Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Mighty Bubble of Stolen Wealth

 

“A mighty bubble of wealth is blown before our eyes, as empty, as transient, as contradictory to the laws of solid material, as confuted by every circumstance of actual condition, as any other bubble which man or child ever blew before.”

Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost, 1999

"Over the past 30 years the plutocrats have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet.

Like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy. Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs."

Bill Moyers, last episode of Bill Moyers Journal, 30 April 2010

"Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it."

Mike Lofgren, The Deep State, 5 January 2016

"Special privileges and the use of the taxing power for private gain, these are the twin pillars upon which plutocracy rests. Accumulating by conscious frauds more money than they can use upon themselves, wisely distribute or safely leave to their children, these denounce as public enemies all who question their methods or throw a light upon their crimes.

Plutocracy is abhorrent to a republic; it is more despotic than monarchy, more heartless than aristocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It preys upon the nation in time of peace and conspires against it in the hour of its calamity. Conscienceless, compassionless and devoid of wisdom, it enervates its votaries while it impoverishes its victims."

William Jennings Bryan, Speech at Madison Square Garden, 30 August 1906

"For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks.

And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses.

And yet the world is there, with the immediately visible effects of the implementation of the great neoliberal utopia: not only the poverty of an increasingly large segment of the most economically advanced societies, the extraordinary growth in income differences, the progressive disappearance of autonomous universes of cultural production, such as film, publishing, etc. through the intrusive imposition of commercial values, but also and above all two major trends.

First is the destruction of all the collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the infernal machine, primarily those of the state, repository of all of the universal values associated with the idea of the public realm. Second is the imposition everywhere, in the upper spheres of the economy and the state as at the heart of corporations, of that sort of moral Darwinism that, with the cult of the winner, schooled in higher mathematics and bungee jumping, institutes the struggle of all against all and cynicism as the norm of all action and behaviour."

Pierre Bourdieu, L’essence du néolibéralisme, (en français), December 1998

Stocks slumped again today despite an early afternoon attempt to take the major indices green.

Gold and silver were slammed lower.

The Dollar grabbed the 99 handle.  It is still chopping within a relatively narrow range however.

VIX wallowed in near complacency, as it is often wont to do.

Bitcoin is hanging on to support a little north of 76k.

The markets seem quiet.   Not in a peaceful way, but in anticipation of an outbreak of uncertainty.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Rape of the Mind

 

"Easy as lying!  Do as now you do.
   Turn every question to a public stew.
A blood-shot voice, low breeding, huckster's tricks—
   What more can man require for politics?"

Aristophanes, The Knights, 424 BC

"It is sometimes said that since everything is for sale under the rule of The Market, nothing is sacred.  The Market is not omnipotent — yet.  But the process is under way and it is gaining momentum.  The Market is becoming more like the Yahweh of the Old Testament — the Supreme Deity, the only true God, whose reign must now be universally accepted and who allows for no rivals."

Harvey Cox, The Market as God, March 1999

“He said they were afraid, and that fear makes stupid people do wicked things.  As long as there are crazed or crafty leaders to play on old fears, a mob will turn cruel.”

Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow, 1955

"And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stolen forth of Holy Writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil."

William Shakespeare, Richard III, November 1633

"You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.  You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing).  You remember everything now, and your heart breaks."

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, 1955

“He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind.  Repeat mechanically your assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity for communicating dissent and opposition.  This is the formula for political conditioning of the masses.  The big lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason.

The eternal demagogue will arise anew.  He will accuse others of conspiracy in order to prove his own importance.  He will try to intimidate those who are neither so iron-fisted nor so hotheaded as he, and temporarily he will drag some people into the web of his delusions.  Perhaps he will even wear a mantle of martyrdom to arouse the tears of the weak-hearted.  With his emotionalism and suspicion, he will shatter the trust of citizens in one another."

Joost Meerloo, Thought Control: The Rape of the Mind, 1956

As you know today was an option expiration for the May futures contracts in gold and silver.  The May contract is important to silver, gold not so much.  I think the metals were pre-pounded last week, so today was not so dramatic.

Stocks were wobbly since an attempt to make it seem as though Iran was suing for peace, spread by a mouthpiece in the 'digital media' that was uncritically picked up by understaffed wire services, was found to be yet another dose of meth for the markets.

