Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Those Who Are Not

 

"Since 1998, in our corrupt political system, the private healthcare sector has spent more than $10.6 billion on lobbying and over the last 30 years it has spent more than $1.7 billion on campaign contributions to maintain the status quo.  We have the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs, and the pharmaceutical industry right now has 1,500 paid lobbyists in Washington, D.C. to make sure that in some cases we pay 10 times more for the medicine that we need."

Bernie Sanders, September 2022

"Yet the system of corruption depends on another factor beyond secrecy, one that is perhaps even more important: impunity.  Impunity means that the rich and powerful escape from punishment even when their malfeasance is in full view.   Impunity is epidemic in America.  The rich and powerful get away with their heists in broad daylight.  When a politician like Bernie Sanders calls out the corruption, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal double down with their mockery over such a foolish 'dreamer.'  Our major institutions, the ones that should know better, are often gross enablers of impunity."

Jeffrey Sachs, The Age of Impunity, May 2016


"There is now abundant evidence of widespread, unpunished criminal behavior in the financial sector.  The evidence is now overwhelming that over the last thirty years, the U.S. financial sector has become a rogue industry.  As its wealth and power grew, it subverted America’s political system (including both political parties), government, and academic institutions in order to free itself from regulation.

As deregulation progressed, the industry became ever more unethical and dangerous, producing ever larger financial crises and ever more blatant criminality.  Since the 1990s, its power has been sufficient to insulate bankers not only from effective regulation but even from criminal law enforcement.  The financial sector is now a parasitic and destabilizing industry that constitutes a major drag on American economic growth.

The rise of predatory finance is both a cause and a symptom of an even broader, and even more disturbing, change in America’s economy and political system.  The financial sector is the core of a new oligarchy that has risen to power over the past thirty years, and that has profoundly changed American life."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation


Stocks had another ranging day, ending slightly higher.

Gold dropped, under pressure most of the day.

Physical inventories are very thin in Hong Kong.

Silver moved higher, taking back some of its recent decline.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

The VIX receded after the big rise yesterday.

Who do the powerful of this world serve?  The simple truth of the matter is this— non serviam.  In all things they will not serve any other but themselves. 

May God have mercy and forgive us, especially in that moment when we will finally see ourselves as we really are, stripped of all worldly ornaments and illusions, and then know what we have done, and what we have failed to do, with perfect clarity.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - And There's the Rinse - Quad Witch on Friday

 

"If I speak with the words of men and of angels, but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.  And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have the faith to move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give away everything that I have, and if I hand myself over for sacrifice but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind.  Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not conceited, does not act improperly, is not selfish, is not provoked, and does not keep a record of wrongs.  Love finds no joy in wickedness but rejoices in the truth."

1 Corinthians 13:1-7

"Then it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature.   It will be too late then to choose your side.   That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not."

C. S. Lewis, 1944

"Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand poverty, because they are poor themselves, after a fashion; they cannot understand destitution. They will be moved, to the sound of beautiful music, at Jesus’s sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will horrify them. They want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, hanging from a woman’s beautiful throat."

Léon Bloy

"A true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz, Discreet Charm of Nihilism

'Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed.'

Mt. 26:24


The headline yesterday here was 'Wax On, Wax Off.' 

The spike rally of the last two days was the 'wax on.'

Guess what today was?

There is a triple witch option expiration on this Friday, based on the calendar I have been posting.

In short, this was a trading setup for the quad witch.  What a surprise.

We even had the usual talking heads muttering about a 100 bp increase by the Fed in September.

What did we say before?   75 bp is baked in, the pivot is an delusion, and 100 bp is highly unlikely.

The Dollar rocketed higher today, slamming gold and silver.  

I didn't think they had much of a shot at moving higher, especially given the dearth of physical in Hong Kong.  They need to scour some coin out of a few of the ETFs. 

I would be a little more constructive on the metals after today, with due caution.

Stock market volume was nothing to write home about.   No real panic.

This is another indication that this was a fairly cynical trading gambit.

And the volatility will get worse, as long as regulation stays so subdued, and the risk reward for cheating is so favorable.

So Jay, how is that 'internal investigation' coming along into that brazen insider trading by the Fed Governors?

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Wax On, Wax Off - And the Beat Goes On

 

“Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works”.

John Stuart Mill


“The second factor contributing to speculative euphoria and programmed collapse is the specious association of money and intelligence. There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.”

John Kenneth Galbraith, A Short History of Financial Euphoria


"The bankers are going to be unrelenting in their attacks on the middle class and the poor.  The attacks are threefold:

1. resisting financial and political reform which caused the crisis in the first place.  Three years after the crisis and no major player has even been indicted, the bonus system is flourishing again, and politicians are taking many millions in funds from the bankers and wealthy elite to promote their agendas.

2. blaming the victims, and compelling them to take the greatest pain of the bailouts, and continuing bailouts and subsidies to the financial class through spending reallocations.  The bailouts and spending on the military industrial complex are crowding out the fundamental public functions of government.

3. shifting the impulse to reform from financial reform to 'tax reform' that further supports the monied interests.  Cut taxes for the wealthiest as your primary agenda using a variety of deceptive means like promoting a consumption tax, or a flat income tax but with offshore havens and loopholes,

Jesse, Of the 1%, By the 1%, and for the 1%, 9 April 2011


"The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true. It really happened. These suspicions are valid.”

Neil Barofsky, TARP Inspector General


It is ironically funny and even remarkable when ordinary people get all exercised about relief for those crippled by monopoly turbocharged medical bills or the interest on credit card debt, when they just stand slack-jawed and silent while Wall Street literally takes trillions in bailouts and subsidies, cheapening the currency and transferring the wealth of a generation to themselves.

And not only that, they self-righteously and vociferously stand for those who are the enablers for the con men that have been robbing them blind for the past thirty years.

“Persuading the people to vote against their own best interests has been the awesome genius of the American political elite from the beginning.” 

 Gore Vidal

Stocks were in rally mode today, although the action was a bit more subdued than last week.

VIX ticked a bit higher.

Gold and silver popped early as the Dollar declined.

Gold gave back a chunk, but silver was once again rallying higher, hitting $20 intraday. 

Physical silver inventories in London continue to plummet.

CPI tomorrow.  An extreme read could move markets.

Let's see if the rally in the metals can continue.

Have a pleasant evening.