Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Long Goodbye - Payrolls Next Week

 

"There is no clean way to make a hundred million bucks.  Somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut out from under them.  Decent people lost their jobs.  Big money is big power, and big power gets used wrong.  It's the system.  The tragedy of life, Howard, is not that the beautiful die young, but that they grow old and mean."

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

“People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.  They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

"One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane.  If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand.  It is much worse to consider this calm, 'well-balanced,' unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder.   He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative.   He had a profound respect for system.

The' sanity' of Eichmann is disturbing.  We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people.   We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction.   And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.  The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless."

Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable

"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

 

And so we say goodbye to July.

Non-Farm Payrolls next week.

Gold and silver rebounded strongly from the recent battering they took from a gauntlet of gameable events.

Stocks have rebound sharply from oversold, and may be completing a bear market rally.

Or perhaps we have reached a bottom of sorts.

I doubt it, but I could be wrong.

The Dollar continued to slide on expectations of the grand pivot.

A few videos at the bottom.  

Old and new, hot and cool.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - From the Far Side - Amazon Thrills After Hours

 

“Truth and the hatred of truth come into our world together.  As soon as truth appears, it is regarded as an enemy.  They remain in ignorance as long as they hate, and they hate unjustly as long as they remain in ignorance.”

Tertullian


“Above all, don't lie to yourself.  The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lies comes to a point when he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov


“You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind.  He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds.

Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity. But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason."

Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings


"Then the kings of the earth, their nobles and their commanders, the rich, the powerful, and every one of their willing slaves and free men, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains.  And they cried to the mountains and the rocks, 'Fall on us, and hide us from the face of the one who sits on the throne, and from the righteous anger of the Lamb.'"

Rev 6:15-16

Stocks were able to add another leg up on the wings of a prayer of a pivot.

Gold and especially silver continued to move higher.

The better miners were up 4-6% on the day.

The Dollar declined again.

What will they think of next?

Amazon surprised to the upside after hours, which served to distract the spokesmodels from the disasters that are Intel and Roku.

I tend to view Amazon as more of an outlier than a bellwether.  They are in their own space, and substantially borrowing their growth from others.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Blue Skies - Forget 'Plastics' Wall Street Says 'Pivot'

 

"J. P. Morgan and Andrew Mellon made their billions through inter locking directorates and outright ownership of hundreds of nationally prominent enterprises.  Glass-Steagall is one crucial piece of a litany of legislation designed to place checks and balances on the concentration of financial resources. To repeal it would be tantamount to bringing back the days of the robber barons.   The unbridled activities of those gifted financiers crumbled under the dynamic forces of the capital marketplace.  If you take away the checks, the market forces will eventually knock the system off balance."

Mark D. Samber, End Bank Law and Robber Barons Ride Again, NY Times, March 5, 1995


"In 1999, on signing Gramm-Leach-Bliley into law, Clinton said, 'This is a day we can celebrate as an American day' and that 'the Glass-Steagall law is no longer appropriate for the economy in which we live' and 'today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down these antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority' and 'This is a very good day for the United States.'"

Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Clinton on Deregulation


"There is no reason to believe either equity swaps or credit derivatives can influence the price of the underlying assets any more than conventional securities trading does."

Alan Greenspan, July 24, 1998, Testimony on the Regulation of OTC Derivatives


"But bad economics was only a symptom of the real problem: secrecy. Smart people are more likely to do stupid things when they close themselves off from outside criticism and advice."

Joseph Stiglitz, What I Learned at the World Economic Crisis, April 17, 2000


"It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud.   The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident."

Charles H. Ferguson


“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair


"We feel that fundamentally Wall Street is sound, and that for people who can afford to pay for them outright, good stocks are cheap at these prices."

Goodbody and Company, The New York Times, October 25, 1929

The market read between the lines of the FOMC decision and in particular Chairman Powell's remarks and assumed that the Fed is in a pivot to a less hawkish stance on interest rates.

And so gold and particularly silver rallied.

Stocks went stratospheric.

The Dollar dumped back to the 106 handle.

Whether this interpretation of the Fed's intentions is valid or not remains to be seen.  

Certainly eyes will be on the data,  

After hours the corporate earnings reports were a very mixed bag.

Tomorrow we will be getting an advance look at 2Q GDP.

Regardless of this backward look, history suggests that we are heading into a recession. 

Unless this time is different.

Have a pleasant evening.