I don't know where things stand now, the fog of war and all that.  I have a few sources I follow that have proven to be more reliable than official media.  The US and Israel are playing it close to the chest on one hand, and posturing for renewed conflict on the other.  Iran has been much more straightforward, agree with them or not.  

VIX is acting like 'meh.'   

On the economy, Wall Street is acting as enablers in hiding the risks of recession and worse, pretending this is all 'normal'.  We are probably already entering a recession, the stock pricing notwithstanding.

In watching this all unfold in Washington and NY I was reminded of an interview between Bill Moyers and Neil Barofsky. He said of the 2008 bailouts and lack of meaningful reform:

"It creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not. And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions.  And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of the one percent or the .1 percent — to the detriment of everyone else."

He also said with the lack of reform that another financial meltdown like 2008 was not only likely, but inevitable.  The economist Simon Johnson said pretty much the same thing.

But very important people, who coincidentally appear quite frequent in the Epstein files among other cesspits of elite corruption, have assured us that this is just foolishness, and uninformed worry.

Have you noticed how most of the Western leaders have awful public approval ratings?  I need to look that up to see how widespread it may be.  How are they getting away with this in nominal democracies? 

Rough seas ahead, mateys.  Clouds gathering on the horizon. Perhaps its finally time to head into harbor.  I'll figuratively be at The Roundhouse Bar, a place where I sat out many a storm in happier days gone by.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Desperate Loneliness of Hell

 

"Your adversary, the devil, prowls the earth like a roaring lion, seeking those whom he may devour. Resist, and stand firmly in the faith, and know that your fellow believers throughout the world are also standing against the same temptations."

1 Peter 5:8-9

"Satan has been in the Heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan. Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament.

Certainly, he has no choice. He has chosen to have no choice. He has wished to ‘be himself’, and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted. The Hell he carries with him is, in one sense, a Hell of infinite boredom. To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."

C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942

“If we go as far as we can into the darkness, regardless of the consequences, I believe a midnight truth will free us from our bondage to violence and bring us to the light of peace.”

James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, 2008

“What we would like to do is change the world— make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute— the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words— we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world."

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, 1952

"And Peter understood that neither Nero, nor all his legions, could overcome the living truth — that they could not overwhelm it with tears or blood, and that now its victory was beginning.  He understood as well why the Lord had turned him back on the road.  That city of pride, of crime, of wickedness, and of a lust for power, was beginning to be His."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis, 1896


Why does 'power' so often turn to self-destruction and cynical brutality?

I think it is because the soul incapable of loving and being loved becomes addicted to feeling - something.  

It is like there is a great hole in their being that torments them.  And so they try to fill it with things, and powerful emotions like hate and hanger, and the misery of other people.   Anything.

The 'shutdown' was resolved in the Senate last night, according to the media. 

Now this amended bill must be returned to the House, which must come back into session to deliberate it.

And if this happens, then Speaker Johnson would hopefully be under quite a bit of pressure to swear in the new member of the House, who has vowed to support the release of the 'Epstein files.'

We all now that, for whatever mysterious reason, the Trump administration had a remarkable change of mind in the release of the files, which they had whinged about for years when they were out of power.

And having pledged to release them, AG Bondi and her cohorts suddenly decided they were irrelevant, we didn't have to see them, and Trump himself dismissed them as a hoax, fake news, and unimportant.

Do you need to buy a vowel?   

So stocks rallied, bubbling back up.

Gold and silver just rocketed higher, having been pressed down into the phantom Non-Farm Payrolls report last week.   

You see, it's not really the report that drives prices.  Its the unregulated power of the moneyed interests of Wall Street and their Banks. 

There is going to be a significant amount of fraud and ugliness that may some day may tumble out into view.   Both of the corporate parties will not wish this to happen.  For every Trump there is a Clinton, so to speak.

But the current system is failing, and the more it abuses the public, the more the resistance to this dirty, rotten system will build. 

In his recollections, Bill Moyers said that one night in a Tennessee hotel Lyndon Johnson described the dynamics of Southern politics like this:

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket.  Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

And so the band plays on.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Weep Instead for Yourselves and Your Children

 

“All tyrannies are virtuoso displays over many years of cunning, risk-taking, terror, delusion, narcissism, showmanship and charm, distilled into a spectacle of total personal control.  Tyrants are the greatest of all actor-managers — omnipotent impresarios.

