Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Whether We Realize It or Not

 

“The opposite of love is not hate, he said. It’s power. Relationships fueled by a drive for power, where one person seeks dominance over the other, are incapable of producing love.”

David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard

"Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish.  Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears.  Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless.  Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.

We often confuse unconditional love with unconditional approval.  God loves us without conditions but does not approve of every human behavior.  God doesn’t approve of betrayal, violence, hatred, suspicion, and all other expressions of evil, because they all contradict the love God wants to instill in the human heart.  Evil is the absence of God’s love.

The more I think about the human suffering in our world and my desire to offer a healing response, the more I realize how crucial it is not to allow myself to become paralyzed by feelings of helplessness and guilt. More important than ever is to be very faithful to my vocation to do well the few things I am called to do and hold on to the joy and peace they bring me. I must resist the temptation to let the forces of darkness pull me into despair and make me one more of their many victims."

Henri J.M. Nouwen

"The Lord requires you to act justly, and to love kindness and mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."

Micah 6:8

"Then it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not."

C. S. Lewis, 1944

 

Today was the quad witching option expiration.

Gold and silver were hit with a sharp reversal, giving back all their gains from yesterday.

Wash and rinse.   What a surprise.

Stocks were trading weakly.

VIX continues wiggling around complacently.

The Dollar gained a little of yesterday's decline back.

This upcoming presidential election is surreal.  

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Willful Blindness: Dancing to the Abyss

 

"I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past.  I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things.  I wasn't aware of the extent.  But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler.  And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out."

Traudl Junge, Im toten Winkel - Hitlers Sekretärin, 2002

"The banks engage in fraud for two reasons.  First, they profit from swindling the public.   Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique.  They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions."

Laurence Kotlikoff, When Banksters Buy Regulators and Prosecutors, Forbes, October 21, 2014

“We should listen to the voice of conscience. It does not take nearly as much courage as one might think to admit to our mistakes and learn from them. Human beings are in this world to learn and to change themselves in learning.”

Traudl Junge, Bis zur letzten Stunde 1947

"Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history off the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor.  Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralizing as earth, air and water.  Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god.  It isn't money itself that causes the trouble, but the use of money as votive offering and pagan ornament. 

Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible.  The world goes on as before, and it turns out that nobody else seems to to notice the unbearable lightness of being.  The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business."

Lewis H. Lapham, Money and Class in America, 1988

"Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now."

Aaron Bushnell

We had that rare risk off day in the markets.

Stocks were weak and retreated a bit from their recent highs, concentrated and overbought.

Gold and silver rallied sharply.

The Dollar rallied.

VIX rose.

Tomorrow is a quad witch stock option expiration.

I suspect quite a bit of today's action was a correction of the recent ploy to squeeze the bears.

The geopolitical strategy of the Western allies is almost incomprehensible at this point.

And that is no indication of depth of thought on their part.

Well, we are expected not to notice some notable things these days, or else risk isolation and ridicule by the cancel culture of the establishment's prevailing narrative.

Something significant, something that is going to be missed, is on its way to a hellish reckoning.

The flower of a generation of Ukrainian men, a city on the Mediterranean, a major base in Eastern Europe?

And we we dance on, creeping closer and closer to the abyss.

Madness. 

And the madness serves none but itself.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Awful Silence of God

 

“People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.  They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956

"You push away every thought of disaster, but only bring the time of violence closer."

Amos 6:3

"Repentance and forgiveness are the two great gifts of God, freely given.  But there is the third and greatest gift, which is thankfulness.  For with thankfulness our sinful pride is vanquished, our hearts are opened, and love enters. And a light comes into our lives."

Jesse, Love and Thankfulness, 15 November 2018

"In his forgetfulness of God, the sinner squanders his fortune, the natural and supernatural gifts which he has received, using his natural gifts, his health, his physical powers, and his reason, to offend God.  The sinner, having forsaken the service of his God, falls under the dominance of Satan, and becomes the slave of his lowest passions, which are signified by the swine which the prodigal was forced to feed.  But the more he obeys his passions, the more dissatisfied he becomes.   No pleasure of the senses can give him happiness, and he feels an emptiness and spiritual hunger in his heart which he is powerless to satisfy.  He knows no rest; he only knows that he is miserable, and hateful to himself."

