Charts at 3:00 PM - Non-Farm Payrolls Report Tomorrow

“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”

William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

Stocks are mixed today with tech up against overhead resistance, and the SP 500 backing off from its own.

Gold has a nice pop today to 1180ish. Let's see if it can hold its gains through the December Non-Farm Payrolls report tomorrow.

Snow tonight. And so I am baking something appropriate for such nasty weather. It fills the house with good smells and warmth.

Have a pleasant evening.

Nomi Prins with Lars Schall on the Next Financial Crisis

Two of my favorite people, financial expert and author Nomi Prins and investigative journalist Lars Schall, discuss the ongoing financial crises, how the Banks play a key role in creating them through monetary existentialism, and why the next crisis will be the worst yet.

Charts at Market Close - The Duty of Delight - Cup and Handle

"How necessary it is to cultivate a spirit of joy. It is a psychological truth that the physical acts of reverence and devotion make one feel devout.  The courteous gesture increases one's respect for others.  To act lovingly is to begin to feel loving, and certainly to act joyfully brings joy to others which in turn makes one feel joyful. I believe we are called to the duty of delight...

People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that."

Dorothy Day

Today was the weekly trip to the butcher and the baker. We tend to be a little picky about quality, so we do drive a little distance but it is well worth it.

It is the little things that make life worth living.  Maybe that is why those who have too much, and think too much about themselves, are so often rather hard to please, and among the most miserable of God's creatures.   Greed can never be filled, and therefore the greedy heart is never at rest.

Stocks were in a lazy upward drift for the better part of the day, with silver following and gold in a sideways chop.

Kohl's and Macy's cut forecasts after the bell, and both stocks are getting slammed lower. Just another sign of the great and glorious consumer recovery.

The first one hundred days of Trump's administration are sure to be interesting. He is not even sworn into office and is already making a big splash.

Just to reiterate what I said yesterday, if gold and silver can break out from here, it will look like a rather long handle (ladle?  lol) in a cup and handle, with measuring objectives as initially indicated, and most likely much higher from here by year's end 2017.

But first the breakout attempt and a confirmation.  One step at a time.

Have a pleasant evening.

Charts at the Market Close - Things You May Not Want To Hear, But May Wish To Know

This year I think that I am going to be publishing all of the charts in one posting, rather than splitting them up between stocks and metals.

Today was a lazier trading day than the numbers might have indicated. It was easy to lift stocks today, in other words.

There was little of note in the Comex reports from the last day of 2016.

I was looking over some old charts over the weekend, and I think that the direction of the gold and silver markets in the first couple of months will be quite telling for the rest of 2017.

The key level will be for the metals to break out above their 'election night' highs when the markets realized that Trump had won.

This atmosphere and tone of the markets reminds me of the period during which the big cup and handle retraced 50 percent or thereabouts in gold, and then took off on a steady run to its all time high.  Remember that?

Still, without the breakout, we have nothing but what we have, which is a sideways chop.

A long time reader sent me this link to this live updating chart that compares the metals prices on the dollar and yuan markets.

Another honored patron introduced me today to the twitter feed of Harald Malmgren, a former presidential adviser to JFK, LBJ, Nixon Ford, US Senate Finance.

I thought quite a few things that he said about stocks and other matters were quite to the point.

Some of Harald Malmgren's tweets from earlier today in descending order by time:

His [Ben Bernanke] continuing denial that QE wrought damage suggests it is he who cannot handle the truth.

Correlation of 1 across all asset classes combined with high leverage & narrow exits means catastrophically fast implosion, sooner or later.

Gold a really big subject. I'll save my thoughts on gold for another day.

What i am trying to point out is that markets and even the Fed are acting on unreliable,overoptimistic official data (aka fake news).

World trade contracting,growth stalling, but CNBC advertisers, Bloomberg customers & political leaders don't want downbeat news. Market illusions.

BEA uses own unique, low deflator (never CPI) to get higher inflation adjusted GDP growth rate, higher consumer spending, hiding feeble real growth.

Most jobs data cherry picked, manipulated, guessed. Declining payroll tax deductions published every day ignored. Job gains illusion.

Occasional glimpses of real economic news reminds how misleading is WH economic recovery spin and its adoption in the form of MSM fake news.

Financial leverage higher now than 2008, systemic risk greater, most jobs created part time, median income down, debt multiple, wealth gap bigger, etc.

On that we seem to agree. A phony recovery reliant on contrived fake data transmitted as fake news, now becoming "post truth".

At this stage of my life you get my views unadulterated with hidden ambitions.

What more can I say after that?

Have a pleasant evening.

The Great Temptation of Confusion and Complexity and the Rise of the Will to Power

"It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.

He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison


"Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed.  Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one's need to think...  I may have made an error in judgement— but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up to leader of a people of almost 80 million.  His success alone proved that I should subordinate myself to him."

Adolph Eichmann, as quoted by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil


“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

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


"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Samuel Johnson

Never relinquish your ability to love, to love others and to love the truth, whether it be from fatigue, or confusion, careerism or expediency.  For in that simple act of the will to love we maintain a critical linkage to our humanity. 

 

The real capitulation of a people to the will to power occurs, not in the mob as one might think, for by then it is an almost forgone conclusion.  The guardians of the public conscience are in the professional class, for they are the enablers of a moral voice and caution. They possess a platform and provide an example, and therefore bear a heavier than normal responsibility for speaking for the truth, early on and often, and not against one group or another as they prefer, because that makes them merely hypocrites. To lie is to lie, to deceive is to deceive, no matter the reasons.
 
No, they must uphold a certain character, against the types of behaviour that are clearly beyond the acceptable moral choices of those in authority.

To be truly human is not being able to simply ignore injustice, deprivation, and cruelty. Such indifference is the opposite of the awareness of others as fellow human beings and caring about them— which is the essence of love.

How the Democratic Party Failed By Repudiating Their Legacy as 'The Party of the People'

As the Democrats and their acolytes in the media pivot towards hysteria against 'the others' to explain their failures, let us not forget what has happened over the past thirty years, culminating in the stunning election of 2016.

This is a relatively short video, and heart of it starts around minute twenty after a discussion of the history, motives, and rationales by which the Democrats took the final steps in repudiating the legacy of The New Deal to embrace neo-liberalism.

The Democratic leadership consciously chose to identify with people they considered to be more like themselves, an elitist professional class. In a very real sense they followed the money and the prestige, and the Clintons were their leaders. The personal economic rewards that they reaped from this are very well documented.

The party covered their credentialism and 'ruling class' aspirations by covering it with a program of identity politics courting, with words more than substantial economic action, minorities with emotional appeals to ethnic identity, and occasionally fear-mongering. The Republicans played the witting foils in this, choosing to continue to embrace big money, but with a different twist towards oligarchy, covering their own greed with equally emotional appeals to 'traditional values.' In this they began to resemble corporate competitors ruled by a similar profit motive but with different branding.

The result has been an historical increase in income disparity, and a shift in power towards a policy bias that favors private war profits, global economic power agendas, and the shifting of almost all income growth to the financial class who continually abuse justice with virtual impunity.

You may wish to start the video around the twenty minute mark to hear how things progressed in the 1990's. If you have the time you can listen to the entire video to hear more of the history of how this change began in the 1970's.