Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Day of the Beast

 

"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 to be, 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, 1955

"God will send them a deceiving power so that they may believe the lie, that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have taken pleasure in their lawlessness."

2 Thessalonians 2:3-12

"Once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder. As soon as men know they that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles."

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1947

"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. 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."

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

"If heaven is seeing and in turn being seen, transformed and made new, by the beatific face of Pure Love in resplendent glory, then hell must be seeing, at the last and forever, one's own dark and miserable soul, as it really is, alone."

Jesse, Death By Overdose, 24 February 2015

"Great and sustained destruction requires great ambition. It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order, and although the idea behind that new order may be criminal and objectively very stupid, it must also be compellingly simple and at the same time absolute.  The ideology of genocide is all of those things.”

Philip Gourevitch, Tomorrow We Will Be Killed, 1998

“Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.”

Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon, 1952

"Those who have faith had better keep in the state of grace, and those who have neither had better find out what they mean, for in the coming age there will be only one way to stop your trembling knees, and that will be to get down on them and pray.  The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about."

Fulton J. Sheen, The Day of the Beast, 1947

Bessent's economic war plan, Operation Economic Outcast, continues as the US attempts to control the soaring interest rates of its sovereign debt, the price of a shrinking global supply of oil, and the crippled confidence in the full faith and credit of the US Dollar.

But in the short term if you have the will and the cash you can cast a fairly broad fig leaf over the desiccated corpse of your strategic position.

The Dollar continues to chop sideways.  Again, DXY is not all that relevant given its heavy weighting to the Euro.

VIX fell.

Oil took a heavy handed hit that was a blatant price manipulation with the primary effect of enabling traders connected to Bessent and Trump to make easy illicit profits.  

It has little to no effect on global oil supplies, and no significant benefit to the American people.

There was a precious metals futures option expiration on the Comex today. 

It was more significant for silver than for gold.

We may get another gut check by the wiseguys on those holders of new futures contracts from their 'in-the-money' longs.

This is going to end badly.

The responsibility for this is not on one man, but those in the Congress and the Courts who have enabled this chronic abuses of the Constitution and the national interest.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Progressivism: A Square Deal for the People

 

"Roosevelt appeared an unlikely candidate for a reform president. Born into a wealthy family, he enjoyed a youth beyond the reach of most Americans, touring Europe and the Middle East, studying with private tutors, and coming of age in a New York mansion. A Harvard man, he socialized with America's upper crust. In practice, however, TR looked after the interests of working class Americans against rapacious corporate trusts, defying -- and some would say betraying -- the very society from which he had sprung.

When TR entered the White House in 1901, he took control of a federal government that often aligned itself with big business. Roosevelt restrained his progressive leanings for a short time, wisely avoiding a shakeup on Wall Street, where jittery investors saw him at best as a loose cannon and at worst as a dangerous demagogue.

In early 1902, however, TR took the offensive against powerful corporate trusts. He convinced Congress to create a Bureau of Corporations to regulate big business, then shocked the nation by bringing an anti-trust suit against J. P. Morgan's Northern Securities Corporation.  Morgan condemned the president, not just for what he had done, but for the ungentlemanly way in which he had done it -- publicly and without warning.  A new paradigm had been established in Washington, and Roosevelt would go on to file suit against more than 40 major corporations during his presidency.

If Roosevelt's trust-busting surprised big business, it was certainly consistent with the major influences on his life. Theodore Roosevelt grew up worshiping a father who preached the moral duty of helping the poor, and he worked to be like his father in every way he could.  As a young man, TR experienced life as a rancher in North Dakota's Badlands, where all the money in the world could not make a cow easier to rope or the summer sun less blazing, and years of honest work from sunup to sundown might still leave a person poor.

He learned to value working class people, and he never forgot them.  From the time he took office in 1901 to the time he left it in 1909, the cowboy president did much to help working Americans. He passed laws to ensure the safety of food and drugs sold in the American marketplace.  He placed millions of acres of land under federal protection, preserving America's natural resources.  He regulated interstate commerce and helped laborers to get a fair shake at the negotiating table.

