Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Keep Off the Moors

 

“I am persuaded that big changes are coming to long standing global currency arrangements.  Gold is flowing from weaker hands to stronger hands, from speculators to central banks and wealthy investors, the multitudes in China and India, and in general from West to East."

Jesse, Monetary Rapture: The Incredible Disappearing Gold Inventories, 23 May 2013

"To put it crudely, the US wants to inflate the rest of the world, while the latter is trying to deflate the US. The US must win, since it has infinite ammunition: there is no limit to the dollars the Federal Reserve can create. What needs to be discussed is the terms of the world’s surrender: the needed changes in nominal exchange rates and domestic policies around the world."

Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 12 Oct 2010

"When the rich wage war, it is the poor who die."

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Devil and the Good Lord, 1951

"Never before has so much debt been imposed on so many people by so few financial operatives — operatives who work from Wall Street, the largest casino in history, and a handful of its junior counterparts around the world, especially Europe.  After transferring trillions of dollars of bad debt or toxic assets from the books of financial speculators to those of governments, global financial moguls, their representatives in the State apparatus and corporate media are now blaming social spending (in effect, the people) as responsible for debt and deficit

A most outrageous aspect of the debt burden that is placed on the taxpayers' shoulders since 2008 is that most of the underlying debt claims are fictitious and illegitimate: they are largely due to manipulated asset price bubbles, dubious or illegal financial speculations, and scandalous conversion of financial gamblers' losses into public liability."

Dr. Ismael Hossein-zadeh, Class War: The Vicious Circle of Debt and Depression, June 7, 2010

“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”

Émile Zola, as quoted in Dreyfus: His Life and Letters, 1937

Stocks managed to turn in another fluctuating day that ended up mostly unchanged.

Gold and silver held a little bounce.

The Dollar bounced back a little as well.

VIX is comatose.

We are deeply into a currency war.  

Things are progressing pretty much as expected.

Gold and silver are flowing from West to East.

The Anglo-American currency hegemony is being sustained by force and fraud, with the reliance on force increasing steadily. 

And so there is tomorrow.  And what God wills.

Have  a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - On the Road from Jerusalem to Jericho - A Light in the Darkness

 

"Today in Markowa, Poland, the martyrs Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma, and their seven children, were beatified: an entire family was exterminated by the Nazis on 24 March 1944 for having given shelter to a family of persecuted Jews.  They opposed the hatred and violence that characterized that time with evangelical love.  May this Polish family, which represented a ray of light in the darkness of the Second World War, be for all of us a model to imitate in the zeal for goodness and service to those in need.”

Francis I, Beatification of the Ulma Family, Martyrs for Love of Neighbor, 10 September 2023

"Poles faced the death penalty for helping Jews. This family must have realized that even though they lived at some distance from the village, they put themselves in great danger from the Germans by sheltering several [8] people in the attic of their house.   Clearly, there were also infamous attitudes and deeds.  However, these cannot overshadow the heroism of those thousands who risked their lives to help others."

Stanisław Gądecki, Archbishop of Poznań, 10 September 2023

"Jozef and Wiktoria lived a holiness that was not only marital but was fully embedded in their entire family.  The Ulma family home became an inn where the despised, outcast, and death-stricken were welcomed and cared for.  They were murdered because they had practiced the corporal work of mercy of sheltering the homeless."

Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, 10 September 2023

"We live in a world where love itself is condemned. People call it weakness, something to grow out of. Some are saying: 'Love is of no importance, we should rather develop our strength; let each one become as strong as he can, and let the weak perish.'"

Titus Brandsma, Dutch priest, executed at Dachau, 26 July 1942

"Overcoming fear is a key element in the process of setting man free.   Fear springs from threats.   We fear suffering; we fear the loss of some goods, the loss of freedom, health or a job.  This fear makes us act against our conscience, and it is by means of our conscience that we take the measure of Truth.   We overcome fear the moment we agree to lose something for the sake of a higher value.  Any nation is bound to perish if deprived of bravery, if it pretends that everything is good when it is not, and if it is satisfied with half-truths. Every day we must be aware that when we are demanding truth from others we must live in truth ourselves, demanding justice we must be just, demanding bravery we must be brave."

Jerzy Popiełuszko, chaplain of Solidarity, Martyr for the Truth, Oct. 19, 1984

"We ought to speak, shout out against injustices, with confidence and without fear.  We proclaim the principles of the Church, the reign of love, without forgetting that it is also a reign of justice.  Viva Cristo Rey!"

Miguel Agustin Pro, Mexican Priest, Martyr, November 23, 1927

"There was a scholar of the law who had come to test him and said, 'Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' and Jesus asked him, 'What is written in the law?  How do you understand it?'  The scholar replied, 'You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.'  Jesus replied, 'You have answered correctly.  Do this and you will live.'

