Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Madness Serves None But Itself

 

“The never ending alarms, the never ending phrases, the never ending hanging out of flags, now in triumph, now in mourning—it all produces apathy.  And everyone feels helpless, and everyone knows he is being lied to, and everyone is told what he has to believe.   The dominant feeling is that this reign of terror can hardly last long, but that its fall will bury us.”

Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1933-41

"When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven mad by fear and horror, and when chaos has become the supreme law, then the time for the empire of lawlessness will have come."

Friedrich Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse

"As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.   The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.  Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.  What is truth?   Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing.  Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference.   It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.

Believe in truth.  To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.  If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.  If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.  The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

"The impulse to evil is not the domain of any particular people or time, but a recurrent problem that must be confronted by each generation, and each individual person, in their own way and calling.   There is always the temptation to look upon injustice as insurmountable, and to simply turn away and to wash our hands with the thought that there is no use of trying.

That is the fate of those who have given themselves over to self-absorption, addictions, or despair, who are dying inside, and who when the time comes will make beasts of themselves, to escape the painful fragility of their own insubstantial being."

Jesse, The Age of Spectacle, 8 November 2012


There is a growing class of politicians and journalists who are at heart insincere performers,  cynically seeking wealth and power as magnets for hysterical nincompoops.

As old as Babylon, and evil as sin.

Rally follows selloff as wash follows rinse. 

A lackluster set of economic data this morning cheered the markets that the Fed will soon be done with their interest rate increases.

And the hopes that corporate America at least will muddle through somehhow and continue to provide the one percent with outsized, largely unproductive, gains.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

Gold and silver were hit early and then recovered to flat.

Looks like some post-option expiration 'technical trading.' 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Emptiness of Passionate Privilege - Saudi Oil for China Gold?

 

"He fancies that he is sufficient for himself; or he supposes that knowledge is sufficient for his happiness; or that exertion, or that the good opinion of others, or fame, or that the comforts and luxuries of wealth, are sufficient for him.  What a truly wretched state is that coldness and dryness of soul, in which so many live and die, high and low, learned and unlearned.  Many a great man,  many a busy man, lives and dies with closed heart, with affections undeveloped, unexercised."

John Henry Newman

"We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put up a façade to prevent ourselves from seeing it.”

Blaise Pascal

"At a late stage, speculation tends to detach itself from really valuable objects and turn to delusive ones.   A larger and larger group of people seeks to become rich without a real understanding of the processes involved.   Not surprisingly, swindlers and catchpenny schemes flourish."

Aliber and Kindleberger, Manias, Panics and Crashes

"American political corruption was the buying up of legislatures and assemblies to keep them from doing the people's will and protecting the people's interests; it was the exploiter entrenching himself in power, it was financial autocracy undermining and destroying political democracy.  By the blindness and greed of ruling classes the people have been plunged into infinite misery."

Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check

"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.

Charles Ferguson

"True narcissists are self-serving and lack integrity.   They believe they’re superior and thus not subject to the same rules and norms.  Studies show they’re more likely to act dishonestly to achieve their ends.   They know they’re lying, and it doesn’t bother them.  They don’t feel shame.”

Charles A. O'Reilly, Stanford University

Stocks slumped further today, testing the limits of a normal correction.

What comes next will likely be driven by key corporate earnings reports. 

The big techs are heavy weights in the SP 500 and the NDX.

Gold and silver were under pressure.

As was the Dollar.

A whopping 289,000 ounces of gold bullion left the Shanghai warehouses yesterday.

There may be some merit in the 'oil for gold' transactions between the Saudis and China.

VIX was basically flat.

META 'crushed' expectations and the stock was up over 10% after hours.

Amazon on deck.

The spice must flow.

Have a pleasant evening

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Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Safer Harbors - Quiet Comex Expiration

 

"They do not see the image of Almighty God before them, and ask themselves what He wishes.   And, for the same reason that they do not please Him, they succeed in pleasing themselves.  Hence, they become both self-satisfied and self-sufficient; – they think they know just what they ought to do, and that they do it all; and in consequence they are very well content with themselves, and rate their merit very high, and have no fear at all of any future scrutiny into their conduct."

John Henry Newman

"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 sinner, having forsaken the service of his God, falls under the dominance of Satan, and becomes the slave of his lowest passions, which are signified by the swine which the prodigal was forced to feed.  But the more he obeys his passions, the more dissatisfied he becomes.  No pleasure of the senses can give him happiness, and he feels an emptiness and spiritual hunger in his heart which he is powerless to satisfy. He knows no rest; he only knows that he is miserable, and hateful to himself...

Though the sinner has offended Him so grievously and so often, yet He does not reproach him, but forgives him everything, and restores him to his former rights and dignity of sonship.  God alone can love in this way, and to us this sort of love is inconceivable. Our Lord portrays this narrow-mindedness of ours in the conclusion of the parable.  The elder son cannot understand his father’s joy; he murmurs at it, and refuses to take part in it; and even professes to believe that his father prefers the returned prodigal to himself, the faithful, obedient and industrious son.  By this behaviour of the elder son our Lord signifies the jealousy of the Pharisees, who considered themselves to be just, and murmured at the deep interest which Jesus took in sinners."

Friedrich Justus Knecht, The Prodigal Son

"We pray for the big things, and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small, and yet really not so small, blessings.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

 

Stocks took a dive today, as one might have expected with this kind of risk-blindness we have been seeing in the recent spate of low VIX readings.

The Dollar and gold caught some safe haven tradings.

Silver followed equities lower.

So, is this yet another 'new bull market' in equities all shot to hell?

Maybe, but we certainly don't know so yet.

So far its just a fairly normal correction.

Stock futures were bouncing for joy after the bell as some of the big cap tech stocks released their earnings results.

People love the lie too much to let go of it quickly or easily.

That seems to be an unambiguous trend in many of our most prominent public figures these days.

I think its the pride.  It causes people to blind themselves.

And cry big salty tears for their favorite con man, while trampling on love and the truth with self-satisfied delight.

Well, the rinse follows wash, so we might see a rally in risk tomorrow.

But let's see if stocks can keep moving higher past this great resistance area that has destroyed the last three rally attempts at breaking it.

Have a pleasant evening.