Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - C'est la mode du temps, cherie, c'est la mode

 

"As a country becomes industrialized, its governance and corruption challenges do not disappear. They simply morph and become more sophisticated: transfer of a briefcase stashed with cash is less frequent.
Instead, subtler forms of capture and 'legal corruption' exist: an expectation of a future job for a regulator in a lobbying firm, or a campaign contribution with strings attached.  In many countries this may be legal, even if unethical.  In industrialized nations undue influence is often legally exercised by powerful private interests, which in turn influence the nation's regulations, policies and laws."

Daniel Kaufmann, Corruption And The Global Financial Crisis, Forbes, 27 January 2009

"America is caught in a confidence or credibility trap, in which the changes, investigations, and reforms necessary to restore trust to an economy or market are rendered unlikely because doing so would expose a pervasive corruption that the principals fear would destroy the careers of politicians and business people who may have permitted and even appeared to facilitate the control fraud that caused the financial crisis in the first place."

Jesse, America Trapped in a Massive Coverup of Control Fraud and Corruption, 22 January 2011


"As many as a dozen members of Congress and their aides took part in insider trading based on foreknowledge of market moving information on Capitol Hill, disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff told CNBC in an interview.  Legal analysts say that Wall Street insider trading laws do not apply to Congress.   As an open and public institution, the legal assumption has long been that any member of the public can have access to information about how Congress works.  In practice, though, that's simply not true, as powerful members of Congress come into contact daily with market-moving tidbits.  That gap between the law and the reality has made Capitol Hill a virtual free-fire zone for insider trading."

Eamon Javers, Congress Members Took Part in Insider Trading, 11 Nov 2011

"But it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it."

Upton Sinclair, The Moneychangers

"The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections.  Later on, this process of corruption spread to the law courts.  And then to the army, and finally the Republic was subjected to the rule of emperors."

Plutarch, The Roman Republic


Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is providing testimony this week to the US Congress.

Today he made the markets cringe by reasserting that the Fed is seriously about reducing inflation.

Gold and silver were smashed early in the morning, but gained quite a bit of that as the day wore on.

VIX declined.

Markets remain wobbly and will be sensitive to a negative exogenous event.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Witness to Injustice - True Nihilism

 

"We cannot speak to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep."

Carl von Ossietzky, editor of Die Weltbühne, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935


"During the years of the Weimar Republic Carl von Ossietzky's political commentaries gained him a reputation as a fervent supporter of democracy and a pluralistic society.  He was convicted in 1931 of revealing state secrets, the illegal German militarization, and served 18 months in prison.  He was released in 1932.

Ossietzky continued to be a constant warning voice against militarism and Nazism when, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor and the Nazi dictatorship began.  Ossietzky was one of a very small group of public figures who continued to speak out against the now ruling Nazi Party.

On 28 February 1933, after the Reichstag fire, he was taken by the police and held without trial in Spandau prison.  He was detained afterwards at the concentration camp KZ Esterwegen near Oldenburg.

He was visited while in the camp by Swiss historian Carl Jacob Burkhardt, as a representative of the International Red Cross.  Burkhardt described Ossietzky as 'a deadly pale broken creature, who seemed numb, with one eye swollen over, and his teeth broken.'

Carl von Ossietzky's international rise to fame began in 1936 when, already suffering from serious illness that was not being treated, he was awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize after an international campaign of people who hoped to achieve his release through this recognition and honor. 

 The award divided public opinion, and was generally condemned by conservative forces.  The leading conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten argued in an editorial that Ossietzky was a criminal.

He was largely forgotten during the period of favorable international regard for the Third Reich, sparked in part by the propaganda campaign for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the German 'economic miracle.'

Ossietzky died in the Nordend hospital in Berlin-Pankow, still in police custody, on 4 May 1938, of tuberculosis and from the after-effects of the abuse he suffered in the concentration camps.  In 1938 Time Magazine named Adolf Hitler as their 'Man of the Year.'"

