Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Forget it Jake - The Committee To Save the World, Again

Walter Sobchak: Am I wrong?

The Dude:  You're not wrong Walter.  You're just an asshole.

Walter Sobchak:  Okay then.

The Big Lebowski


"A bucket shop is an establishment, nominally for the transaction of a stock exchange business, or business of similar character, but really for the registration of bets, or wagers, usually for small amounts, on the rise or fall of the prices of stocks, grain, oil, [gold] etc., there being no transfer or delivery of the stock or commodities nominally dealt in."

US Supreme Court in Gatewood v. North Carolina, 27 S.Ct 167, 168 1906


"I don’t think there’s any doubt that quantitative easing enabled the rich and the quick. It was a massive gift… I hope that we do indeed succeed in being able to say in the end the wealth effect was more evenly distributed. I doubt it.”

Richard Fisher, former Dallas Fed President, 2014


"A glance at the situation today only too clearly indicates that equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists... We are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already."

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Commonwealth Club Address, September 1932


Numbered — God has numbered your reign, and will end it.
Weighed — you are weighed on the scales, and found wanting.
Divided — your power will be divided up and given to others.

Daniel 5:25-28

On a positive note, beside cheap gas and home heating oil, I have noticed a marked decline in spam phone calls. Are they having trouble staffing their phone centers?

These certainly are interesting times.

Pretenses, long asserted, are dropping like flies.

The gold action on the Comex is fascinating. Like watching Dracula melting and turning into dust in the sunlight of an old Hammer film.

Are we being rescued by the very fellows who have led us into a financial asset bubble, and its grinding, destructive aftermath, again?

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

Have a great weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - We Learn Nothing - The Downward Spiral of Dumbness

“The truth is, there are not two kinds of people.  There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts.  Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on their respective message boards, in uncannily identical language, that their opponents lack any self-awareness or empathy, the ability to see the other side of an argument or to laugh at themselves.  Which would seem to suggest that they’re both correct.

Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective.”

Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing


“A sociopath is one who sees others as impersonal objects to be manipulated to fulfill their own narcissistic needs without any regard for the hurtful consequences of their selfish actions.”

R. Alan Woods


"I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil.  I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy.  It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man.  Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."

G. M. Gilbert


“The downward spiral of dumbness in America is about to hit a new low.”

Hunter S. Thompson

Stocks were higher today.

As was the Dollar, gold and silver.

The price of oil went higher as Trumpolini reportedly urged the Saudis and Russia to get together and cut production. Yay!

The only thing that seemed to go lower is the IQ of the discourse of the nation.  Thank you Fox, MSNBC, and Talk Radio.  And the usual internet suspects.

Other than that it was the same old.

Get right, sit tight.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - 20% Survival Rate For Those On Ventilators - Good to the Last Drop

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism


“The mob believes everything it is told, provided only that it be repeated over and over. Provided too that its passions, hatreds, fears are catered to.  The grosser, the bigger, the cruder the lie, the more readily is it believed and followed.   The mob has no memory; needless to pretend to any truth: the mob is radically incapable of perceiving it: the mob can never comprehend that its own interests are what is at stake.”

Alexandre Koyré, Réflexions sur le Mensonge


"You are of your father the devil, and your will is to fulfill your father's desires.   He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand with the truth, because there is no truth in him.   When he lies, he speaks from his own character— for he is a liar and the father of lies."

John 8:44

Stocks took a deep turn down today on the realization that we can't print our way out of everything.

The Dollar rallied, and the usual games were played with gold and silver and their related investments.

Governor Cuomo today noted that those who are placed on ventilators have about a 20% survival rate.

I am sure there will be a study from some business funded think tank that says if the survival rate is that low, then we should not bother with all the expense of building and procuring them. Better to put that money to work on tax cuts and bailouts.

You know, like the moneyed interest funded campaign to quit all this lolly-gagging and get back to work.

Bailouts for the rich, the virus for the rest.

"A thriving upper class accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings, who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to functionaries, to instruments."

Friedrich Nietzsche

But hey, it's all good.    Good to the last drop.

Have a pleasant evening.