Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Husks of the Fashionably Dead - FOMC Next Week

 

“A society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience.   A society that narrows the meaning of 'success' to the big money and in its terms condemns failure as the chief vice, raising money to the plane of absolute value, will produce the sharp operator and the shady deal.

People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.  They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

"I see dead people.  Walking around like regular people.  They don't see each other.   They only see what they want to see.  They don't know that they're dead."

Cole Sear: The Sixth Sense

"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, 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.

All sin, indeed, when repented of, He will put away; but pride hardens the heart against repentance, and sensuality debases it to a brutal nature."

John Henry Newman

"People love the sentimentality of their beliefs, the traditions and tribalism and forms of a self-conception, the good feeling that they get from believing that they are better than and different from the great body of mankind.  We can be wonderfully profane.

But when it comes to applying those higher principles of belief in their daily lives, most people are highly selective, and in general want nothing to do with them, except as it is convenient, and serves their purposes without sacrifice.  And so they become spiritually dead, dried husks of souls that have slowly starved the love from their hearts.  They view themselves as superior, and therefore victims of their inferiors.   They cling to their hypocrisy like a drowning man might cling to an anchor, down to the depths of the abyss."

Jesse, Dead People, Seeing Only What They Want to See, 8 February 2018

Stocks wobbled around again.  The usual rally attempt failed into the close.

Gold and silver were under some pressure.

The Dollar drifted sideways, finishing slightly higher.

VIX fell slightly and remains on the low side for recent history.

There will be a FOMC meeting and rate decision next week.

The market seems to be anticipating a 'neutral' meeting.

Whatever that means.

Need little, want less, love more.   For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Hope and Change - The Discreet Charm of Elitism

 

"The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor.  As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel.  Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."

President Grover Cleveland, State of the Union, December 3, 1888

"I think Bill Clinton was the pivotal figure of our times. Before he came along, the market-based reforms of Reaganism were controversial; after Clinton, they were accepted consensus wisdom. Clinton was the leader of the group that promised to end the Democrats’ old-style Rooseveltian politics, that hoped to make the Democrats into a party of white-collar winners, and he actually pulled that revolution off. He completed the Reagan agenda in a way the Republicans could not have dreamed of doing—signing trade agreements, deregulating Wall Street, getting the balanced budget, the ’94 crime bill, welfare reform. He almost got Social Security partially privatized, too.  A near miss [Miss Lewinsky that is] on that one.

He remade our party of the left (such as it is) so that it was no longer really identified with the economic fortunes of working people. Instead it was about highly educated professional-class winners, people whose good fortunes the Clintonized Democratic Party now regarded as a reflection of their merit. Now it was possible for the Democratic Party to reach out to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, and so on. This was something relatively new for a left party in the industrialized world, and it was quickly adopted by other left parties in other countries, most notably 'New Labour' in the UK.  Unfortunately, this strategy has little to offer the people who used to be the Democratic Party’s main constituents except scolding.  It merely assumes that they have, as the ’90s saying went, nowhere else to go."

Seymour Hersh, A Conversation on US Politics with Thomas Frank, July 13, 2023

"The Press of the United States?  Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it.  I know nothing that I may say can influence you.  You have no souls to be influenced.  You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats.  There is no Republican Party.  There is no Democratic Party.   You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy.  You talk verbosely in antiquated terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while you wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1907

Hope and change.

Right...

Stocks slumped a bit today on a dose of reality out of the earnings reports.

It was just a little leak compared to the recent 'AI-fueled' bubble action, so the bulloney boys are undaunted.

In the spirit of trend reversals, the Dollar rallied, and gold and silver lost ground.

There will be a stock option expiration tomorrow.

FOMC next week.

They never see it coming.  Because they think that they and their friends are it, above it all, blessed with the discreet charm of an effete and anachronistic elitism, the old shibboleth of 'class.'

“Religion, opium for the people.  To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife.  And now we are witnessing a transformation.  A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death–the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”  

Czeslaw Milosz

Lessons unlearned bring old and familiar consequences, familiar at least to those who study history, and don't choose to consider it to be beneath them.

In the end, it is never between you and them, but between you and God.

Have a pleasant evening.

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.