Plutocrats deplored Roosevelt. Yet TR adamantly defended the right of big business to exist. Trying to destroy the trusts, Roosevelt wrote in his Autobiography, "was a hopeless effort... those who went into it, although they regarded themselves as radical progressives, really represented a sincere form of rural Toryism." To TR, Progressivism meant a square deal for the American people and American business, a society where businesses profited by fair competition -- but not at the expense of the average American.

In fact, Roosevelt's relationship with labor was a tenuous one; he probably feared nothing more than he feared labor's potential for violence. "We can no more and no less afford to condone evil in the man of capital than evil in the man of no capital," Roosevelt wrote. One of his greatest frustrations was the inability of capitalists to see that their greed might well foment a bloody American revolution. Labor regularly condemned him, insisting that his brand of reform did not go far enough.

After leaving the presidency, Roosevelt continued to push for domestic reform, most notably during his Progressive party campaign for the presidency in 1912. He ran on a "New Nationalism" platform, calling for women's suffrage, an end to child labor, pensions for the elderly, unemployment insurance, and increased regulation of the trusts. While Theodore Roosevelt failed in this final presidential bid, others picked up his torch, and many of the ideas he championed would later come to fruition."

PBS American Experience: TR's Domestic Policy,


Most Americans are not well-informed of their own history, and the struggle for rights and justice that has occurred from time to time.

The Progressive reform movement was a reaction to the abuses of 'The Gilded Age' around the turn of the century.

Corruption always goes too far, because that is its nature.   And then it faces a counter reaction to reform. 

And so it goes. 

Do the markets really need any additional words today from what has already been written? 

Dollar drifting lower as contra-dollar investments and commodities are moving higher.

The power elite and their moneyed interests: their toxic behaviour is running the country and the economy into the ground. 

Stocks — dancing on a volcano.

"American political corruption was the buying up of legislatures and assemblies to keep them from doing the people's will and protecting the people's interests; it was the exploiter entrenching himself in power, it was financial autocracy undermining and destroying political democracy.

By the blindness and greed of ruling classes the people have been plunged into infinite misery ; but that misery has its purpose in the scheme of nature. Something more than a century ago we saw the people driven by just such misery to grope their way into a new order of society; they threw off the chains of hereditary monarchy, and made themselves citizens of free republics. And now again we face such a crisis only this time it is in the world of industry that we have to abolish hereditary rule, and to build an industrial commonwealth in which the equal rights of all men are recognized by law."

Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check, 1919

The hour for reform has surely come. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - When Judgement Comes

 

"Because you are proud of heart,
      you think, 'I am a god!
I sit on a god’s throne
      in the heart of the sea.'
But you are a man, not a god;
     yet you pretend
     that you are a god at heart.
Oh yes, you are wiser than Daniel,
     nothing secret is too obscure for you.
By your knowledge and cunning
     you made yourself rich,
     filling your vaults with gold and silver.
Through your great wisdom in trading
you heaped up riches for yourself—
     your heart is haughty because of your riches.
     Therefore thus says the Lord God:
Because you pretend you are a god at heart,
Therefore, I will bring against you
     strangers, the most bloodthirsty of nations.
They shall draw their swords
     against your splendid wisdom,
     and violate your radiance.
They shall thrust you down into the abyss:
     you shall die a violent death
     in the heart of the sea.
Then, face to face with your destroyers,
     will you still say, 'I am a god'?
No, you are a man, not a god,
     handed over to those who will bring you low."

Ezekiel 28:1-9

"From the smallest to the greatest, they are all greedy for gain.  Policy makers and spokesmen alike, they all practice deceit.  They dismiss the pains of my people as though they are not serious.  'Peace, peace, they say, where there is no peace.  Are they ashamed of their lawlessness?  No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush.  So they will fall among the fallen, and will be brought low when their judgement comes."

Jeremiah 6:13-15


And in the news...

US Diesel crack spread has crossed $100 for the first time in history. It has surged over 140% this year to a record $102.20, showing how expensive diesel has become compared with crude oil. Recent Houthis attack on a Saudi Arabia refinery pushed prices higher. Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries and disruptions across the Gulf had already squeezed diesel supply.

