Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - His Living Garden

 

"As the father has loved me, so I have loved you.  Abide in my love.   If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my father's commandments, and abide in his love.  These things I have told you, that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete.  This is my commandment: love one another, as I have loved you.   Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down their life for their friends.  And you are my friends, if you do as I have commanded you."

John 15:9-14

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.  It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.   Greed may drive men into competition if there is not enough to go round; but the proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will try to get still more just to assert his power.  Nearly all those evils in the world which people put down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of pride.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

"Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heaven."

John Milton, Paradise Lost

"We live in a world where love itself is condemned.  People call it weakness, something to grow out of.  Some are saying: 'let each one become as strong as he can, and let the weak perish.'  The neo-paganism [of the Nazis] may well cast-off love but, in spite of everything, history teaches us that we shall be the victors over this.  Do not yield to hatred.  We are here in a dark tunnel, but we have to go on.  At the end, an eternal light is shining for us.  We shall not forsake love."

Titus Brandsma, Dachau, 26 July 1942

"Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength.  But it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it."

Léon Bloy

The action today was little more than a wash-and-rinse prelude to the Fed's interest rate meeting and announcement tomorrow.

Watch out for secondary effects from Jay Powell's press conference after the decision announcement.

Stocks dropped and then pulled back to finished just slightly lower.

VIX waffled, finishing nearly unchanged.

Gold and silver did a dip.

The Street squeezed out the Instacart IPO today.  

My eye is recovering slowly.  I still cannot drive which is inconvenient.  But the worst of it is past, and the important bits are all in place and settled down.

Tender mercies.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Time to Come Home - FOMC Rate Decision on Wednesday

 

"Anger and fury are abominations, yet a sinner holds them close in his heart.  The vengeful will face the Lord’s justice, for he has a strict account of their sins.  Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be forgiven when you pray."

Sirach 27:30-28:1

"If I speak in the tongues of angels and of men, but I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.   And if I can prophesy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.   If I give away everything I own, and if I give over my body in order to boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.   Love is patient, love is kind, it is not envious.  Love does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not selfish, it is not easily angered or resentful.  It is not glad of injustice, but rejoices in the truth."

1 Corinthians 13:1-7

"Worldly pride is easier for us to perceive.  We see it clearly in the self-proclaimed elite of our time.   But less obvious perhaps is the spiritual form of pride, that reduces us into an insidiously distorted order of things. Spiritual pride blinds us to our own faults.  But even worse, it leads us to magnify and fix ourselves upon the faults of others.

In doing so we seek to magnify our own imagined achievements, and at the same time dismiss our bad treatment and low regard for others. There is no person who is spiritually proud whose heart will serve as a home for the Holy Spirit, the spirit of humility, and mercy, and of love. They are too full of the law, and harsh judgement, and the trappings and ornaments of worldly observance, and of themselves.

Spiritual pride leads to a lingering spiritual death. It turns the living being into a living tomb, all bright and polished on the outside, proudly ornamented with scrupulous attention to detail, and ostentatious adherence to the letter of the law— but inside full of corruption, and festering foulness. This is all too common among those whose love is directed to the rituals and the forms of religion, but wanting nothing to do with the human realities of it, the acts of mercy to others which are the second great commandment.  It is a sickening romance with the self, unto death."

Jesse, Being Human, 20 August 2017

O Lord, pierce our hardened hearts, enlighten our blindness, and break the chains of our pride and self-deception, so that we may choose the fullness of life in your loving and sacred heart.

Stocks ended largely flat today, after the usual up and down wash and rinse cycle.

The Dollar was a bit lower.

Gold and silver rallied, and finished near the highs.

There will be an FOMC rate decision this Wednesday afternoon.

Have a pleasant evening.

US Dollar Very Long Term Chart - La Douleur du Monde

 

The US Mega-Banks and SWIFT money transfer system for the world's reserve currency are Financial Dreadnoughts in time of currency war.

 Le privilège stratégique