Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Living in the Dispensation of the Unspeakable

 

"The root of all sin is pride, superbia. I want to be my own law, I have a right to my self, my hatred and my desires, my life and my death.   The mind and flesh of man are set on fire by pride; for it is precisely in his wickedness that man wants to be as God."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"And they treat the wounds of my people falsely saying peace, peace, where there is no peace."

Jeremiah 8:11

"You shall not give any of your children as a sacrifice to Molech, nor shall you profane the name of your God by honoring idols."

Leviticus 18:21

"With full knowledge and understanding they [the Carthiginians] themselves offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan; but should she utter a single moan or let fall a single tear, she had to forfeit the money, and her child was sacrificed nevertheless; and the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums that the cries of their wailing should not reach the ears of the people."

Plutarch, De Superstitiones

"As everything in what used to be called creation becomes a commodity, human beings begin to look at one another, and at themselves, in a funny way, and they see price tags. The Market is not omnipotent—yet. But the process is under way and it is gaining momentum."

Harvey Cox, The Market as God: Living In the New Dispensation

"They began work at 5:30 and quit at 7 at night.  Children six years old going home to lie on a straw pallet until time to resume work the next morning.  I have seen the hair torn out of their heads by the machinery, their scalps torn off, and yet not a single tear was shed."

Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones,  reformer, "the most dangerous woman in America"

"The people who belong to this world worshiped the beast.  They are the ones whose names are not written in the Book of Life that belongs to the Lamb."

Revelation 13:8

Stocks were wobbling around again today, trying to rally but falling back to unchanged at the end.

Gold was slightly  lower, silver slightly higher.

The VIX was flattish.

The Dollar gain a little.

There will be a stock option expiration on Friday.

It is in healing the little ones that we heal ourselves.

And it is by choosing to oppress his innocents that we cause our Lord to weep, not for them, but for us.

"I will put a new heart and a new spirit within you; I will take your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.  I will put My spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My ways, and you will know My judgements and do them."

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Ship of Fools - Lingering at Another Minsky Moment

 

“The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Adam Smith

"I write to you from a disgraced profession. Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably to understand the forces behind the financial crisis.  Concepts including 'rational expectations,' 'market discipline,' and the 'efficient markets hypothesis' led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices, that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur.  Not all economists believed this – but most did.

Thus the study of financial fraud received little attention.   Practically no research institutes exist; collaboration between economists and criminologists is rare; in the leading departments there are few specialists and very few students.  Economists have soft-pedaled the role of fraud in every crisis they examined, including the Savings & Loan debacle, the Russian transition, the Asian meltdown and the dot.com bubble.

They continue to do so now.  At a conference sponsored by the Levy Economics Institute in New York on April 17, the closest a former Under Secretary of the Treasury, Peter Fisher, got to this question was to use the word 'naughtiness.'  This was on the day that the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with fraud."

James K. Galbraith, Why the 'Experts' Failed to See How Financial Fraud Collapsed the Economy, May 16, 2010

"There is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman.

The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the 'last thing standing' between us and the end of the world.   It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability.   Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system.  Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue.

I think what we need in order to restore some kind of sense of fairness is not the final triumph of markets over the body and soul of humanity, but something that confronts markets, and that refuses to think of itself as a brand."

Thomas Frank, 2016

 

Stocks managed to shake off some early gloom and rallied in the afternoon.

The Dollar chopped sideways, finishing largely unchanged.

Gold and silver rallied sharply.

The VIX fell slightly.

Earnings continue rolling in, for what they are worth.

Did I mention that there will be a stock option expiration on Friday.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Banquet of Consequences

 

“It was not curiosity that killed the goose who laid the golden egg, but an insatiable greed that devoured common sense.  If there are damned souls in hell, it is because men blind themselves.”

E. A. Bucchianeri

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

"You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here. Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart.”

John Connolly, The Infernals

"Not Nero, but God, rules the world."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis

"Everyone knows that plagues have a way of recurring throughout history, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that crash down on us out of the sky. There have always been plagues and wars, yet they always take us by surprise. When war breaks out people say it's stupid and won't last long. Stupidity has a knack of getting in the way, which we would see if not wrapped up in ourselves. In this our townsfolk were like everybody else— they did not believe in plagues."

Albert Camus, The Plague

 

There will be a stock index option expiration on Friday.

Stocks were in rally mode today.

The Dollar was flat.

Gold and silver were largely unchanged.

We are entering earnings season in earnest.

I think the theme for the rest of this decade and the next will be 'consequences.'

Have a pleasant evening.