Friedrich Justus Knecht, Practical Commentary On Holy Scripture, 1923

"The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself: ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity— greedy, dishonest, adulterous— or even like this tax collector over there."

Luke 18:11

"They do not see the image of Almighty God before them, and ask themselves what He wishes.  And, for the same reason that they do not please Him, they succeed in pleasing themselves.  Hence, they become both self-satisfied and self-sufficient; they think they know just what they ought to do, and that they do it all; and in consequence they are very well content with themselves, and rate their merit very high, and have no fear at all of any future scrutiny into their conduct. 

The more secret God's hand is, the more powerful— the more silent, the more awful."

John Henry Newman


Stocks had yet another ranging day, wobbling around their record highs.

Or at least highs for the indices, if not for the bulk of the market.

Narrow rallies like this either broaden out on fundamentals, or suffer violent corrections.

VIX fell.

Gold and silver rallied.  

They are just sweeping back and forth in a range for now.

The Dollar is just chopping.

US markets will be closed tomorrow in observance of Juneteenth.

On Friday there will be a major stock option expiration.

Worldly leaders act as if possessed by the lawless willfulness of powerful interests.

I cannot escape the feeling that their relentless madness is about to go off the rails.

Maybe I just need a day off.

You may have heard that long time silver analyst Ted Butler has passed away.   

I remember him in my prayers.  His last message to his subscribers was poignant.

At some point we will all say goodby, some like Ted with a simple grace to their small circle of  family and friends, and others with their usual hollow words to vast crowds of enablers, sycophants, and hangers-on.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

See you on Thursday.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Conmen and their Puppetmasters - Stock Option Expiration

 

"So let us begin anew— remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof.   Let us never negotiate out of fear.  But let us never fear to negotiate."

John F Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961

"The man who has never learned to obey knows not how to command, and the man who has never disciplined himself knows not how to be merciful.  It is always the selfish who are unkind to others, and those who are hardest on themselves are the kindest to others, as the teacher who knows the least is always the most intolerant to his pupils."

Fulton J. Sheen, Victory Over Vice, 2016

"Psychopaths love chaos and hate rules, so they're comfortable in the fast-moving modern corporation. Dr. Paul Babiak, an industrial-organizational psychologist based near New York City, is in the process of writing a book with Bob Hare called When Psychopaths Go to Work: Cons, Bullies and the Puppetmaster. The subtitle refers to the three broad classes of psychopaths Babiak has encountered in the workplace."

Robert Hercz, Psychopaths Among Us

“The manipulator’s power lies in their ability to exploit vulnerability and manipulate emotions.”

Robert Hare, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, 1993

"We are poor indeed if this Nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world.  We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude.  In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity. 

Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.  Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events.  To some generations much is given.  Of other generations much is expected.  This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny."

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Nomination Acceptance, Philadelphia, June 27, 1936


It was risk on all the way today, as equities caught their footing and then rose almost relentlessly higher.

If there is anything to spoil the bullish scenario it is the very narrow nature of the advance, with a handful of story stocks providing most of the gains by far.

This has been going on for a while.  And historically these things can run on for a while, until something happens to upset the scenario, to disrupt the flow of what is essentially a long con.

As a reminder, there will be a quadruple witch stock option expiration on this Friday.

Gold and silver pulled back a bit along with the Dollar, a sure sign of a risk on impulsive move.

I have been puzzling over the domestic political situation in the US for some time now.  It certainly is of consequence to the world at large.

Biden doesn't really seem to be in control of things, in setting policy.  He appears more and more of a figurehead.  He gets propped up for the occasion and performs his piece, with mixed results.

I think the leading figures on the American political scene have a similar position, but are performing their functions more effectively.

Is former president Jimmy Carter right, in saying that the US is now an oligarchy, or perhaps more precisely a plutocracy?

Who are the true puppetmasters?   The ones who are the most difficult to see.

It's something to think about.  One wonders if anyone outside of the political duopoly can gain any effective influence on the power that is controlling things these days. 

This upcoming election is either going to be rather interesting, or merely pathetic.  It all depends on the wild cards.

Have a pleasant evening.