Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Cœurs des Cochons

 

"You are like whitewashed tombs which appear beautiful, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all corruption.   You outwardly look righteous, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness."

Matthew 23:27-28


"Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand poverty, because they are poor themselves after a fashion; but they cannot understand destitution.  Capable of giving alms, perhaps, but incapable of stripping their own souls bare, they may be moved to the sound of beautiful music, to Jesus’s sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will horrify them."

Léon Bloy


“The court is like a palace of marble; it's composed of people very hard and very polished.  False greatness is unsociable and remote— conscious of its own frailty, it hides, or at least averts its face, and reveals itself only enough to create an illusion and not be recognized as the meanness that it really is.”

Jean de la Bruyere


"All the nations which appear in history are necessarily a mixture, for us inextricable, of City of Good and City of Evil.  But what theology, history and common sense have also taught me is that the civilizations which allow the gap to widen between the ideal to which they claim and the realizations which they propose of it, these civilizations are dying of their hypocrisy.“

Henri-Irénée Marrou, France ma patrie


"The Lord has told you, O man, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
Only this: to do what is right, to show mercy,
and to walk humbly with your God."

Micah 6:8


“We run heedlessly into the abyss, after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées


It started out as a 'risk on' day, but alas, Apple indicated a slowdown in its business with all that entails, and stocks took a turn into the red.

Gold and silver joined the Dollar in giving up some ground.

The wash and rinse consumes all.

The VIX bounced back up again off its lower bound moving average.

There will be a futures options expiration for gold on the Comex this Friday.

Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Come and See

 

"At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person.  Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have relighted the flame within us."

Albert Schweitzer


“The will of God presents itself at every moment like an immense sea that your heart cannot exhaust. There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. 

Leave the past to the infinite mercy of God, the future to His good Providence, and give the present wholly to His love by being faithful to His grace.”

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, L'abandon à la Providence Divine


"The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age [age 94 c 100 AD).  His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words.  During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, 'Little children, love one another.'  

The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, 'Teacher, why do you always say this?'  He replied with a line worthy of John: 'Because it is the Lord's commandment, and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.'"

Jerome, Commentary on Galatians, based on the commentaries of Origen of Alexandria


Stocks went on a 'risk on' tear higher, with the VIX dropping down hard to its longer term moving average.

Apparently the concerns about a 100 basis point interest rate increase at the next Fed meeting has receded since the other day.

And surprise, the Fed Inspector General has found nothing amiss with 'Fed governors doing millions of short term transactions in the futures markets for their personal accounts.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Shameless.

Gold slumped again despite the big drop in the Dollar.   Silver rode higher with stocks.

One might suspect a short term bottom is underway, at least until the next Comex options expiration on June 26^th.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Avoir la Pêche

 

“Joy is based on the spiritual knowledge that, while the world in which we live is shrouded in darkness, God has overcome the world.  Joy does not simply happen to us.  We have to choose joy, and keep choosing it every day.”

Henri J.M. Nouwen


"Man is nourished by the invisible, man is nourished by that which is beyond the personal.  He dies from preferring the opposite."

Jacques Lusseyran, Poetry at Buchenwald


“Joy is sometimes a blessing, but it is often a conquest.”

Paulo Coelho


“Joy dwells in the innermost part of the soul; it can be found in a dark prison as well as a palace.”

Marie-Françoise Thérèse Martin de Lisieux


"The most beautiful and natural expressions of joy which I have seen in my life were in poor people who had little to hold on to.  I also think of the real joy shown by others who, even amid pressing professional obligations, were able to preserve, in detachment and simplicity, a heart full of faith. 

Thanks solely to this encounter with God’s love, which blossoms into an enriching friendship, we are liberated from our narrowness and self-absorption.  We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio


“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

 

Joy is not a goal or a destination.  Joy is a way of life which we choose by letting go of our self-absorption and pride.

Stocks slumped hard again on concerns about the economy and inflation.

But wonderful to be seen, they rallied again to a little green or unchanged in the quiet trading in the afternoon when the rest of the world has gone to sleep.

Gold and silver were hit hard once again.

Stock option expiration and all that nonsense about disappearing physical inventories in Asia, and the need to scrape the ETFs in the land of hidden leverage..

We appear to be heading into the stagflation I forecast around the end of the last great bubble. The monetary and government policy choices were obviously heading in that direction.

I made a lemon ricotta and marscapone tart today for the first time, as a dessert for our dinner of barbecued chicken and zucchini au gratin.  

The garden is producing bountifully.   We just finished using the last jar of tomatoes we put up from the previous year.

Small graces and tender mercies.

The meme among the walking dead of Wall Street is that this current crisis and stagflation is a result of the stimulus which was given to the public in the form of hundred dollar checks and unemployment relief during the Covid lockdowns.  

Certainly it has nothing to do with the billions in tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and trillions in printed money that were given by the Fed to their cronies on Wall Street, in order to foment the bubble in financial assets and another epic transfer of wealth.

They really are shameless.   As old as Babylon, and evil as sin.

Have a pleasant evening.