Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Impunity - The Old Wash and Rinse

 

"At bottom, what should you do to avoid being an idiot or a swine?  Merely this: you should do something great, you should become resigned to the fact that you will seem ridiculous to a race of janitors and bureaucrats if you are to enter the service of Splendor.  Then you will know what it means to be the friend of God.  The Friend of God!"

Léon Bloy

"What we need are not truths that serve us, but a truth that we may serve."

Jacques Maritain

"What we would like to do is change the world— make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe and shelter themselves as God intended them to do.  And to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute— the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor in other words, we can to a certain extent change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.  We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world.

This is the month of the Sacred Heart, the symbol of Christ’s love for man.  We are supposed to love as Christ loved, to the extent of laying down our lives for our brothers.  That was the New commandment. To love to the extent of laying down our lives, dying to ourselves.  To accept the least place, to sit back, to ask nothing for ourselves, to serve each other, to lay down our lives for our brothers, this is the strange upside-down teaching of the Gospel."

Dorothy Day

“Then the Lord will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat;  I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink;  I was a stranger and you welcomed me;  I was naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me; I was held captive and you comforted me.’

Matthew 25:34-36


The smokey haze over the NYC metropolitan area wasn't the only smoke that was being blown around today.

The Dollar chopped to end unchanged.

The VIX fell.

Stocks got hit with tech leading the way lower.

And gold and silver got smashed.

Rinse follows wash.

Have a pleasant evening.

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.