But because he wished to justify himself,  he asked Jesus,  'And who then is my neighbor?'  Jesus replied, 'A man fell victim to robbers, as he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho...'"

Luke 10:25-30

"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 with equal force 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 city."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero, 1898

 

Not the day that they were murdered, or the day they were beatified, but the anniversary of their wedding, July 7 is the feast day of the Ulma family: Jozef and Wiktoria, and their seven children.  They died as martyrs for love of the other, of their neighbor.  They are a light for us, down the long dark halls of history.  

'In the end, the only real tragedy is not to have been a saint.'

Lord, pierce our hardened hearts, enlighten our minds, heal our blindness, and break the self-made chains of our pride and self-deception, so that we may choose repentance, forgiveness, and life. 

Stocks wobbled but managed to extend their gains and new highs.

The market has narrowed significantly, and is fairly overextended — and complacent.

We are overdue for a correction.  And given a sufficient exogenous trigger a decline of 10 to 20 percent is certainly not out of the question.  There are warnings in the air.

But market participants are set up to 'lose their shit' as the saying goes.  Complacency, fueled by pride, goes before a fall.  Even presidents and kings are prone to this human failing.

They never see it, or want to see it, coming.

Gold and silver were pinned back.  Gold has so far confirmed a short term double bottom W formation that if it is activated will take it up to the $2490 region.  But we are not there yet.

Gold is under pressure because the Banks with their Banker-auntie at the Fed are playing some dangerous games with asset liabilities and leverage.   I know that is hard to believe — even after they have failed at this in spectacular fashion, two or three times in the last 20 years.

It's what they do.  They are sociopaths, and will likely never learn to act any differently. And along with them in this ongoing control fraud are the professional elite, the plutocrats, and their politicians.  And why should they not push on, when they are winning.  

It's an old, familiar story.

The same goes for national leaders and some countries, who seem to be swirling with reckless abandon towards their own rendezvous with destiny.

Madness.  A tragic spectacle of delusion.

But here we are, like so many others before us, on the rode from Jerusalem to Jericho.  

Who then is your neighbor, and what is it that you have been instructed to do?

This is the whole of the law.  And of a righteous life.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Poisoned Chalice of Empire

 

"Readers of this column know that President Joe Biden’s drift into blankness has been ongoing for months, as he and his foreign policy aides have been urging a ceasefire that will not happen in Gaza while continuing to supply the weapons that make a ceasefire less likely. There’s a similar paradox in Ukraine, where Biden has been financing a war that cannot be won and refusing to participate in negotiations that could end the slaughter.

The reality behind all of this, as I’ve been told for months, is that the president is simply no longer there, in terms of understanding the contradictions of the policies he and his foreign policy advisers have been carrying out. America should not have a president who does not know what he has signed off on. People in power have to be responsible for what they do, and last night showed America and the world that we have a president who clearly is not in that position today...

Whatever happens, we have a president—now fully unveiled—who just may not be responsible for what he does in the coming campaign, not to mention his actions in the Middle East and Ukraine."

Seymour Hersh, Who Is Running the Country?, June 28.2024

“The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost selves?”

Maximilian Kolbe

"No warning will suffice to powerful fools who, driven mad by hubris and lust for power, weave the hangman's ropes of their own destruction.  They preach the necessity of hardness, and practice the circumvention of the law for themselves and their associates in injustice.  But when the reckoning comes for them, as it eventually does, they always seem astonished, but unfortunately never to the point of speechlessness.  They will harangue fortune, and all those imaginary enemies who conspired to their downfall, to the bitter end.  The Western elite are in denial, and a bubble of delusion, so profound that I am concerned that when reality intrudes their reaction will be mishandled, provocative, and likely to hasten a generational change that is already occurring and being fiercely resisted, slowly."

Jesse, Complicity of the Advantaged in the Nakedness of Kings, 19 February 2015

"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."

Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism, The Nation, May 1, 2003

"And what does the Lord require of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?"

Micah 6:8

"I know nothing that I may say can influence you.  You have no souls to be influenced.  You are spineless, flaccid things.  You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats.  There is no Republican Party.  There is no Democratic Party.  There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House.  You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the plutocracy.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel


Stocks rallied higher to new record highs, based on a seemingly benign Non-Farm Payrolls report.

Economist Danielle DiMartino Booth reminds us that recessions tend to be marked from the first Fed rate cut.

The Dollar fell.

Gold and silver rocketed higher.

Daisy and I abide, counting our blessings.

The pundit class and  their spokemodels are misrepresenting what is happening geopolitically, and the risks which are involved.

