Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A World on Fire - Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday

 

"Augustine began to write this book three years after Rome first collapsed and opened its gates to a barbarian invader. Alaric and his Goths sacked the city in 410.  Rome had been the inviolate mistress of the world for a thousand years.  The fall of the city that some had thought would stand forever demoralized what was left of the civilized world. Those who still took the pagan gods seriously  —  and it seems they were not a few —  looked about them for a scapegoat upon which to lay the guilt for this catastrophe.

The Christians had emerged from the catacombs and had been officially recognized by the convert Emperor Constantine.  Nevertheless Christianity remained the object of superstitious fear on the part of many, and it was inevitable that the bad luck that had befallen the Empire should be blamed on the Church.   St. Augustine took up his pen in 413 AD and set about proving the absurdity of such a charge.   This furnished him with the subject matter for the first ten books of The City of God."

Thomas Merton, Introduction, Augustine City of God, February 1994

“Pride is the beginning of sin.  It was pride that changed angels into devils; and it is humility that makes men angels.  There never has been, and never can be, and there never shall be any sin without pride.

What does love look like?  It has the hands to help others.  It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy.  It has eyes to see misery and want.  It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men.

Do not grieve or complain that you were born in a time when you can no longer see God in the flesh.  He did not in fact take this privilege from you.  As He says: ‘Whatever you have done to the least of my brothers, you did to me.’   Believe, so that you may understand.

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” 

Augustine of Hippo

The big tickle this week is likely to be the Non-Farm Payrolls report for August on this Friday, September 1st.

Stocks wobbled around but managed to end up with modest gains as Treasury yields receded slightly.

The Dollar chopped around sideways, finishing nominally unchanged.

Gold and silver rallied, with gold holding on to some gain but silver finished unchanged.

The VIX has fallen back down to near the 50 DMA, which has been its lower bound lately.

It looks like Florida is in for a rough time.  Remember them in your prayers.   Let's hope that this is not the beginning of a cycle, a trend.

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

"There never has been, and never can be, and there never shall be any sin without pride."

And the same can often be said about the downfall of public figures, whose original misdeeds are compounded and most often eclipsed by their attempts to deny and erase them.

Pride goes before a destruction, and an arrogant spirit before a fall.

The madness serves none but itself.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Endless Wash and Rinse

 

"The Federal Reserve, as one writer put it after the recent increase in the discount rate, is in the position of the chaperone who has ordered the punch bowl removed just when the party was really warming up.”

William McChesney Martin, Speech to Investment Bankers Association of New York, October 1955

“The job of the Federal Reserve is 'to know when to remove the punch bowl at the party.'   Under Alan Greenspan’s leadership its motto became let’s all get drunk and see what happens."

Said Elias Dawlabani, The Next Generation Economic System, 2013

"We're not even thinking about thinking about the consequences of our actions."

Jerome Powell, Chairman, Federal Reserve, June 2020

"The problems we face did not come down from the heavens.  They are made, they are made by bad human decisions, and good human decisions can change them.  The economic game is rigged, and this level of inequality is unsustainable.  We need an economy that works for all, not just the powerful. "

Bernie Sanders

“As is often the case, we are navigating by the stars under cloudy skies.”

Jerome Powell, Fed Chair, Jackson Hole Remarks, Ausust 25, 2023


It's so difficult and complex. Shut up and know your place.

Don't look at the man behind the curtain.

It's so difficult and complex. Shut up and know your place.

After all, who could have seen it coming?

Financial asset bubbles, such as the several we have seen since 1999, result in outsized gains and fabulous wealth for the shameless few, especially if they are greased up with high bracket tax cuts by a servile political class.

The most popular corrective measure is higher prices and the austerity of cutbacks, wage stagnation, and unemployment for the 98% who obtained little or no benefit from this orgy of control frauds, regulatory failures, insider trading, and willful policy errors.

And in the aftermath they say that they're only human and repeatedly make the same mistakes, for outsized pay and power.  Be afraid, and know your place.  And take out your confusion and anger on the innocent and the weak and the other, those who we choose to offer up for sacrifice.  

You may suffer, but they'll suffer even more, and you may draw some self-righteous comfort from a small portion of our dark power.  

Words of hate and fear are a narcotic, and the power elite's favorite mass distraction.  And as we saw so many times in the last century, they do this all too well.

And so there we have it, another fine wash and rinse in the city on a hill.

Stocks finished higher, while the VIX finished lower.

Gold and silver took a hit, as expected, but managed to finish up not all that badly.

There will be a precious metals option expiration at the Comex on Monday.

It's traditional to give the 'in-the-money' call option holders a gut check on the day after to encourage them to sell those new futures contracts positions.

Play the long game.  Eternity is for keeps.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - What Does It Profit a Man

 

“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1943

"If history is what is recorded, then deep history is the sum of events which tend to be officially obscured or even suppressed in traditional books and media.   Important recent deep events include the political assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, Iran- Contra, and now 9/11.   All these deep events have involved what I call the deep state, that part of the state which is not publicly accountable, and pursues its goals by means which will not be approved by a public examination.   The CIA (with its on-going relationships to drug-traffickers) is an obvious aspect of the deep state, but not the only one, perhaps not even the dirtiest.

The difference between 1963 and 2001 was in the White House.  Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson successfully contained the desires of their hawks to defeat and destroy the Soviet Union. But Bush and Cheney have maneuvered America into a war on terrorism.  That war threatens to become a permanent justification for curtailing the U.S. constitution’s elaborate checks and balances, and its guarantees of America’s traditional liberties. "

Peter Dale Scott, 9/11, JFK, and War: Recurring Patterns

"The ultimate purpose of crime is to establish an endless empire. It seeks a state of complete insecurity and anarchy, founded upon the tainted ideals of a world thought doomed to annihilation.   When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, 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

“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.  To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.  Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing.  At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.

Truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed. The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The second mode is shamanistic incantation. The fascist style depends upon endless repetition, designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. The final mode is misplaced faith. At the end of the war a worker told Victor Klemperer that 'understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.' 

Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power.  For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions.  The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book.”

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 2017

 

Stocks were hit by a steady selling today, and went out near the lows.

The VIX rose.

The Dollar rallied.

Gold finished unchanged from the open.

Silver was off a bit.

Waves of warm air were emanating out of Wyoming, as the Fed's annual meeting there staggered into the close.

I must have forgotten to watch the first Republican Presidential candidates debate last night.

Darn.

Have a pleasant evening.