Jesse, In memory of Journalist Carl von Ossietzky, 16 June 2012


"Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute?  They put to death those who foretold the coming of the righteous one, whose betrayers and murderers you have become."

Acts 7:52


“Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love."

Julian Assange, Witnessing


Commodities were slammed today, with oil, gold and silver taking a hard sell-off, purportedly because of a 'disappointment' on Wall Street at the level of Chinese economic stimulus.

Smells like teen spirit.

Stocks themselves were trading weakly despite the much better than expected housing data.

A true opium of the people is the belief that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our lawlessness, our selfishness, and even murders that we are not going to be judged.

Historically the cup is filling,  and this is when we might see a reversal begin to unfold, call it karma, nemesis, fortune, judgement, or natural consequence as you prefer.

But for now, let's see what the rest of the week brings.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Desolate Delusion of Evil - Three Day Weekend

 

"What is good?  All that enhances the feeling of power, the will to power, and the power itself in man.  What is bad?  All that proceeds from weakness.  What is happiness?  The feeling that power is increasing— that resistance has been overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence.  The first principle of our humanism is that the weak and the failures shall perish.  And they ought to be helped to perish.   What is more harmful than any vice?   Active pity for all failure and weakness — Christianity."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

"Satan's monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament.  Certainly, he has no choice.  He has chosen to have no choice.  He has wished to be himself, and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted.  The Hell he carries with him is, in one sense, a Hell of infinite boredom.

To admire Satan, then, is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."

C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942

"All of Hell, which seemed so immense to the narrator, would fit into a practically microscopic space in Heaven.  Lewis [The Great Divorce] is illustrating here the Augustinian principle that sin is the state of being incurvatus in se (curved in around oneself).  It is the reduction of reality to the infinitely small space of the ego’s concerns and preoccupations."

Robert Barron, Self-Obsession and Hell, 2016

"Wherever you are going this morning, my friends, show the world that you're going with truth.  You are going with justice, you are going with goodness, and you will have an eternal companionship.  And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you, but you'll go on anyhow.  But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow, before the gods of evil."

Martin Luther King, Ebenezer Baptist Church, 5 November 1967

“I have been to many countries and seen much poverty and suffering.  Everywhere I go people tell me of their hardships and struggles, and ask for help, and I give what I can.  But of all the countries I have been to, the poorest one I have been to is America. America suffers most from the poverty of loneliness."

Teresa of Calcutta

"This is not capitalism.   Capitalism does not demand that we destroy human lives for the sake of maximizing profits using any and all means which that end justifies.  The Market is not an end to itself. The Market is not God.  This is beyond capitalism.  This is tyranny.  It is a pernicious form of selfishness and self-indulgence, a privileged arrogance.

To paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, 'The modern economist is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior justification for selfishness.'

And this is not a choice between poverty for the sake of truth and a very comfortable living, but the overwhelming need for a fabulous, ostentatious wealth and power that seems to have become the god of  this generation.   And it is a sickness, a sickness unto death."

Jesse, The Careerists and the Banality of Evil, 24 July 2012

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You who murder the prophets, and abuse those whom God has sent to you.   How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings.  But you were not willing.  So your house is now yours to command— but is made desolate.”

Matthew 23:37-38

The markets were well positioned by the week's action for today's relatively quiet quad witch option expiration.

Stocks were off a bit.

The VIX declined, again to the lows.

Gold and silver held their ground.

The Dollar was up a bit.

The cafe has always enjoyed a wide international clientele, but for the first time another country has edged out the US in readership over a sustained period of time.  It is the city-state of Singapore.

This has been going on for a month or so and I have no idea what may be driving it.  I have considered a few scenarios but since I don't use any analytics or tracking except the very basic macro traffic counts that are included with Blogger it is only speculation. 

US markets will be closed on Monday for the 'Juneteenth' national holiday which commemorates the end of slavery.

Need little, want less, love more.  

For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.