Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Seductive Illusions of Empire

 

"Their tongues are devious weapons, bent like a drawn bow. With falsehoods rather than truth they have gained power in the land.  They commit one crime after another.  They do not know me."

Jeremiah 9:3

"For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work.  But the one who restrains it will continue to do so until he steps away.   And then the lawless one will be revealed, the one whom the Lord will slay by the breath of his mouth and bring to an end with the splendor of his coming.

The coming of the lawless one will be the work of Satan made manifest in power, signs and wonders of falsehood, and in every wicked deception designed for those who are perishing because they did not accept the love of truth, and be saved.

For this reason, God permits them [the exceptional] a powerful delusion to believe their lies, that all may be condemned who deny the truth and instead take pleasure in lawlessness."

2 Thessalonians 2:7-12

"If at the start this cancerous growth in the nation was not particularly noticeable, it was only because there were still enough forces at work that operated for the good, so that it was kept under control. As it grew larger, however, and finally in an ultimate spurt of growth attained ruling power, the tumor broke open, as it were, and infected the whole body."

The White Rose, Second Leaflet, Munich 1942

"When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven mad by fear and horror, and when chaos has become the supreme law, then the time for the empire of lawlessness will have come."

Fritz Lang, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933


An explanation of today's market decline is unnecessary, unless one is a spokesmodel for one of the financial or ideologically inclined organizations which are always trying to find clever ways to distract and mislead the narrative.

The mispricing of risks has corrected a bit, but I fear it has some way to go. 

Perhaps a substantial way to go, all things considered, including the real economy.

Gold popped but was held in check.

Silver ended the week mostly unchanged, but this was on top of a prior stellar performance the week before. 

Despite what people say, silver is just not as 'monetary' as gold.

And Bitcoin is a risk asset in drag.  

VIX ticked up.  But it did not yet spike.

I would imagine they will be exchanging 'presents' with messages attached back and forth this weekend over there.

The targets and the heft (throw weight) of the packages will be pivotal.

Even moreso if anyone else selects to cast off pretense and most openly engage. 

And then there is the Ukraine, the neglected. 

It's always something new and shinier with the Empire. 

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

Have a pleasant, and hopefully uneventful, weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Burden of Self-Deception

 

"Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.  You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.  You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’  Why not?  It is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows.  Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy.  One hears no protest, and certainly sees none.  You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this.  In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say?  They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist.  You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it.  These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?  On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you.  On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.  You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now.  Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work.  You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings.  Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither.  Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things.  This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what?  It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker.  So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you.  The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.  The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.   

Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.  Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.  The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

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.  Suddenly it all comes down, all at once.  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.  Too late.  You are compromised beyond repair."

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

 

Stocks managed to stage a little rally into the close and hold it.

Gold and silver marched in place.

The Dollar was nominally unchanged.

VIX continues to wallow in self-deception.

Our complacency in the face of growing lawlessness is astonishing.

Who could have seen it coming.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Congregation of Liars

 

"This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. And I was one of them."

John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, 2004

“In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.”

Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, 2004

"Power will achieve its murderous potential.  It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."

R. J. Rummel, Death By Government, 1994

"There is a certain madness in crowds. But the genesis of the madness is in those who assemble the crowds, give them weapons, and walk among them whispering&madness; madness."

Jesse, Housing Madness, 15 April 2008

"Go now, write it on a tablet for them, inscribe it on a scroll, so that in the days to come it may be a witness to them, for ever and ever.  For these are a rebellious people, deceitful children,  unwilling to listen to the instructions of the Lord.

They say to their seers, ‘Do not see!’ and to the prophets, ‘Say nothing of what is right! Tell us only things that please us, prophesy illusions.'"

Isaiah 30:8-10

"Why do you not understand what I am saying?  It is because you cannot bear to hear my words.  You are from your father, the devil, and you choose to carry out your father’s desires.  He was a murderer from the beginning, and he does not abide by the truth, for there is no truth in him.  

When he lies, he speaks in accord with his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.  But because I speak the truth, you refuse to believe me."

John 8:43-45 

 

There are some who love money and power, and serve their gods with lies, theft, and murder. 

They are desolate in the eyes of the Lord.

Their lawlessness will not stand.

Stocks were soaring overnight, as a judge struck down the legitimacy of the Trump tariffs declared 'in a state of emergency.'

Gold and silver were smashed.

But like so many things these days, none of this was real.  

Don't blame them, they say.  Hate the game, not the players.  Who run the game. 

Stocks finished unchanged to lower.

Gold and silver came back from fairly impressive losses overnight to finish in the green. 

Another opportunity to gather more for themselves.

But the VIX is still mispricing the risks of a recession, which now almost looks to be inevitable.

Who could have seen it coming? 

Do not be taken by their harvest of sorrows, and the wine press of God's wrath.

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Well of Deep Politics

 

“C. Wright Mills was among the first to take note of how 'national security' could be invoked by the power elite to more deeply disguise its operations.  Mills wrote in his 1956 masterpiece The Power Elite that America was ruled by those who control the 'strategic command posts' of society—the big corporations, the machinery of the state, and the military establishment.  These dominant cliques were drawn together by their deep mutual stake in the 'permanent war economy' that had emerged during the Cold War.

The crucial task of unifying the power elite, according to Mills, fell to a special subset of the corporate hierarchy—top Wall Street lawyers and investment bankers.   'For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an ‘emergency’ without foreseeable end,' Mills wrote.  

In the view of the Dulles brothers, democracy was an enterprise that had to be carefully managed by the right men, not simply left to elected officials as a public trust.  From their earliest days on Wall Street—where they ran Sullivan and Cromwell, the most powerful corporate law firm in the nation—their overriding commitment was always to the circle of accomplished, privileged men whom they saw as the true seat of power in America.