US inventories have fallen to 107 million barrels, their lowest seasonal level since 1996. This is pushing the food prices higher. Trucks transport over 80% of US agricultural products including dairy, fruit, vegetables and nuts, making distribution more expensive.

Food Inflation is already up by 3% this year. With inventories falling and prices rising, it will get difficult for governments to control inflation globally despite hiking rates.

Stocks declined today, but it seemed to be fairly orderly selling.

This makes me wonder if this is a real adjustment to risk, or just the usual pre-option expiration wash and rinse.

Well, we will see in a day or two..

Gold and silver were hit hard.

VIX rose but in a very 'orderly' manner.

Bitcoin held steady, but if you look at a longer term chart below it is essentially flat-lining.

This is not constructive for crypto creatures like Micro-Strategy, which require a steadily rising price of Bitcoin to keep the machine running. 

And as you can see in the first chart below, MSTR seems to be using share issuance to pay the dividends and the bills.  And is not adding to its Bitcoin inventory.

Absent some change, this looks like a death spiral.

Speaking of spirals, although I do not comment or chart them here, I always keep an eye on the currency and the interest rates of Treasuries.  And the rates on longer term debt in a number of countries, including the US, are flashing warning signs.  

As Carl Quintanilla quoted on X today:

"You are on a bus called the 30-year bond and there is a cliff coming, but you don’t know if it is 100 meters away or 100 miles away,” he said. “You are hoping you can get off the bus before it crashes.”  

The situation in Hormuz is fairly ugly, and distracting from the other ugly situation in Ukraine.

Europe has boxed itself into a natural gas quandary, and it may be a very hard winter if the cold sets in.

Greedy foolish people can do enormous damage if they are given some power and leeway. 

Don Tzu seems to be maxing out.   The shame of the Congress, and to some extent the Supreme Court, in standing idly by and not fulfilling their oaths to defend the Constitution is a profile in cowardice.

And then there is the complicity in a genocide and ethnic cleansing being livestreamed, so that no one cannot say they did not know, except in the most devious of ways.

These are the gods of this world, that some have chosen to worship, or at least accommodate for 'practical reasons'.  

And some of the more publicly 'fervent' Christians have made an evil cult of it, without shame in their betrayal and rebellion.

Such are the times. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - At the Court of Nero

 

"The American economy increasingly serves only a narrow part of society, and America's national politics has failed to put the country back on track through honest, open, and transparent problem solving.  Too many of America's elites-among the super-rich, the CEOs, and many of my colleagues in academia-have abandoned a commitment to social responsibility.  They chase wealth and power, the rest of society be damned."

Jeffrey Sachs, The Price of Civilization, 2012

"Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.  It’s the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.  Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1944

"As they face failure, arrest, indictment, or dismissal, they will endlessly air their grievances.  Narcissists are natural wound collectors and as such, they have been collecting and nurturing social slights and perceived wrongs just for this occasion.  They will wallow in victimhood claiming they have been relentlessly and needlessly persecuted.  They, of course, expect their attorneys, followers, or enablers to subserviently echo their flatulent claims.

So, what happens in the end?  Difficult to predict.  Each circumstance is different.  Some will kick and flail and disappear for a while, intentionally or thanks to incarceration—biding their time until they can do it all over again.  Others regroup, plan, scheme, and prepare another triumphant entry into the lives of the unsuspecting to victimize them when the opportunity arises.

Others, unfortunately, will seek to do harm as they face a breakup, a divorce, are fired from a job, are outed for their crimes, or are removed from office.  Others will hound, stalk, or just make life intolerable for those they deem responsible.  Their past can often give us insight as to what they might do, but one can never be sure—humans are terribly complex and as with many afflicted with a personality disorder, sensitive to the smallest of unrecognized but catalytic triggers.

In the case of narcissistic cult leaders, the cult members often pay with their lives as they did in Jonestown Guyana when Jim Jones came under investigation.  In interpersonal relationships, violence is always something to be concerned. "

Joe Navarro, When the Narcissist Fails, 2 January 2024

"Seneca had made the bargain that many good men have made when agreeing to aid bad regimes. On the one hand, their presence strengthens the regime and helps it endure. But their moral influence may also improve the regime's behavior or save the lives of its enemies. For many, this has been a bargain worth making, even if it has cost them—as it may have cost Seneca—their immortal soul.

