Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Vanities - The Decline of the American Republic

 

“It’s no accident that the size of the financial sector today as a percentage of GDP is at levels equaled only on the eve of the Great Depression.  Like the decade leading up to the financial crisis of 2008, the Roaring Twenties were marked by not only financial boom and technological wonder, but also massive income inequality.  Worker wages stagnated and those of the upper classes grew, bolstered in large part by stock prices.  Another similarity was a rise in debt, both public and private, which was used to mask the declining spending power of the lower and middle classes and its dampening effect on GDP growth."

Rana Foroohar, Makers and Takers, 17 May 2016


"Financial collapses that are not due to natural disasters or war are always founded in fraud. And if you dig a bit, you will find that there are individuals behind it.   It is not some random madness, but a weakness of character, a perennial gullibility, a feeling that 'everyone is doing it,' that seems to be exploited periodically by heartless individuals.  In certain periods of history they become more socially acceptable.  When things seem to come mysteriously rushed out of nowhere with little factual basis behind them, and don't make sense, then they probably don't. This holds true for the Iraq war, and the bank bailouts, MF Global, and the financial and commodity market scandals that are yet to be revealed."

Jesse, The Myth of Alan Greenspan, 10 May 2012


“Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan pulled off one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated against the American people in the history of this great nation, and the underlying scam is still alive and well, more than a quarter century later.  It represents the very foundation upon which the economic malpractice that led the nation to the great economic collapse of 2008 was built.   They came up with the perfect strategy for the redistribution of income and wealth from the working class to the rich."

Allen Smith, The Greatest Fraud Ever, 14 April 2010


"Hillary's record on this subject [financial reform], and her service to Big Money, and the role that she and Bill played in gutting the progressive wing of the Democratic Party while making themselves rich on their speeches to the Big Money crowd, speaks for itself.  To expect anything different from her if she gets in office will be like the hope and change from Obama which didn't make it past his third week in office, when he brought back Clinton's financial policy team."

Jesse, Wall Street Reform and Fiscal Policy, 6 February 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.  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


"The Clintons, along with a large group of Republican Congressmen and compliant Democrats, put a 'for sale' sign not only on the Lincoln bedroom, but on the rest of the White House and the Capitol.  They certainly did not do it alone, as it was a bipartisan effort to overturn the protections established in the darker days of the Great Depression.  And it became the thing to do in Washington and New York, to partner up with big money to take the public for a wild ride.   The Clintons turned the Democrats into the Republicans, while the Republicans were turning into a mob."

Jesse, Role the Clintons Played in Enabling the 2008 Financial Crisis, 13 February 2016


"Less than two months after stepping down from the Fed, Yellen was raking in huge fees from the mega banks on Wall Street, the very banks that are supervised by the Fed.  When Yellen was nominated by President Joe Biden for the post of Treasury Secretary, she had to file a new financial disclosure form.  That form revealed that she had received more than $7 million in speaking fees, the bulk of which came from Wall Street mega banks and trading houses, after stepping down from the Fed."

Pam and Russ Martens, The Fed's Trading Scandal Broadens,, 24 October 2022


"And so these reformers, throwing their constituency under the bus, have become the facilitators of the deep capture of our regulatory and political system in a bipartisan effort to get rich.  Most are just people, being carried along by an unsustainable tide of cynicism and personal greed that has imprinted itself on the minds of our privileged elites.

They choose to commit criminal acts through a wonderful power of rationalization, in a downward spiral of moral decline.  This perverse mindset, which used to be a denizen of rural enclaves and big city bosses is becoming pervasive in Washington and New York."

Jesse, Wall Street's Double Agent, 9 July 2015

"It's not just America.  The whole world has sort of turned muddy.  By and large, the world is increasingly run by ignoramuses, wackos and psychotics.   This was long before Donald Trump.  But we've got more crazy people running the world now than ever.

I think it's the one reason a guy like Donald Trump ran. They understood where he was coming from. That Trump is just a blowhard. They laughed at him. They knew Trump doesn't know what he's talking about. But Trump wasn't the same old big smile and a lot of good words. 

