Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - O Brave New World

 

“When we serve the poor and the sick we serve the Lord.  Apart from the cross, there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.”

Isabella Flores de Oliva

“God creates out of nothing.  Wonderful you say.  Yes but he does what is still more wonderful— he makes saints out of sinners.”

Søren Kierkegaard

"In concentration camps we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints.  We can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.  They offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

Viktor E. Frankl

"Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction."

Simone Weil

“The ordinary life is like the life of the saints.  They all seek satisfaction, and differ only according to the object in which they hope to find it.”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

"The only real tragedy, at the end, is not to have been a saint."

Léon Bloy, La Femme Pauvre

Stocks had another wide ranging day, finishing mostly to the downside.

The Dollar fell back a bit off yesterday's grab at the 109 handle.

Gold and silver bounced back after six straight trading days of decline.

VIX was largely unchanged, hovering just below its 200 DMA.

I think we will see the risk markets continue to waffle back and forth until some additional guidance is given to them regarding the Fed's intentions, probably this Friday at Jackson Hole when Jay Powell speaks. 

Having no burdensome memory, and paying little attention to even recent history and reality, allows a people to go forward as if each day is brand new and open to their imaginative creation, without worry, moral impediments, and shame. 

In some ways the very definition of psychosis, formerly known as the 'lunatic fringe.' 

O brave new world, that has such people in it.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

 

"Financial repression is sometimes the effect of policy even if it is not the intent.  It manifests itself, for example, when policy makers react more forcefully to declines in asset prices than to increases.

Price increases tend to be treated with benign indifference.  But declines often lead policy makers to respond with force, deploying fiscal stimulus and monetary accommodation. Market participants then conclude that governments have their backs.

Efforts to manage and manipulate asset prices are not new.  But history provides little comfort that these practices work. Interfering with market prices occasionally buys time, but rarely do policy makers seize the window of opportunity to enact structural reform.  Financial repression embeds the wrong incentives—obfuscation begets delay, and a robust recovery becomes unattainable."

Kevin Warsh, The Financial Repression Trap, 2011

"Through a set of economic policies designed to bail out and subsidize failed and often tainted corporate enterprises, while actively promoting a false sense of confidence to support those policies, the public has become exposed, by those very people entrusted to protect them, to dangerously high levels of hidden counterparty risks.

The cautionary functions of the media, the political class, and the regulatory bodies have been routinely directed, distorted, and even silenced for the benefit of a highly compromised and increasingly self-serving elite. And this corruption has begun feeding on its own momentum, resulting in increasingly blatant examples of deception, distortion, and outright theft. This is crony capitalism, and its deadly credibility trap."

Jesse, April 2012

“All make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”

Sophocles, Antigone

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

Upton Sinclair


Nine out of ten Americans who actually notice these sorts of thins (which are not many) would have noticed that today was a decidedly risk off day in financial asset markets.

With distractions like political yahooism and the Kardashians who can spare the time for such arcane machinations? 

VIX took a leg higher to tag its 200 day moving average.

Gold and silver moved lower, and there will be a Comex option expiration on Thursday the 25th.

I still greatly prefer the higher ground, with a little dabbling along the shoreline here and there.

Buy I actually made money today in some select gold mining positions, go figure.  

All eyes and ears will be on Powell at Jackson Hole this Friday.

Why?  Because although we are probably après-bubble peak, the Fed still has the juice to keep it going or let it slide, at least for now.

At some point an exogenous event will probably take their favorite toy away from the Banksters.

We had almost 2 1/2"" of rain today, starting very early this morning, to it had time to soak in.   

That more than doubles what we have had so far this summer.  

I have had the garden, and even mature and hardy shrubs, on life support for some time now.  

So far we have canned eight quarts of San Marzano and roma tomatoes.

The lawn, alas, looks blow-torched.

Little Daisy is thriving, and slowly but surely taking over things here.

Have a pleasant evening.

Remembering Prague - Freedom

 

"Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance."

Václav Havel, Letter to Alexander Dubček, August 1969

"The impulse to freedom and democracy always seems weak and hopeless when matched against the forces of oppression, because aggressive oppression is always more single-minded, having already crushed internal dissent and perspective, and is generally better organized and equipped.

And yet even the greatest tyrannies have fallen, always.  This is because they carry within themselves the seeds of their own renewal and return to balance, or utter destruction.

As in most human things, their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness, and it is their inability to master and evolve that strength, to reform and achieve sustainability, that brings them crashing down, every time.  Their strength is their weakness, in its overreach and self-absorption."

Jesse, 8 June 2012


Marta Kubišová's song Prayer for Marta became a symbol of national resistance against the occupation of Warsaw Pact troops in 1968 as well as the Velvet Revolution in 1989. 

The name Velvet Revolution refers to the final protests against the communist regime that started in November 1989, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi assault on the students at Prague University in which 1200 were arrested and 9 killed without trial.

Compared to the protests in other former communist states, Czechoslovakian protests were considered much more peaceful and smooth, like velvet.