memorial Day.

Non-Farm Payrolls for May next Friday.

Have a pleasant weekend.

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan

"Vanity and narcissism — the compulsive need to be admired and praised — undermine one's courage, for one then fights on someone else's conviction rather than one's own."

Rollo May


"Narcissus so himself, himself forsook,
And died to kiss his shadow in the brook."

William Shakespeare


"Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man —
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seemed
To his great heart none other than a God!"

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Tithonus

I had intended to write about the winds of change beginning to rise in Europe, but it is hard to find a proper beginning for such a vast and historic subject. But luckily a reader sent me Grant Williams latest newsletter, which you can read in its entirety here. So I may defer on my own effort, and provide a taste of things to come with this.

As you may recall I have said on any number of occasions that when change comes, it will probably come first at the periphery, as in all great changes in empire. In the east it is generally brutish, sturm und drang.   But watch when it comes to the UK, most likely first amongst the English speaking nations.  The backlash and repression there on the whole will be— polite but comprehensive.

The credibility trap takes its toll over time, and people lose interest in the status quo.   The ruling elite never see it coming, because they are so self-absorbed, enamored of themselves.  Their first reaction is disbelief, and then rage, because how can they be unappreciated, so betrayed, such beneficient gods?

I am not saying that the change will necessarily be for the good, but it will come, just as it did in the 1930's, with very mixed results.

Like so many things that approach the universal nature of art, our reaction to it probably says more about us than it does about it. And perhaps for this effort as well.

And the times, they are a-changin'.

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO Hmmm...
Fight Club
By Grant Williams
01 April 2014

...Elsewhere this past week in Europe, there was another sign of things to come — and this time it played out in the UK as Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg of the pro-European Liberal Democrats threw down the gauntlet to the staunchly anti-European Nigel Farage of UKIP to join him in the first of two live televised debates — ostensibly on whether the UK should remain part of Europe, but in reality a desperate attempt to both blunt the challenge presented by Farage’s surging popularity and at the same time restore some credibility to Clegg’s ailing junior coalition partners.

As regular readers will know, Farage is the very embodiment of the anti-establishment movement. A pint-drinking, chain-smoking everyman who looks like he’d be more at home debating the issues of the day in a London pub than in the European parliament, Farage spent 20 years as a commodity trader and is one of the few politicians amongst the current crop to have a background in the private sector.

Clegg, on the other hand, is the archetypal politician: public school and Oxbridge-educated, related to aristocracy (albeit of the Russian variety), and a man who has been involved in politics for his entire adult life. The debate was fascinating to watch.

Farage’s bluster and soapbox oratory versus the polished politics of Clegg. Farage’s passion and intensity versus Clegg’s measured tone.

In the aftermath, the political pundits had their say on who emerged victorious, and they were unanimous:

Mary Riddell:
No minds will have been changed. The Faragistes who see their champion as the battler against faceless, bloodless, heartless power-brokers will be happy. But Nick won. As he should have. Easily.

Dan Hodges:
Nick Clegg kept calm and stuck to the facts. And it became clear facts are Nigel Farage’s enemy. He became increasingly angry and bombastic. By the end Clegg was engaging easily and effectively with his audience. Nigel Farage appeared to be cracking jokes to amuse only himself. His explanation of his reason for employing his wife was especially embarrassing. Fortunately, by that point, few people in the audience appeared to be listening to him.”

Toby Young:
“Overall, Clegg came across as more in command of the detail (possibly because he’d been briefed by the civil service beforehand) and for that reason I think he edged it.... Farage will certainly have pleased his supporters, but not much more than that.”

So... a humiliating public mauling of poor Nigel. But here’s where it gets interesting. In the Telegraph’s poll more than 81 per cent of readers said they thought Nigel Farage had won the debate.

A YouGov poll found that 57 per cent of people thought Mr Farage won the debate. This is perhaps the most important point.

Regardless of what those who spend their lives around politics believe, the public is ready for change, and they will be very hard to sway unless somehow they feel that quality of their lives can improve drastically — and that is not about to happen.

Measuring political performance by traditional metrics is a waste of time in a world where the people will simply vote for change. We saw it in Greece, we saw it in Spain, and now we’ve seen it in France. Next up, European elections in six weeks’ time.

Public disaffection with the world’s leaders is growing by the day — you can feel it — and nowhere was that made more apparent recently than in Holland last week when Barack Obama, halfway through his tour of Europe, took to the stage alongside Dutch PM Mark Rutte.

Obama, so used to adoring hordes — not only at home, but wherever in the world he is reading a teleprompter giving a soaring lesson in oratory — was presented with the answer to the age-old question about the sound of one hand clapping after he concluded, at a press conference, remarks espousing the USA’s “core values” of privacy, the rule of law, and individual rights. ([See the video below] to watch the most awkward end to a speech since Sally Field accepted the Oscar for Best Actress in 1985.)

