Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - It Can't Happen Here

 

"It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.

The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.

He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

"People do not wake up one morning and decide to become monsters that will be reviled by all civilized people throughout history.  They go down that path one small step at a time, one seemingly harmless and practical decision after another.  They are just being reasonable, practical, realistic— merely following the advice of thought leaders and repeating the stories and slogans that 'everyone knows.'  

For most people it quickly becomes depersonalized, a kind of game.  What clever slogans and high sounding arguments can one memorize, what authorities and books will one reference and quote, and finally, what resolve can a person muster to stubbornly go back and defend the position which they have taken, which most likely has little or nothing to do with logical arguments or reason?

Having freed ourselves from the constraints of truth and morality, we live in a truly cynical age.  My purpose is this— to show us what we are becoming, to expose that which we serve, without any self-righteous illusions."

Jesse, It Can't Happen Here: Pride, Power, Exceptionalism, 8 May 2017

"And then he prompts you what to say, and listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you.  He bids you mount aloft.  He shows you how to become as gods.  Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his." 

John Henry Newman, In Time of Antichrist

 

Stocks chopped around today finishing largely unchanged.

Gold and silver did a similar slide and chop back to evens.

VIX fell sharply which was a bit of a surprise.

The Russell 2000 was the star of the day led by regional banks. 

Hair of the dog for the eternal Wall Street optimists?

Fitch downgraded the US REIT sector to 'deteriorating.'

The markets will be looking for the inflation data as it comes.

The Fed is on 'pause' but since Australia unpaused today and hiked rates it may be a week stimulant.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metal Charts - Reckless Disregard

 

"Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks.  In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. 

These artificially constrained systems become prone to 'Black Swans' — that is, they become extremely vulnerable to large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set of observers.

Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems."

Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan of Cairo, Foreign Affairs

"Having fallen from the eternal, the evil one's desires are endless, insatiable.  Having fallen from pure Being, he is driven by the desire to possess, to fill his emptiness.  But the problem is insoluble, always. He is compelled to have and to hold, to possess and consume, and nothing else.  All he takes, he destroys."

Denis de Rougemont

“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.  Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

'Life is a school of probabilities.'

Walter Bagehot

...and the tuition is paid by their willful miscalculation and mispricing of risk.  Good designs have linear consequences.   Unfortunately bad designs have exponential consequences. 

Stocks did the customary 'pop and flop' today, with a rally in the morning that faded out to nothing in the afternoon. 

Gold bounced back, while silver endured its own wash and rinse to finish nearly unchanged.

VIX has come up a bit off its multi-year lows.

The market has weak underpinnings and is susceptible to any kind of exogenous surprise.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Feeding Moloch - Waschen und Spülen

 

"We were standing at a window of my room in the Foreign Office.  It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking.  My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words:  'The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.'"

Edward Grey, Twenty-Five Years 1892–1916, 1925

“Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.”

Henri Barbusse, Le Feu: journal d'une escouade, 1916

"I believed that our public intelligentsia had succumbed to an amazing series of cognitive failures; that time after time they had gotten the facts wrong, ignored the clanging bullshit detector, made the sort of mistakes that would disqualify them.

What I didn't understand was that these weren't cognitive failures at all; they were moral failures, mistakes that were hard-wired into the belief systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in question. As such they were mistakes that, from the point of view of those organizations or professions or classes, shed no discredit on the individual chowderheads who made them.

Holding them accountable was out of the question, and it remains off the table today. These people ignored every flashing red signal, refused to listen to the whistleblowers, blew off the obvious screaming indicators that something was going wrong in the boardrooms of the nation, even talked us into an unnecessary war, and the bailout apparatus still stands ready."

Thomas Frank, Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly, March 26, 2012

"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell

“Let us learn our lessons.  Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that any one who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.  The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.  Antiquated War Offices, incompetent or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations— all take their seat at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war."

Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission, Thornton Butterworth Ltd, London 1930


As it is with conventional war, so too with economic wars, wars fought with banking systems, trade sanctions, and currency.

The Jobs number came in smoking hot this morning, and the Labor Participation Rate ticked higher.

But unemployment rate rose, so of course stocks focused on that and went into a risk on stampede higher.   

Gold and silver were crushed.

What a surprise.  Not.

 And of course the VIX fell to a low we have not seen since 2021.

Market bubbles, false flags, cartel pricing, manufactured wars?   It's all good for profits.

Maybe we'll see the flip side to this next week.  

Rinse follows wash in the endless harvesting of a nation's wealth.

Have a pleasant weekend.