The Rome he has been trained to serve, the Rome of Augustus and Germanicus, was gone. In its place stood Neropolis, ruled by a megalomaniac brat.”

James Romm, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, 2014

Stocks popped and flopped after yet another phony leak about peace negotiations through Barak David at Axios last night.

Oil appears to be attempting to break out.

The 'crack spreads' which are a measure of the difference in price between paper and physical are blowing out on diesel, and to a lesser extent gasoline.

What is unsustainable will not be sustained.

The use of the 'Overton Window' is straining, with the increasing use of force and fraud, to contain the depravity of those who have chosen to serve the darkness.

“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”    Martin Luther King, Strength to Love, 1963

Judgement is coming— even for those who do not believe in it, or that the rules apply to them.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Gates of Hell Are Terrible to Behold

 

"And he exhorted them with many words and argument saying, 'Save yourselves from this perverse and wicked generation.'"

Acts 2:40

"We are coming apart as a society, and inequality is right at the core of that. When the 90 percent are getting worse off and they’re trying to figure out what happened, they’re not people like me who get to spend four or five hours a day studying these things and then writing about them — they’re people who have to make a living and get through life. And they’re going to be swayed by demagogues and filled with fear about the other, rather than bringing us together.

I think it would be easy for someone to arrive in the near future and really create forces that would lead to trouble in this country.  If we don’t get a handle on this then one of these days our descendants are going to sit down in high-school history class and open a textbook that begins with the words: The United States of America was— and then it will dissect how our experiment in self-governance came apart."

David Cay Johnston, Inequality’s Looming Disaster, Salon May 22, 2014

They will not see. They will not listen. Blindly they follow their seducers into ruin."

The White Rose, Fifth Leaflet, Munich 1943

"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. He is not an agent, but merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as a symptom.

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."

Hillaire Belloc, This That and the Other, 1912

“The narcissist devours people, consumes their output, and casts the empty, writhing shells aside."

Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self Love, 1999

"No other modern country gives corporations the unfettered power found in America to gouge customers, shortchange workers and erect barriers to fair play.  A big reason is that so little of the news, which informs us about the world around us, addresses the private, government-approved mechanisms by which price gouging is employed to redistribute income upward.

All this was done under the guise of 'deregulation,' but the harsh truth is that there’s really no such thing.  Everything has rules.  Deregulation is just a disingenuous name for new regulation, too often under rules that favor corporations over their customers.”

David Cay Johnston, The Fine Print, November 2011

"The gates of Hell are terrible to behold, are they not? The lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making. If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves."

E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World, 2008

"War is a super-human force that will make an agent of those who foolishly and recklessly believe in their own agency. The last two years, I have been affected by the intersection of the biblical Massacre of the Holy Innocents with the genocide in Gaza. It is the story of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt, their lives as refugees and as strangers in a foreign land, and the persecution of refugees and immigrants in our land today."

Matthew Hoh, No Best Case Scenario, December 17, 2025

It was a day for optimistic bounces, as the CPI data came in this morning behind.  

And at least for today the disaster that is looming in the Middle East can be forgotten.

Stocks bounced.

Gold and silver bounced.

The Dollar crept just a little higher to sink its fingernails in the 100 handle.

Bitcoin dropped a bit again.

SpaceX continues its recent rally off the low.  They are reloading after the most recent wash and rinse.

The current market is based on a howler of a new era tech story that ranks right up there with the best of them.  

Even the gerbils they were shooting out of cannons in 2007 had more gravitas and credibility than the numbers which the AI companies and their spokesmodels are shooting at the wall.

Typically on Wall Street the only guys who make money in tech bubble are the suppliers of the picks and shovels, and then even they are eventually pulled under when it all comes crashing back to earth.

But, by all mean, let us blind ourselves in the finest tradition of crash and burn business models.

Until someone roots the moral hazard out of the markets, they will keep coming back for more.

Stock up.  Stack up. 

Run. 

Have a pleasant evening.