Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Masters of the Universe - Non-Farm Payrolls Tomorrow

 

“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”

Czesław Miłosz,  Nobel Prize, 8 December 1980


“They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions, but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself.  The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird


"At times, God will be the only witness to your righteous behavior.  Sometimes God is the only one who will understand your motives.  At such times all you can do is maintain your integrity, trusting that God always keeps His eyes on you.  God looks favorably upon those who walk with integrity, doing what they know is right, regardless of how others perceive their actions.

The most important thing is that you are a person of integrity before God.  When no one seems to understand why you have done something or when others question whether you have done all you should have done, your confidence should not be in the hope of vindication in the eyes of others.  It should be in the knowledge that God keeps you in His sight.  If you have this confidence, it will be enough to sustain you."

Henry Blackaby, Integrity Upheld

 

I have included a chart below of the range of gold futures contracts.

The August contract is now setting the 'spot price' and is driving the continuous contract quote as well.

See how narrow the volume is, compared to October and December.

The Dollar chopped sideways finishing just a little lower.

Gold traded woodenly, compared to the volatility in the related miners.

Silver lost more ground but took a bit back after the initial plunge bath.

Stocks bounced a bit in tech land but as for the rest of them, meh.

Non-Farm Payrolls tomorrow.  

It's the big reveal for all the preceding shenanigans.

The lack of integrity in Western political, financial, academic, and corporate leadership is very discouraging.  Financialization has ripped civility of the spirit from our hearts and souls.

"I want to end with the idea that the [unregulated] market is capable of resolving all of our social conflict, fairly and justly.  That is the great idea of the 1990's.   And we all know now what a crock that is.   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

The oligarchy is audacious, and getting moreso every day. 

Surely, there is at this day a confederacy of evil, marshaling its hosts from all parts of the world, preparing to take many, both the willful and unsuspecting, as if in a net.

Winning....

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Shifting, Whispering Sands - The Unspeakable

 

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty. Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but was wrong in thinking that we can get them for ourselves, without grace."

Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce, 1947

"Only those who live by faith really know what is happening in the world.  The great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on.  The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about."

Fulton J. Sheen, 1947

"Evil will remain with us, no one will ever eliminate human suffering, the political arena will always attract irresponsible and ambitious adventurers and charlatans.  And man will not stop destroying the world.  In this regard, I have no illusions.

Neither I nor anyone else will ever win this war once and for all.  At the very most, we can win a battle or two-and not even that is certain.  It is an eternal, never-ending struggle waged not just by good people (among whom I count myself, more or less) against evil people, by people who think about the world and eternity against people who think only of themselves and the moment.  It takes place inside everyone.  It is what makes a person a person, and life, life."

Vaclav Havel, Summer Meditations, 1991

"For, in the end, the only real tragedy is not to have been a saint."

Léon Bloy, La femme pauvre

Fitch, the credit ratings agency, gave US Treasuries a downgrade last night.

As you may recall, the ratings agencies have been the servile minions of their biggest customers on Wall Street, the Funds and the Banks.

I am sure they were caught by surprise.   

As if.

So the Treasury Yield Curve levitated.

The Dollar rose, which is an odd effect in the bigger picture, but short term is expected.

Gold and silver were hammered.

Stocks cratered.

There must be a Non-Farm Payrolls report in this pile somewhere, if not a pony.

Wash, rinse, repeat.   

The plutocrats' transfer of wealth continues, like the shifting, whispering sands.

If you can maintain your humanity and your soul, when all else are losing theirs with abandon, you win.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metal Charts - Beckoning from the Abyss

 

"We have watched the Reichstag burn twice in the last two decades.  If 2008 was a quiet coup in finance, during which Wall Street, in the name of exceptional and emergency circumstances, appropriated vast wealth from ordinary citizens in ways those citizens never fully understood, and therefore couldn’t effectively resist, so 9/11 began a takeover of the commonwealth by intelligence and military leaders, a putsch, unvoted and undiscussed, from which our constitutional rights and our democracy have yet to recover."

Tom Mueller, Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in the Age of Fraud, 2019

“Men lost faith in the state not because Christianity held them aloof, but because the state defended wealth against poverty, fought to capture slaves, taxed toil to support luxury, and failed to protect its people from famine, pestilence, invasion, and destitution.  Rome was not destroyed by Christianity, any more than by barbarian invasion; it was an empty shell when Christianity rose to influence and invasion came.  A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.”

Will Durant, Caesar and Christ, 1944

"The last forty years have seen a huge proliferation of think tanks and political NGOs whose purpose, beneath all the verbiage, is to execute political agendas by proxy.  Powerful corporations are part of the nexus of power around the state, and enjoy the ability to deploy its coercive power, just as the state often exerts its influence through the agency of powerful corporations."

Julian Assange, When Google Met Wikileaks, January 1, 2014

“The man who discovered the real Hitler was Dietrich Eckart. We find his presence at every important point in Hitler’s career until Eckart’s death in the last days of 1923. Eckart literally made Hitler. And he was closely related with the Thule Society, with the powerful Germanenorden.  We now know the atmosphere in which these secret organizations functioned and played a determining role in opposition to the leftist half of the German population. Even in the political field their actions were everywhere a matter of secrecy and covert plotting, always of power politics and sometimes of murder.

This, however, was only the surface of a world rife with religious expectation and steeped in occultism. If the German aspiration is clearly discernible in Dietrich Eckart, so is the occult way in which he tutored his pupil.  Occult here means not only 'hidden'; it refers literally to the practice of the occult sciences."

Georges Van Vrekhem, Hitler and His God, 2012

"Life under a strongman means not simply being lied to but being beset by contradiction and uncertainty until the line between truth and falsehood blurs and a kind of exhaustion settles over questions of fact.  Authoritarianism wants to convince its supporters that nothing is true, that the whole machinery of truth is an intolerable imposition on their psyches, and thus that they might as well give free rein to their fantasies."

Brian Phillips, Rise of the Postmodern Right, November 16, 2016

"When humanity has been driven mad by fear and horror, and when chaos has become the supreme law, then the time for the empire of lawlessness will have come."

Friedrich Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

Ephesians 6:12

Stocks were troubled today, and finished off a bit.

The Dollar moved higher.

Gold and silver were whacked from the NY open and closed near the lows.

The continuous gold contract from ICE was broken today.   I went with the August contract and hope they will fix this in a day or so.  Silver was unaffected.

VIX rose slightly.

Non-Farm Payrolls may dominate trading this week.

The antinomian cha-cha of the 'efficient markets' perpetual wash and rinse continues.  

Impunity comes from pervasive soft corruption, and the broadly corrosive effects of fashionable self-deceit.

Lawlessness often follows.  Hell, a companion.

Have a pleasant evening.