Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Precarious Propositions

 

“Where is the noble face of modesty, or the strength of virtue, now that blasphemy is in power and men have put justice behind them, and there is no law but lawlessness, and none join in fear of the gods?”

Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis

“The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.  Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

"Even if it were to explode into smithereens today, the fact would remain that [the Party] recently won fifteen million votes.  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

"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

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord', will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and accomplish great things in your name?' Then I will declare to them, ''I do not know you. Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.”

Matthew 7:21-23

VIX turned higher as the Persian Gulf is turning quickly into a serious shooting match.

AFTER THE BELL: Iran orders a complete evacuation of oil tankers in Kuwaiti and Bahraini ports — warning crews to leave immediately or the vessels will be targeted, potentially triggering a chain reaction across the region, per Tasnim News. The warning applies to tankers at anchor or docked, with an attack reportedly potentially coming within hours. It comes after reported U.S. strikes on Iranian oil tankers, with Tehran now openly signaling immediate retaliation.

During the day Wall Street plays their games, because they don't face many consequences for their duplicity, and have a fine example to follow in Washington.

Things will improve once we revert to the mean on that topic.

Gold got hammered lower late in the day.   Probably wiseguys cleaning up their Non-Farm Payroll bets.

Silver rallied and fell.

Bitcoin drifted lower.

The Dollar is still in its usual chop, but off the 99 handle.

Oil, despite some of the intraday paper games, is starting to break out.

This is going to get very ugly.  

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Rise of the Unspeakable

 

"Even if it were to explode into smithereens today, the fact would remain that it [NSDAP] recently won fifteen million voters. Its brutish, loud-mouthed and brainless behavior has acted not as a deterrent but rather as an attraction, and has generated unconditional and subservient followers."

Carl von Ossietzky, Die Weltbühne, January, 1933

"It is very odd that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought about by small men."

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1928

"I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget.  Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.  We could not prevent their deaths the first time, but if we forget them they will be killed a second time.  And this time, it will be our responsibility.

And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.  We must always take sides.  Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.  Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.  Sometimes we must interfere.  When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.  Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe."

Elie Wiesel, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 10 December 1986

"What theology, history and common sense have taught me is that the civilizations which allow the gap to widen between the ideal to which they claim and the realizations which they propose of it, these civilizations are dying of their hypocrisy.“

Henri-Irénée Marrou, France ma patrie, Le Monde, 5 avril 1956

"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.  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

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

Luke 23:28

"The days are coming when men will go mad, and when they meet a man who has kept his senses, will rise up against him, saying, 'You are mad, because you are not like us.'  And I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said, groaning, 'What can get us through such snares?'  And then I heard a voice saying to me — humility.”

Saint Anthony the Great, Abbot of Colzim Egypt, 251-356


Gold topped and closed above $4000 today.

This marks the consummation of a forecast about the global economy and the 'currency wars' in the resolution of Bretton Woods II that I had made in the late 1990s with gold at $300.   

I am very grateful that I have been allowed to live long enough to see this all unfold.

Silver lagged a bit, being weighed down by the economy and the equities.

Stocks sagged but held a level.   When they give way they could fall quite a bit, but we'll need to see some trigger event for that.

But is is coming, sooner or later.   And it will be remarkable.

I haven't had a vacation in a very long time.   As you know I have been posting pretty much every day since 2008, through thick and thin.

So I am going to take a little time off now.   Unless some other forecast event in the markets comes to pass, I will probably see you again around Thanksgiving if God wills it.   

I have an abiding concern that some truly unfortunate geopolitical event is going to take the markets down, and perhaps some people and significant organizations, even nations, down with them. 

There have been a lot of very ugly things that we've seen over the past 70 years or so.  The Vietnam war and the political assassinations and lies that paved the way for it were awful to live through.  The Cold War was a little frightening for a child.  The Civil Rights struggle was both thrilling and discouraging in its hope and brutality.

But the shameless rise of lawlessness and cruelty among our leaders, with their complicity in the horrific war crimes of proxy wars and the sadistic genocide in Gaza, has just about broken my heart. 

So let's remember to pray, and heed the storm warnings as they develop, and be mindful of the wickedness of those who lie and deceive people in order to ensnare their souls.  

And they are certainly out there and on the prowl, even now.  

'What can get us through such snares?'   And then I heard a voice saying to me — 'humility.'

See you then.

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

"Fear not, little flock, for your Father delights to welcome you into His Kingdom." Luke 12:32

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.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Awful Faces From Beyond

 

"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; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

Hilaire Belloc, The Barbarians, 1912

"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.  It must satisfy not only a particular political need, but also a specifically German emotional condition. 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

"Representative institutions no longer represent voters.  Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans.  The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security.

Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract at best merely half of an electorate whose information about foreign and domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media.  Citizens are manipulated into a nervous state by the media's reports of rampant crime and terrorist networks, by thinly veiled threats of the Attorney General and by their own fears about unemployment.  What is crucially important here is not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting of constitutional limitations and institutional processes that discourages the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic.

No doubt these remarks will be dismissed by some as alarmist, but I want to go further and name the emergent political system 'inverted totalitarianism.'  By inverted I mean that while the current system and its operatives share with Nazism the aspiration toward unlimited power and aggressive expansionism, their methods and actions seem upside down.   For example, in Weimar Germany, before the Nazis took power, the 'streets' were dominated by totalitarian-oriented gangs of toughs, and whatever there was of democracy was confined to the government.

In rebuttal it will be said that there is no domestic equivalent to the Nazi regime of torture, concentration camps or other instruments of terror.  Instead, inverted totalitarianism has its own means of promoting generalized fear; not only by sudden 'alerts' and the publicized heavy-handed treatment of aliens and the Devil's Island that is Guantánamo Bay, but by a pervasive atmosphere of fear abetted by a corporate economy of ruthless downsizing, withdrawal or reduction of pension and health benefits; a corporate political system that relentlessly threatens to privatize Social Security and the modest health benefits available, especially to the poor. 

With such instrumentalities for promoting uncertainty and dependence, it is almost overkill for inverted totalitarianism to employ a system of criminal justice that is punitive in the extreme, relishes the death penalty and is consistently biased against the powerless.

Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers.

That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents.  What is at stake, then, is nothing less than the attempted transformation of a tolerably free society into a variant of the extreme regimes of the past century."

Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism, May 1, 2003


Stocks took a dive again today, but managed to rally back and post some measurable gains.

Gold and silver were smacked again, hard.

The bears were leaning pretty heavily on the miners, particularly some that were ex-dividend today.

Buying them on the dip was an edgy trade at times.

But they managed to come back again into the close, somewhat.

VIX declined.

The Dollar rallied.

And so we toddle on into the weekend. 

As a reminder there will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday March 7th.

The weather has become rather warm here the last few days, rising into the low 60s while the sun is out.

And so today was a good day to wear shorts while taking Daisy for her afternoon walk.

It's the little things that make life worth living.

Need little, want less, love more.

For those who abide in love, abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - You Who Murder the Prophets and the Innocent

 

"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

"During the years of the Weimar Republic Carl von Ossietzky's political commentaries gained him a reputation as a fervent supporter of democracy and a pluralistic society. He was convicted in 1931 of revealing state secrets, the illegal German militarization, and served 18 months in prison. He was released in 1932. Ossietzky continued to be a constant warning voice against militarism and Nazism when, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor and the Nazi dictatorship began.

On 28 February 1933, after the Reichstag fire, he was taken by the police and held without trial in Spandau prison.  He was detained afterwards at the concentration camp KZ Esterwegen near Oldenburg. He was visited while in the camp by Swiss historian Carl Jacob Burkhardt, as a representative of the International Red Cross.  Burkhardt described Ossietzky as 'a deadly pale broken creature, who seemed numb, with one eye swollen over, and his teeth broken.'"

Jesse, In memory of Journalist Carl von Ossietzky, 16 June 2012

"Tell my friends that I have come to the end.  I hear my wife tried to visit me.  We cannot speak to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep. 

I only wanted peace."

Carl von Ossietzky, German Journalist, winner in absentia of 1935 Nobel Peace Prize, died after a long brutal imprisonment on 4 May 1938

"Only one who spent the years following the First World War in Germany can fully understand how hard a battle it was that a man like Ossietzky had to fight.  He knew that the tradition of his countrymen, bent on violence and war, had not lost its power.  He knew how difficult, thankless and dangerous a task it was. to preach sanity and justice to his countrymen who had been hardened by a rough fate and demoralizing influence of a long war.  In their blindness they repaid him in hatred, persecution and slow destruction; to heed him and to act accordingly would have meant their salvation and would have been a true relief for the whole world.  It will be to the eternal fame of the Nobel Foundation that it bestowed its high honor to this humble martyr and that it is resolved to keep alive the memory of his work."

Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, 1956

"A true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz, Discreet Charm of Nihilism

Stocks wobbled today.

Gold rallied, as the Dollar fell.

Silver moved lower with equities.

VIX rose.

Earnings may dominate the stock market action, with tech and the miners reporting results this week.

It is hard to believe some of the things that are happening, even if one forecasted them, and anticipated them.  What are we becoming?

The moral cowardice of the West is, once again, our shame.

"But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

Hilaire Belloc

 Have a pleasant evening.