The Democrats have been going around saying, 'We're for the people, we're for the little guy.' And all they do is run to Wall Street for money.  And the one guy that didn't, Sanders, was sabotaged by the Democratic National Committee.  If I were the Democrats I would stop worrying about Donald Trump and start talking to the American people about jobs and health care. "

Seymour Hersh, 23 July 2019


"We are coming apart as a society, and inequality is right at the core of that.  When the 90 percent are getting worse off and they’re trying to figure out what happened, they’re not people like me who get to spend four or five hours a day studying these things and then writing about them — they’re people who have to make a living and get through life.  And they’re going to be swayed by demagogues and filled with fear about the other, rather than bringing us together."

David Cay Johnston, Inequality's Looming Disaster, May 2014


“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”

C. S. Lewis

 

Stocks managed to pull themselves together and extend their rally higher, up to the key overhead resistance levels they are visited before.

Gold and silver fell a bit.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

VIX remain essentially unchanged. 

What time is the next wash and rinse?

Risk levels remain elevated, and the underlying fundamentals of the equity markets are shaky.

Stagflation, that most improbable of natural outcomes, spawned by a twisted monetary and fiscal policy has come to pass.  

How was it forecast here some years ago, when most were arguing for the inevitability of deflation, or the abandonment of any rational perspective on monetary policy?

You have hardened your hearts, and surrendered yourself to lies.

How can you hope to understand anything?

Have a pleasant evening.

The Grand Enigma of Human Life: Fear, Suffering, Repentance, and Forgiveness

 

Lord, pierce our hardened hearts, enlighten our minds, heal our blindness, and break the self-made chains of our pride and self-deception, so that we may choose repentance, forgiveness, and life.

"In the realm of suffering, affliction is a thing apart, specific, irreducible.  It is wholly different than simple suffering. Affliction grips the soul and marks it to the depths with a mark belonging only to itself: the mark of slavery.  Slavery as it was practiced in ancient Rome is the most extreme form of affliction.

It is not truly affliction unless an event that grasps a life and uproots it attacks it directly or indirectly in all its parts—social, psychological, physical.  The social factor is essential.  It is not truly affliction unless we are under some form of social degradation or fear of such degradation.

Those who are persecuted for their faith and who know it, although they suffer, are not afflicted.  In the books of the martyrs, those who entered singing into the arena with the beasts were not afflicted. Christ was afflicted.  He did not die as a martyr.  He died as a common criminal, mixed with thieves.

The grand enigma of human life is not suffering, but affliction. It is not astonishing that innocents should be killed, tortured, flushed from their countries, reduced to misery or slavery, imprisoned in camps and cells—since we know there are criminals who commit these acts.  Neither is it astonishing that sickness imposes long periods of suffering that paralyze life and make it an image of death—since nature is subject to the blind play of mechanical necessity. 

But it is astonishing that God has given affliction the power to take hold of the very souls of innocents and to seize them as their sovereign master.  In the best case, the one marked by affliction only keeps half his soul.

Those to whom one of these blows has happened— after which they struggle on the ground like a half-crushed worm—have no words to express what has happened to them.  Among the people they meet, even those who have suffered much, those who have never had contact with affliction have no idea what it is.  It is something specific, irreducible to any other thing, like sounds we cannot explain at all to a deaf-mute. 

Affliction renders God seemingly absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent that the light in a completely dark cell.  A sort of horror submerges the whole soul.  During this absence there is nothing to love. What is terrible is that in this darkness when there is nothing to love, if the soul ceases to love, the absence of God becomes definitive.

Then one day God comes to manifest Himself to them and reveals the beauty of the world, like God did in the case of Job.  But if the soul ceases to love, it falls into something here below that is nearly equivalent to hell."

Simone Weil, The Love of God and Affliction


"God is constantly knocking at the gate of my heart to invite me to go beyond the state I have reached, because my whole life should be a journey on the way to love.  I cannot give a renewed assent to love, nor above all can I give a more intensified assent than hitherto, unless a divine movement comes secretly to my heart to help it ascend higher.  I can refuse it.  But if I let God act he will raise me further, step by step, to a greater love."