People can’t even bring themselves to be polite to the incumbent political class anymore — not even to a rock star like Obama. Make no mistake, from Ukraine to Holland, from the United Kingdom and France to Greece, Italy, and beyond, politicians are under immense pressure to “do something” in order not to lose their grasp on power.

From Nobel to Ignoble

SP 500 Futures - A Closer Look - Miseria Ex Machina

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Tithonus

This is a classic "wash and rinse cycle" within a greater uptrend. Whether it may continue to be so could be determined by the new earnings cycle that begins this week, the dilemma that is Europe, or the ongoing political process of financialisation.

Far from being a capital forming mechanism, the US equity market has been allowed to degenerate, once again, into a vehicle largely dominated by frauds and schemes of wealth transferral.

A person might as well brag of making a fortune in the stock market by short term speculation in the same manner that a first rate pickpocket might boast of making a rich harvest in the town square during some public event, distracting by spreading rumours, alarms, and other misdirection.

Having made their wealth in a generational fraud, the oligarchs mean to keep it by any and all means, including beggaring the world if only to make their own fortunes shine brighter.

This is capitalism in decline, as justice fails, or more precisely, is bought into silent partnership. And the killing of conscience in financial things opens a Pandora's box of maladies of the spirit and the madness of hardened hearts.

And there is no finer symbol of this decline than the current electoral contest, which appears but a Hobson's choice between the corruptly lax magistrate and the pre-eminently audacious highwayman.

Nanex: Investors Need to Realize that the Machines Have Taken Over

Die Mackie Messers Der Wall Street - The Mack the Knives of Wall Street

Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?

I was watching old movies and documentaries last night as a follow up to my recent readings. They also have some contemporary and artistic resonance to today.

Here is a clip that I found interesting. You may be familiar with the music if not the lyrics.

Drei Groschen Oper - Die Moritat von Mackie Messer



The above is a scene from the G. W. Pabst movie version of DreiGroschenOper, or Three Penny Opera, with Ernst Busch as the moritat, or street ballad, singer. I have to admit I find his rendition with the jerking enunciation and exaggerated trills a bit distracting. But this original film excerpt gives people who have only been exposed to the jazz versions a better idea of the original meaning and context.

Here is the same tune, with a spoken introduction, performed by Kurt Gerron, who starred in the live premiere of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's opera at Berlin's Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in August 1928. Gerron played both the street singer and Tiger Brown, the corrupt police chief.



Based on John Gay's satirical Beggar's Opera from 1728, it is set in London just before the coronation of Queen Victoria. The opening night audience, which did not know what to expect, was stunned, demanding encores for almost every song according to eyewitnesses. It was a sensational success that swept Europe, spawning numerous productions, catapulting the authors and actors to fame. Gerron, while remaining a popular character actor, became a successful movie director.

Now it is part of the rustling leaves of history, the voices of ghosts returned, whispers from dead lips.

While watching the 1930 German version of Der Blaue Engel yesterday (with English subtitles as I am not fluent in German) I was reminded that Gerron was third billing as the impresario Kiepert. I had forgotten what a melodramatic piece on morality the movie was, that it launched Dietrich's career, and how riveting a performance is given by Emil Jannings as Herr Dr. Rath. His madness scene is still remarkable, with his high pitched screaming, even in this jaded age of exaggerated emotions and special effects. I find it incredibly prophetic for the German people, and especially the intelligentsia, of that time. They were seduced, and went mad.



One thing always leads to another. If we live here, it does not hurt to get to know the place, before we take our leave.

As you may recall, the 'Weimar Republic' had seventeen governments in fifteen years, and the social and financial disruption had its outlet in the cultural ferment of Berlin.  This phenomenon is brought out fairly well in the CBC documentary, Legendary Sin Cities: Paris, Berlin and Shanghai.

I watched it again this week. If in the 1920's the US was naughty, Paris was voluptuously extravagant, and Berlin was a spasm of idiosyncratic excess.

Actor and director Kurt Gerron had his own very sad end. Although the video clip here merely says he died at Auschwitz in Okt 1944, it does not remind us that just before his death Gerron, himself a Jew, produced a propaganda film documentary, probably under enticement and coercion, for the Nazis about the 'ideal and humane conditions' for the Jewish inmates at Theresienstadt. Such are the ways of the captive mainstream media and the demimonde of the status quo. Mackie, welches war dein Preis?

After it was finished he was shipped to Auschwitz and shot on arrival: advanced profit sharing from the Reich's wages of death. I found a documentary on the internet, Prisoner in Paradise, that speaks to this sad little chapter.

The song of history resonates through time, with like instruments. But what if someone removes all the strings, leaving only empty minds and vacant stares?

I became aware of Brecht as a playwright during a course of study while an undergraduate in university while taking a course in modern drama. I do not remember so much now except that my favorite of Brecht was Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, or simply, Mother Courage.

The Mackie Messers of Wall Street are nothing new. Each generation has the responsibility to rein in its predators. It is just a question of whether anyone will sing a ballad about them after they are gone.

