Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Old Switcheroo - Empire of Lawlessness

 

“I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich.  The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough.  I knew this was a lie, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.”

Howard Zinn

"There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success."

Lord Acton

“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

"A lot of white-collar criminals are psychopaths. But they flourish because the characteristics that define the disorder are actually valued. When they get caught, what happens? A slap on the wrist, a six-month ban from trading, and don't give us the $100 million back. I've always looked at white-collar crime as being as bad or worse than some of the physically violent crimes that are committed."

Robert Hare

"The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well. Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them. Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Plunder, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus


The ongoing current of statements from the spokesmodels and talking heads over the past week, as well as a number of market indicators I have learned to watch over the past thirty years or so had me thinking that we would see a terrible jobs number this morning, and a fantastic reversal and rally in equities and the metals.  And I structured my trading positions accordingly, with a hedge for uncertainty.

And this morning when I heard the monster overshoot in the Jobs number I thought, 'oh no, I was wrong.'  Thank God for the hedge, but I wish it was larger.

But little did I know.  I'm glad I did nothing as the little set piece we call the 'free markets' played out.  Am I getting more patiently wily or just lazy?  Oh me of little faith. 

But what else might we expect from empire building jokers who make a blasphemous religion of greed out of victimizing the innocent.  

It is probably a mistake to ever underestimate the shamelessness and greed of the power elite.

And so the Dollar this morning rocketed higher, and then dropped precipitously and ended slightly lower into the close.

Stocks did the opposite, with a monster rally crushing the shorts and hedges.

The VIX fell sharply after spiking higher.

Wash-rinse-repeat.

My eyesight continues to return, if all too slowly but surely.  Whenever I might feel like getting too comfortably complacent He always seems to knock me down hard off my perch.  Thank God for His loving kindness and tender mercies.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Them Tumblin' Dice - Non-Farm Payrolls Tomorrow

 

"Ordinarily, the financial risk in a market, and hence the risk to the economy at large, is limited because the assets traded are finite. There are only so many houses, mortgages, shares of stock, bushels of corn, [bars of silver], or barrels of oil in which to invest.

But a synthetic instrument has no real assets. It is simply a bet on the performance of the assets it references. That means the number of synthetic instruments is limitless, and so is the risk they present to the economy...

Increasingly, synthetics became bets made by people who had no interest in the referenced assets. Synthetics became the chips in a giant casino, one that created no economic growth even when it thrived, and then helped throttle the economy when the casino collapsed."

US Congressman Carl Levin, Financial crisis: The role of investment banks, April 27, 2010


"To anticipate the market is to gamble. To be patient and react only when the market gives the signal is to speculate."

Jesse Livermore

We will be getting the Non-Farm Payrolls report tomorrow.

The markets are obviously edgy ahead of that information.

The whole thing hinges on the Fed, what impact on their thinking that the number may have.

It is just another sign of how artificial and distorted the financial system has become.  Their actions are enormously amplified by the speculation and leverage in the system, which is their own doing. 

So rather than guess let's see how things come out tomorrow, and go from there.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Whipping Fear and Greed - A School of Probabilities

 

"Life is a school of probabilities."

Walter Bagehot

"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought."

 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society 

"Democracy is held captive, not just by money, but by ideas — the ideas that money buys." 

William Greider 

"As in all periods of speculation, men sought not to be persuaded by the reality of things but to find excuses for escaping into the new world of fantasy."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929

"When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself.   To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality.   It is to disguise the reality." 

John Kenneth Galbraith, Power and the Useful Economist, 1973

"Dimon told Bloomberg TV it's possible the central bank will continue hiking rates by another 1.5 percentage points, to 7%...When members of his board ask him whether interest rates could really go that high, his answer is always 'yes,' he told Bloomberg."

Nicole Goodkind, CNN Reporter, Be prepared for 7% interest rates, warns Jamie Dimon, October 2, 2023

I watched the Bloomberg interview, several times in the course of that day.  And also the subsequent interview with CNN.   Dimon cautions about the potential for a recession, but is merely suggesting that rates *could* go to 7% given some improbable set of circumstances.

And he is quite correct in his estimation of the things that might cause a recession, and that is hardly an outlier opinion at all. Many have been expecting some sort of recession, including this guy here, and for many of the same reasons.  It is not at all unusual for a recession to follow a period of Fed tightening the money supply.  That, after all, is their purpose.  They merely like to quibble about the degree.  After all, rate policy is a blunt instrument, too often used to unjustly correct a financial asset bubble grown to outrageous proportion due to (self-serving from a class perspective) policy error.

But one might ask, if they have a financial mind, how likely is the Fed to increase its benchmark rate to 7% if the real economy falls into an actual recession?  Even given their enduring propensity for awful forecasting and myopic nincompoopism?  Have we so far retreated into our own realities, or the doublespeak of Wall Street speculation?

Many, many things are 'possible.' But much less are probable. Preparedness is good, especially flexible preparedness based on some reasonable calculation of the probability of various outcomes with flexible models for adjustment.

In fairness to CNN, the spokesmodels on financial TV has also been outright saying that 'Jamie Dimon (thinks/says/sees) rates are going to 7%.'

Rather than asking Mr. Dimon if rates *could* go to 7% would it not be more appropriate to ask him how likely such an event might be.  Jamie hedged his statements very carefully, allowing that his bank is capable of hedging against such an outcome. And I should like to think that they could, since that is the business that they are in.

But how easily we lose all concept of the nature of tail risks, in a very bipolar manner. We seem to either obsess about the merely possible, or disregard a careening approach to the abyss completely.   

Has the good work of Nassim Taleb and other thinkers, as well as our own personal experience, gone completely for naught?  Have we been so completely mesmerized by that duplicitous rationale that 'no one could have seen it coming', even though many people made themselves willfully blind to it, for professional purposes and convenience?  That all outcomes are equally probable if we can but imagine them, or hear them on television from some clueless politician or spokesmodel?

It's easy to become too cynical these days, in the empire of lies and lawlessness.

So today we had the rally off the dire selling of yesterday, with most equity markets higher.

VIX fell quite sharply.

Gold and silver were under pressure, even as The Dollar declined.

Gold snapped back to about unchanged in the last fifteen minutes.  What a surprise.

Traders are doing their usual market reaping boogie woogie ahead of the Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday morning.  

Whipping the public between fear and greed is all part of the endless wealth transfer of the wash and rinse.

People, even nominally good people in positions of nominal righteousness, can make Faustian bargains for the sake of a 'higher good.'   It's one of the devil's favorite snares.

How many in the 20th century made a deal with the devil to spite Bolshevism, or even a despised liberal tolerance?   How many today make similarly corrupt deals for some other higher good that they espouse in their exceptional righteousness, especially in judging others?

It's never between you and them.  It's always between you and God.   And he has made his will clear, for all but the hardest of hearts.

Have a pleasant evening.