For a dictatorship to last long, it has to ensure a degree of economic prosperity and justice. When these are no longer assured, their fall is inevitable.  A dictator meticulously collects around himself, people who feed him with 'facts' and 'assessments' he likes to hear rather than truth.  He shuts himself from the harsh reality outside and indulges in actions that only increase the wrath of the masses."

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Dictators Get the Deaths They Deserve, October 26, 2011

"Indeed, one can be deceived in many ways; one can be deceived in believing what is untrue, but on the other hand, one is also deceived in not believing what is true."

Søren Kierkegaard, Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, SKS vol.9, 1847

"Over the past 30 years the plutocrats have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding.  This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet.  Millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable."

Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, 30 April 2010

"Turning to them Jesus said, 'Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me.  Weep instead for yourselves and your children.'"

Luke 23:28

It was risk on today, as the dismal unemployment claims number came in hot, and the inflation numbers were high but in-line.

So its rate cut time, yay!

We may be led by hysterical fools and craven nincompoops, dancing along like trousered apes for the sake of a powerfully pampered few, but we still know how to celebrate 'winning.'

VIX fell.

The Dollar fell.

Stocks soared, pulling silver along with them.

Gold held its ground weakly on the risky exuberance.

There are some ugly things gathering on our horizon, but no one really wants to hear it.

A few years ago I made a decent forecast which came true, and a snarky reader said that 'I would probably like to be a prophet.'

And I answered, 'Certainly not.  Prophets have notoriously poor career prospects.'

And they do.  People do not want to hear about the consequences of their lawlessness and excess and foolishness.

You can't drive with your crazy drunk grandpa or your crazy drunk self at the wheel every other day, and not expect something bad to happen eventually.

And yet here we are. 

"The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well.  Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them.  Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich.  Plunder, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus, Agricola

Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.   Even if they delude themselves into thinking that for their greed, lawlessness, and even murders, that they will not be judged. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - And All the Consequences

 

"Time to move the blame to where it really belongs.  That means no more coddling banks with bailout billions marked 'secret.'  No more allowing their executives lavish bonuses and new corporate jets as if they’ve won the megalottery and not sent the economy down the tubes.  And no more apostles of Wall Street calling the shots."

Bill Moyers, Changing the Rules of the Blame Game, Bill Moyers Journal, April 7, 2009

"Over the past 30 years the plutocrats have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. Remember that Citigroup reference to "market-friendly governments" on their side? It hasn't mattered which party has been in power — government has done Wall Street's bidding.

This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet. So it is that like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy.  Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs. Democracy only works when we claim it as our own."

Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal (last episode), 30 April 2010

"That sound of shattered glass you’ve been hearing is the iconic portrait of Jamie Dimon splintering as it hits the floor of JPMorgan Chase.  As the Good Book says, 'Pride goeth before a fall,' and the sleek silver-haired, too-smart-for-his-own-good CEO of America’s largest bank has been turning every television show within reach into a confessional booth.  Barack Obama’s favorite banker faces losses of $2 billion and possibly more – all because of the complex, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t trading in exotic financial instruments that he has so ardently lobbied Congress not to regulate.

Once again, doing God’s work — that is, betting huge sums of money with depositor funds knowing that you are too big to fail and can count on taxpayers riding to your rescue if your avarice threatens to take the country down — has lost some of its luster. The jewels in Dimon’s crown sparkle with a little less grandiosity than a few days ago, when he ridiculed Paul Volcker’s ideas for keeping Wall Street honest as 'infantile.'”

Bill Moyers, Are JPMorgan's Losses the Canary in the Coal Mine?, May 16, 2012

"America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies and rewards flow in one direction: up. They (the corporations) are counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They're counting on you to stand at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket.

In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether 'we, the people' is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality - one nation, indivisible - or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others."

Bill Moyers, September 23, 2016

And so we close in on the end of the first half of 2025.  And Donnie will be bragging about the stock markets being at new all time highs.

It's no longer Biden's market.  Or wars.   He owns it now.  And all the usual consequences.

The elite don't care.  Our rulers are not even concerned.  They don't believe in laws, or justice, or plagues. 

US markets will be closed next Friday for the Fourth of July.

The market in equities is at a bubble high in my estimation.  

Gold and silver were smacked down so the metals bears can minimize their paper losses and maximize their gains. 

'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'

And judgement waits. 

Have a pleasant weekend.