Let's hope someone sings for our children, so they will not forget, even if they are taken by clumsy hands into insensate barbarity again.

And what if the Café closes, and the lights go out all over Europe again? Our culture is now so artificial, it will not even remain as dust. But the word, and its song and those who hear it, never die, outliving the artifice and most monumental objects of men. And so there is always room for joy and optimism, and even love among the ruins, but not despair.

In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
I am great Ozymandias, saith the stone,
The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand. — The City's gone,
Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race,
Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Horace Smith, Ozymandias, 1818

Goldman To Advise Greece On the Sale of Strategic Assets to Avert Debt Crisis

And then come the jackals...



Note: obviously this is a cartoon, and Greece is not selling the Parthenon, yet.

But it does carry a more serious sentiment that was known in English literature as 'tragic transcience,' at least when I studied it in university. It may best be embodied in the renaissance poem "A Litany in Time of Plague" by Thomas Nashe which goes "Beauty is but a flower, Which wrinkles will devour; Brightness falls from the air; Queens have died young and fair; Dust hath closed Helen's eye, I am sick, I must die, Lord have mercy on us.”

Here is a later expression of this same thought that I most recently came across again in a short poem by Rudyard Kipling titled "Recessional."

"Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!"

Rudyard Kipling

How are the mighty fallen...

And then of course there is Shelley's classic--

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Gold: Until the Banks Are Restrained and Balance Is Restored

Gold has apparently broken out of a big inverse Head and Shoulder formation, possibly an ascending triangle if you prefer that for reliability. In combination, as they often are, this is a powerful sign of buying pressure, accumulation and a sharp rise in price.

The targets we saw on the Gold Long Term chart posted here on September 15 call out a range of targets for this leg in the bull market from 1310 to 1350 level.



Here is a closer look at an updated chart showing the successful breakout from the Inverse H&S pattern. The target of 1310 now seems more confident for this leg of the gold bull market.

The formation will be in play as long as the 'secondary neckline' is not violated on a weekly close.



It is always more difficult to move from the charts to a more fundamental macro analysis and ask, "What does this mean? What is the market telling us with these sharp moves higher in gold and silver?"

And of course there is the most common question of all, "How far can it go?"

This is where the controversy begins, because gold is stepping on the toes of those who misunderstand the existing forces of demand deflation and monetary inflation in the United States, who fundamentally do not understand money and wealth, and their differences.

It is also bothering the financial commentators and analysts who, in addition to mouthing the words and sentiments that other people provide for them, sometimes have a thought of their own and must wonder, "Is what I am saying true? And if it is, why is gold doing this? Should I be fearful of my position if the markets fail?"

We have tried to portray some potential causes for the sweeping move in gold. One must first remember that this is nothing new. Gold is in an obvious and sustained bull market, that has it roots when the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan decided to print its way out of a series of crises beginning in the mid 1990's, and started rising in earnest with the Fed's monetary and regulatory errors in 2002.

Gold, despite the obvious efforts of the monied interests to disparage it publicly while accumulating it privately, is rising because the US dollar is being used badly, is being weakened by the failing schemes of a corrupt combination of the government and financial interests.

This is why there has been no serious reform, no meaningful investigations or indictments in what will surely be remembered in history as a financial fraud of a magnitude with the South Sea Bubble in England and the Mississippi Bubble in France.

There are going to be more crises, more dislocations associated with this, despite the best efforts of the financial engineers to paper it over, and the captive media to cover it up, dismiss it, and move along to the next asset bubble, this time in stocks.

This is what gold is telling us. It is saying that the era of the US Dollar as the world's reserve currency is over, with all that this implies in the balance of power in the world as it has existed since the end of the Second World War. And it is occurring for some very good reasons which the US media and the Congress seem to prefer to ignore.

Gold is where people put their wealth when they are confronted with uncertainty, with asymmetric information, when they are afraid; when the statists and the crony capitalists are preying on the savings of the people. Gold is a refuge, a safe haven, when there is good reason to be concerned about your currency, your wealth, and your future; when lies are in the ascendancy and truth and justice are scarce commodities.

This is because gold is one of the few stores of value that is compact, universal, portable, and contingent upon the full faith and credit of nothing but itself.

And so the rally in gold will likely continue until the banks are restrained, the financial system is reformed, and balance is restored to the economy. When the media once again speaks freely and truthfully and openly, when justice is done and the guilty are judged, and when the people can more reasonably place their confidence in the words and actions of those who hold the stewardship of their nation under the Constitution which they have sworn to uphold.

Or, when the Constitution is tossed, and freedom is extinguished, because it is no longer convenient to a people given over to self-deception, egoism, greed, mere anarchy, and nothingness.

"In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:
I am great Ozymandias, saith the stone,
The King of Kings; this mighty city shows
The wonders of my hand. The City's gone,
Nought but the leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, and some hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place."

Horace Smith, 1 February 1818