Gold and silver were hammered lower.
Let's see if they can hold support next week.
The dollar rallied.
Stocks managed to churn out a neutral showing.
Have a pleasant weekend.
"The problem with movies and books is they make evil look glamorous, exciting, when it's no such thing. It's boring and it's depressing and it's stupid. Criminals are all after cheap thrills and easy money, and when they get them, all they want is more of the same, over and over. They're shallow, empty, boring people who couldn't give you five minutes of interesting conversation. Maybe some can be monkey-clever, some of the time, but they aren't hardly ever smart."
Dean Koontz
Gold and silver were hammered lower.
Let's see if they can hold support next week.
The dollar rallied.
Stocks managed to churn out a neutral showing.
Have a pleasant weekend.
"No one today likes truth: utility and self interest have long ago been substituted for truth. We live in a nightmare of falsehoods, and there are few who are sufficiently awake and aware to see things as they are. Our first duty is to clear away illusions and recover a sense of reality."
Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev
"Our basic trouble was not an insufficiency of capital. It was an insufficient distribution of buying power coupled with an over-sufficient speculation in production.
Do what we may have to do to inject life into our ailing economic order, we cannot make it endure for long unless we can bring about a wiser, more equitable distribution of the national income.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1932
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The bubble momentum trade in financial assets was getting crowded and overdone.
The mavens of the markets tried to shake off the hangers-on yesterday, but Jay Powell nixed their plans with his happy talk.
So today the captains of Wall Street called for a down bubble, emergency deep.
Time to take out the garbage. Scrape the hull.
The challenge the financiers presented to the Fed showed up in the yields of the longer dated 5+ Treasuries and curve.
Despite the selling, the Dollar tread water very nicely just above 90.
VIX went north.
A grand wash day.
What will Chairman Jay and his banker buddies do next in response?
Or is this just another episode of kabuki theater among financial friends.
Let's see what comes out in the rinse.
Have a pleasant evening.
"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
"Flagrant evils cure themselves by being flagrant."
John Henry Newman
“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”
C. S. Lewis
The metals were hit hard in the early morning hours.
This is often the case on the day after an option expiration on the Comex.
Stocks slumped very hard again led lower by tech.
Jay Powell, Fed Chair, helped to talk the market back up during his testimony today.
The metals recovered, led higher by the miners, especially silver.
Lately the manipulation is open and predictable, shameless and without fear of consequences.
And if some notice, they are easily distracted by nonsense, bread, and circuses.
We love our illusions. The more empty they become, the more strongly we embrace them.
Through years of short term thinking and private greed our systems have grown increasingly fragile and vulnerable.
Are you not entertained?
"The banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, and balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained recovery."
Jesse, July 2009
Have pleasant evening.