Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Our Oligarchs and Their Enablers - Gold and Silver Rising

 

"Immediately upon departing her post as Chair of the Federal Reserve, but prior to getting the nod from the Biden administration to become U.S. Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen engaged in what the courageous reporter at ProPublica, Jesse Eisinger, called a 'two-fisted money grab from banks.'   Yellen raked in more than $7 million in speaking fees with the bulk of that coming from Wall Street banks and trading houses, including JPMorgan Chase.”

Pam and Russ Martens, Yellen’s Treasury Hires 5-Count Felon JPM to Look for Fraud, October 11, 2023

"As a country becomes industrialized, its governance and corruption challenges do not disappear.  They simply morph and become more sophisticated: Transfer of a briefcase stashed with cash is less frequent.    Instead, subtler forms of capture and 'legal corruption' exist: an expectation of a future job for a regulator in a lobbying firm, or a campaign contribution with strings attached."

Daniel Kaufmann, Corruption And The Global Financial Crisis, Forbes, 27 January 2009

"A credibility trap is when the regulatory, political and/or informational functions of a society have been compromised by a corrupting influence and a fraud, so that they cannot address the situation without implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure including themselves.   The status quo has at least tolerated the corruption and the fraud, if not profited directly from it, and most likely continues to do so."

Jesse, Financial Coup d'Etat and a Credibility Trap, 28 September 2012

"And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not. And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of -- and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent -- to the detriment of everyone else.

Neil Barofsky, Interview with Bill Moyers, 27 October 2012

 

Here are the updated charts.

Gold and silver put in another solid performance.

The Dollar slid a little lower.

VIX declined further showing the almost complacent optimism in the equity markets.

Earlier today the doctor gave me a green light on the recovery of my eye.    The improvement in the last week has been heartening.  

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Nakedness of Kings - Pax Americana

"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.  It is not merely that at present the rule of naked force obtains almost everywhere.  Probably that has always been the case.  Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking.  Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion."

George Orwell, Review of Bertrand Russell's Power, 1939

"No warning will suffice to powerful fools who, driven mad by hubris and lust for power, weave the hangman's ropes of their own destruction.  They preach the necessity of hardness, and practice the circumvention of the law for themselves and their associates in injustice.  But when the reckoning comes for them, as it eventually does, they always seem astonished, but unfortunately never to the point of speechlessness.  They will harangue fortune, and all those imaginary enemies who conspired to their downfall, to the bitter end.  The Western elite are in a denial, and a bubble of delusion, so profound that I am concerned that when reality intrudes their reaction will be mishandled, provocative, and likely to hasten a generational change that is already occurring and being fiercely resisted, slowly."

Jesse, Complicity of the Advantaged in the Nakedness of Kings, 19 February 2015

"Washington has become our Versailles. We are ruled, entertained, and informed by courtiers -- and the media has evolved into a class of courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are mostly courtiers. Our pundits and experts, at least those with prominent public platforms, are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception.”

Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion

"Such, then, is the law of Christ's kingdom, such the paradox which is seen in its history.  It belongs to the poor in spirit; it belongs to the persecuted; it is possessed by the meek; it is sustained by the patient.  It conquers by suffering; it advances by retiring; it is made wise through foolishness.  God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise: and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, God has chosen."

John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons

Stocks continued climbing higher in defiant bullishness.

Once they get done squeezing the shorts and crushing the hedges of the cautious, we may expect them to dump the stock markets hard, under whatever pretext is handy.

But for today the Fed heads were out speaking sweet nothings about rates being fine where they are.

The VIX continued to drop.

Gold backed off a bit, but silver gave up most of its recent gains.

What a surprise.

A big chunk of gold left the Hong Kong Comex registered warehouses.

The Dollar declined.  

Who needs safety when you are closely held in the comforting hands of the Pax Americana?

We start getting some economic data on Wednesday.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts -To Remain Human

 

"It is the time of the harvest, and the reaper cuts into the ripe grain with wide strokes.  Mourning takes up her abode in the country cottages, and there is no one to dry the tears of the mothers.  Whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war.

Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element:  The struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist.

Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate.

Everywhere, and at times of greatest trials, men have appeared, prophets and saints who cherished their freedom, who preached the One God and who with His help brought the people to a reversal of their downward course.  Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenseless against the principle of evil.  He is a like rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air."

Please distribute this as widely as possible.

The White Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich, 1942

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.  They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“If you can feel that staying human is worth while— you've beaten them.”

George Orwell, 1984

“It is very easy to get drunk with hate.  Hate is like the glass of whisky which is given to the soldiers before a bayonet charge.  Whisky stimulates but does not nourish.  What we can do and and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it.  The real conflict is the inner conflict.  Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love.  And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”

Maximilian Kolbe, executed at Auschwitz, 14 August 1941

What good is morality?  What good is love?

Because they give meaning to our lives, and over time, even to our suffering.  Because they keep us from losing our selves.  And because they can save us from becoming what we hate, from being one with it, bound together for all time.

The bloody terrorist attack in the Mideast roiled markets.

Gold, and to a lesser extent silver, saw a definite flight to safety.

The gleaning of the ETFs for physical bullion for the East must be put temporarily on hold.

Stocks slumped hard in the overnight futures, but rallied during the day, going out on the highs.

Let's see if that defiant bullishness can be maintained.

The Dollar chopped sideways, still at an intermediate high.

VIX spiked and then dropped sharply during the day.

We will not be seeing much economic data in the US until Wednesday and Thursday as noted in the calendar below.

We will be remembering the 60th anniversary of the political assassinations of the 1960s starting in November.

I remember times of war many, too many times, over the past seventy years.  Since the Vietnam War it seems that they have never had an end for us.   Some few must surely think they benefit from all this carnage.  

I do not know them.  I only see the misery, suffering and tears that they bring.  And for which there will be a judgement they do not expect— a reckoning.  For God is not mocked.

Have a pleasant evening.