Madness.

"For these are a rebellious people, deceitful children, unwilling to listen to the commandments of the Lord. They say to their seers,‘Do not see!’, and to the prophets,‘Say nothing of what is right. Tell us only the things that please us — prophesy illusions.'"

Isaiah 30:8-10

Their pride blinds them.  They close their eyes and ears to truth. They never see it coming. 

I remember you all in my prayers.

Have a pleasant weekend.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - At the Hands of a Savage Few

 

"The truly savage and frenetic part of New York, the terrible, cold, cruel part, is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills this street believes that the world will always be the same, that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.

I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several billion dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness. I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings."

Federico Garcia Lorca, A Poet In New York, October 1929

"The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards:  And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.  We have receiv'd them as a fair Inheritance from our worthy Ancestors: They purchas'd them for us with toil and danger and expence of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence.  It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.  Of the latter we are in most danger at present: Let us therefore be aware of it.

Samuel Adams, Essay in the Boston Gazette, October 14, 1771

"Intellectual freedom is essential — freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship."

Andrei Sakharov, Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, July 22, 1968

"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; 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, This That and The Other, 1912

"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few, as we have learned to our sorrow."

Judge Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty, 21 May 1944


Wall Street took advantage of the light, pre-holiday trade to run the stock indices up to new highs.

How could they not?   It's what they do.

The bigger banksters are covering themselves by warning of a stock market crash.

It would not be surprising to see a thorough rinse follow such a ham-handed wash.

Gold and silver rebounded strongly from their recent price suppression for the Comex option expiration.

VIX is allowing in blissful ignorance.

US markets are closed until Friday in observance of its national holiday.

The rest of the world will have to carry on until then without our financial supervision.

You have to wonder what is going on in the minds of those who are setting the US foreign policy these days.   

From a strategic standpoint they appear to be incredibly foolish and self-destructive.

It's unlikely that the Babbler-in-chief is involved on more than a superficial level.

So the ulterior and very selfish, short term motives of bent and untempered underlings are given free rein without appropriate adult supervision.  This is the most likely explanation.

How else could you characterize the squandering of 8 trillion dollars and millions of human lives in pursuit of an endless series of discretionary wars in pursuit of power and money.

This is hardly a US phenomenon.   It is a good description for far too many figures among the powers of the world.  It's the natural outcome of society organized around personal gratification and savagery.

As always, I remember you in my prayers, as you remember me.

Have a pleasant 4th of July.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - To Withstand the Evil of This Day

 

"They spend their days in prosperity, and slide down quietly into the abyss.   They say to God, 'Leave us alone!  We do not want to learn your ways.  Who is the Almighty that we should serve him?   And what would we gain by praying to him?  Is not the prosperity of the wicked the result of their own efforts, since they have never sought God’s help?'"

Job 21:12-16

"Listen to the sound of my cries, my Lord and my God.   For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil will not abide with you.  The boastful will not stand before your eyes; you will have no part with lawlessness.  You bring low those who speak lies, and despise the bloodthirsty and deceitful. There is no truth in their mouths; their hearts are desolate; their throats are open graves; they sway us with their words.

Lead us, O Lord, in your righteousness despite adversity.  Make your ways straight before us."

Psalm 5:1-9

"Simon, Simon. Satan has asked to have you, and to sift all of you, like wheat.   But I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail.   And when you have returned to the faith, you must help to strengthen your brothers."

Luke 22:31-32

"Sometimes God is the only one who will understand your motives.  Sometimes you will do all you know God has asked you to do, only to face ridicule from others.  At such times all you can do is maintain your integrity, trusting that God always keeps His eyes on you.  God looks favorably upon those who walk with integrity, doing what they know is right, regardless of how others perceive their actions.

When no one seems to understand why you have done something or when others question whether you have done all you should have done, your confidence should not be in the hope of vindication in the eyes of others.  It should be in the knowledge that God keeps you in His sight. If you have this confidence, it will be enough to sustain you."

Henry Blackaby, Integrity Upheld

"Watch therefore and pray always, that you may escape all these things that will come to pass, and be among those standing with the Son of Man.”

Luke 21:36

Once again stocks came in trading heavily, but went out with gains into the close.

VIX fell.  It's called a growing complacency.

The Dollar fell a bit.

Gold and silver both held their ground with silver showing a gain.

Holiday on Thursday, Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday.

There is quite a debate going on after the recent presidential debate, regarding Biden's ability to function for another four years in office.

But for me the key question is, who is running things in Washington these days?   Not this guy.  

No wonder things are so screwy in Foggy Bottom.  The children in the administration are lacking adult supervision.

Have a pleasant evening.