Charles Journet


"The souls of the virtuous are in the hands of God, no torment shall ever touch them. In the eyes of the unbelieving they appeared to die, their going looked like a tragedy, their leaving us, like a desolation; but they are at peace.  God has put them to the test and proven them worthy to be with him; he has tested them like gold in a furnace, and accepted them as a sacred offering.

They who trust in him will understand the truth, those who are faithful will live with him forever, in love; for grace and mercy await those whom he has chosen."

Wisdom 3:1-6, 9


"The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God. The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything. 

Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness."

Thomas Merton


"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


"Overcoming fear is a key element in the process of setting man free.  Fear springs from threats.  We fear suffering; we fear the loss of some goods, the loss of freedom, health or a job.  This fear makes us act against our conscience, and it is by means of our conscience that we take the measure of Truth.  We overcome fear the moment we agree to lose something for the sake of a higher value.  

If Truth becomes a value worth suffering for, worth taking a risk, then we will overcome the fear that keeps us in slavery."

Jerzy Popiełuszko

"Angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone."

George Eliot

"The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not. Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn to God when everything is going well for us. We 'have all we want' is a terrible saying when 'all' does not include God. We find God an interruption. You can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when you think you are humble enough.

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.  The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

C. S. Lewis


“Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist— and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have life.”

Léon Bloy


"You do not love yourself better than God loves you. You cannot shrink from pain more than He dislikes your bearing it; and if He puts it on you, it is as you would put it on yourself, if you would be wise, for a greater good afterwards.

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission -- I may never know it in this life but I shall be told it in the next.  I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.  He has not created me for naught.  I shall do good, I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments.

Therefore I will trust Him.  Whatever I am, I can never be thrown away.  If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him.  If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.  He does nothing in vain.  He knows what He is about.  He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers.  He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me -- still He knows what He is about.

Let us feel what we really are--sinners attempting great things.  Let us simply obey God's will, whatever may come.  He can turn all things to our eternal good.  Easter day is preceded by the forty days of Lent, to show us that they only who sow in tears shall reap in joy. The more we do, the more shall we trust in Christ; and that surely is no morose doctrine, that leads us to soothe our selfish restlessness, and forget our fears, in the vision of the Incarnate Son of God."

John Henry Newman

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Pandemic of Willful Goofiness - Stock Index Option Expiration

 

“You hypocrites.  You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky; why do you not know how to interpret the present time?  Why can you not judge for yourselves what is right?"

Luke 12:54-57

"The undeserving maintain power by promoting hysteria."

Frank Herbert

"Demagogues are willing to do or say anything to gain office or to consolidate their power.  Unconstrained by ideology, they have no concern for the consequences of their actions.   Anything that serves to make them more powerful is good enough for them — even if the political system that facilitated their rise should be destroyed in the process.  They wreck the informal rules of civility that democracies require to survive.  Once voters are activated along violent lines and fervently believe the myths propagated by the demagogue, the dam is broken; the ordinary rules of democratic politics no longer apply, and there is no telling what might come next."

Daniel Ziblatt

“Against such foolishness we are defenseless.   Reason falls on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the foolish person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Anyone can be misled by a clever person, and no one likes to readily admit that they have been had.   It is a sign of character and maturity to realize this, and admit your were deceived, and to demand change and reform.  But some cannot do this.  It seems as though the more incorrect that the truth shows them to be, the louder and more strident they become in shouting down and denying the reality of the situation.  And anyone who denies their fantasies becomes someone to be feared and hated, shunned and eliminated." 

Jesse, 18 June 2012


 Stocks rebounded strongly today.

Gold and silver rocketed higher after the recent, determined price suppression.

The Dollar slipped back from its recent high.

The VIX continued to move lower, slowly.

It's all about the Benjamins, the stock option expiration today.

Take a good look at the gold futures chart.  Notice any patterns?

The option market is a bucket shop.

Nevertheless, we are one exogenous event from a market meltdown.

Dancing on the rim of a volcano, as it were.

People seem determined to embrace their own destruction out of a fit of unrighteous anger, fear, and willfulness.

We'll try to stay out of their way as best we can, and remember them in our prayers.

The madness serves none but itself.

Have a pleasant weekend.