Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Downward Spiral of Dumbness

 

“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.”

Timothy Kreider, We Learn Nothing


Q.  If you could travel back in time and change something in the financial world that would benefit society, what would it be?

A.  I would go back in time to help Alan Greenspan achieve a wonderfully rewarding career as a professional clarinetist.   And then I would skip forward ten years or so and stop the Bankers' campaign to repeal Glass-Steagall.

Jesse, Interview with MindfulMoney.UK, August 2012


"The deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.  The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people."

Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment


Stocks ran through a quick 'wash and rinse' cycle. 

What a surprise. 

The Dollar edged slightly higher.

Gold and silver gave back some recent gains.

Consumer inflation data tomorrow.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Light Shines in the Darkness

 

"The Lord is my light and my salvation;
   whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the refuge of my life;
   of whom shall I be afraid?

Hear my voice, Lord, when I call;
    have mercy, and answer me.

Wait on the Lord; be of good courage,
   and He shall strengthen your heart.
Wait, I say, on the Lord!"

Psalm 27


"The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them a light has shined."

Is 9:1


"You are the light of the world.   A city built on a mountain cannot be hidden.   No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket; instead it is set on a stand, where it gives light to all in the house.  Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father in heaven."

Matthew 5:14-16


"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

John 1:5

Stocks were selling off this morning, as the markets took a bit of gloom from things in the overnight.

But things seemed to stabilize during the day, with stocks finding a bottom and turning around.

A mild short squeeze took stocks well into the green.

The Dollar chopped sideways for most of the day, but slid into the red in the final hours.

The VIX moved lower.

Gold and silver rallied off the recent Non-Farm Payroll related lows.

Can gold and silver build on their gains and even make another attempt at a breakout?

 Let's see how the rest of the week goes.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Lackluster and Repetitive - The Banality of Monetary Policy

 

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago


“The primary purposes of the political pamphlets of the early 1700s were neither to enlighten nor educate the masses, but to incite partisan conversation and spread commensurate ideas. Facts were not permitted to fetter the views they espoused, and the restraints of objective journalistic credibility were discarded by pamphleteers bent on promoting subjective slant to an insatiable general public for whom political dissonance was an integral part of social interaction.”

Gavin John Adams, Letters to John Law


"You are the very cause of your ignorance, yourselves. You put away the light, yourselves; you first pluck out both your own eyes, yourselves; and after that other men’s too, so that the blind may lead the blind, until you both fall into the pit.”

Thomas More, The Sadness of Christ


"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science, 1966



Even as pump and dumps go, today was rather lackluster, even boring to the point of banality.

It contained all the cutting drama of a Jackie Vernon vacation slide show.

Gold and silver rallied early and then were pressed back down.

Stocks rallied early and then largely faded into the afternoon.

The dollar chopped sideways but managed to finish slightly higher.

The VIX wallowed.

Have a pleasant evening.