Carl Jung’s portrait of Hitler is as chilling a picture of psychopathology as you will find.  And Hitler was much more fashionable in the social settings that men like Dulles frequented—in England as well as the United States—than it was later comfortable to admit.  Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who as a young lawyer served with Allen in the OSS, later declared that both Dulleses were guilty of treason.

After the war, Dulles helped a number of notorious war criminals escape via the 'Nazi ratlines' that ran from Germany, down through Italy, to sanctuary in Latin America, the Middle East, and even the United States.

During the Eisenhower administration, the Dulles brothers would finally be given full license to exercise their power in the global arena.  In the name of defending the free world from Communist tyranny, they would impose an American reign on the world enforced by nuclear terror and cloak-and-dagger brutality.

Allen Dulles was one of the wiliest masters of secret power ever produced by America.  And his most ambitious clandestine efforts were directed not against hostile governments but against his own.  While serving in multiple presidential administrations, he learned to manipulate them and sometimes subvert them.  The drive for absolute control was the only passion that truly gripped Allen Dulles.  Dulles undermined or betrayed every president he served in high office.

On the weekend of the JFK assassination, Dulles hunkered down for unexplained reasons at a secret CIA facility in northern Virginia known as 'the Farm,' despite the fact that he had been removed from the agency two years earlier.

Under Dulles, American's intelligence system had become a dark and invasive force - at home and abroad - violating citizens' privacy, kidnapping, torturing, and killing at will.  His legacy would be carried far into the future by men and women who shared his philosophy about the boundless authority of the national security system's splendid watchmen.

The CIA was empowered not only to engage in the deadly 'spy versus spy' antics against the KGB that became the stuff of Cold War legend but to subvert democratic governments that were deemed insufficiently pro-American and to terminate these government's elected leaders.

The Allen Dulles story continues to haunt the country.  Many of the practices that still provoke bouts of American soul-searching originated during Dulles’s formative rule at the CIA.  Mind control experimentation, torture, political assassination, extraordinary rendition, massive surveillance of U.S. citizens and foreign allies—these were all widely used tools of the Dulles reign.

These were some of James Jesus Angleton’s dying words.  He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles.  He had been on a satanic quest.  'I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.'  He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day—Dulles, Helms, Wisner.  These men were 'the grand masters,' he said.  'If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.'  Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. 'I guess I will see them there soon.'

The Devil’s Chessboard seeks to shine a torch down the well of  'deep politics,' as Peter Dale Scott—an important scholar of American power—has termed this underworld of unaccountable authority.  Until we have a full reckoning of the Dulles era and its high crimes, the country cannot find its way forward."

David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government, 2015 

"The coming of the lawless will be the work of Satan made manifest in all power and false signs and wonders, and in every wicked deception for those who are perishing because they refused to accept the love of the truth to be saved.  For this reason, God allows them to have a powerful delusion to believe their own lies, that all those who deny the truth and instead take pleasure in lawlessness will be condemned."

2 Thessalonians 2:7-12 

I was reading The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot over the long weekend.

It is an enlightening look into what we now call the Deep State.  

They had no shame.  None at all.  And very little fear of any consequences. 

Speaking of which, the new centurions of Wall Street were juicing the futures higher in the dull holiday weekend trade, and that enthusiasm carried on to the cash trading today.

Gold and silver were similarly smashed over the weekend.

No surprise there, since today was a futures option expiration on the Comex for precious metals.

VIX slumped as risk assessment was set aside for the MAGAnificent US economy.

The Dollar popped back up a bit.

We may get some follow on action tomorrow.  

I believe Nvidia earnings are out this week.

Things do not look good.  

The looting of the Treasury by the oligarchy accelerates. 

Freedom of speech and assembly is threatened and curtailed to the approving smiles of 'patriots'. 

And the killing and repression of innocents continues. 

But we can surely kick that can down the road, and distract ourselves with passionate words and colorful circuses. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Large and Awful Faces From Beyond

 

"The Hitler Party likes to emphasize its uniqueness, and it really should not be measured against conventional yardsticks.   Even if it were to explode into smithereens today, the fact would remain that it recently won fifteen million voters.  Its brutality, loud-mouthedness and brainlessness have acted not as a deterrent but rather as an attraction, and have generated unconditional and subservient followers."

Carl von Ossietzky, Die Weltbühne, January, 1933

"The quiet words of the wise are worth more than the shouts of a ruler of fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinful man can destroy much that is good."

Ecclesiastes 9:17-18

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who murder the prophets and abuse those whom God has sent to you as messengers. As you have willed it, so your house is now yours to command— but it is made desolate.”

Matthew 23:37-38

"The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.  He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.  Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers. 

In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid.  We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh.  But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

We permit our jaded intellects to play with drugs of novelty for the fresh sensation they arouse, though we know well there is no good in them, but only wasting at the last.  The real interest of watching the Barbarian is not the amusement derivable from his antics, but the prime doubt whether he will succeed or no, whether he will flourish.  He is, I repeat, not an agent, but merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as a symptom."

Hillaire Belloc, This That and the Other, 1912

“If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.”

G. K. Chesterton, The Wisdom of Father Brown, 1914


The US will be observing Memorial Day this coming Monday.  The markets will be closed.

Stocks were weak on fresh tariff threats from Trump.

Gold and silver rallied as the Dollar swooned back down to the bottom of the 99 handle again.

There will be a precious metals futures option expiration this coming Tuesday. 

VIX ticked up a bit, but still remains relatively subdued.

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

Have a pleasant weekend.