Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - For He Had Many Possessions

 

"Our society resembles an immense machine that ceaselessly snatches and devours human beings and which no one knows how to master.  And they who sacrifice themselves for social progress are like persons who try to catch hold of the wheels and the transmission belts in order to stop the machine and are destroyed in their attempts.  But the impotence one feels today—an impotence we should never consider permanent—does not excuse one from remaining true to one’s self, nor does it excuse capitulation to the enemy, whatever mask he may wear.

Whether the mask is labelled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of the Proletariat, our great adversary remains The Apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military.  Not the one facing us across the frontier or the battle-lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves.  No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”

Simone Weil, Reflections on War, February 1945

"The power of a monopoly of the instruments of communication, may be so used as to impoverish and imprison the mind.  One idea insinuated into the mind may take possession of it and exercise a hypnotic spell. Two or more ideas are better, but if these are methodically selected to suit the purpose of an authority, they still deny freedom.  Whoever determines what alternatives shall be made known to man controls what that man should choose from. He is deprived of freedom in proportion as he is denied access to any ideas, or is confined to any range of ideas short of the totality of relevant possibilities. If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, it is not merely because evil deeds may be performed in the name of patriotism, but because patriotic fervor can obliterate moral distinctions altogether. ”

Ralph Barton Perry, The Humanity of Man, 1956

"People of faith can read the Bible so that almost any perspective on a current issue will find some support in the Bible. That rich and multivoiced offering in the Bible is what makes appeals to it so tempting—and yet so tricky and hazardous, because much of our reading of the Bible turns out to be an echo of what we thought anyway.

And because the reach of the gracious God of the Bible is toward the other, we ought rightly to be skeptical and suspicious of any reading of the Bible that excludes the other, because it is likely to be informed by vested interest, fears, and hopes that serve self-protection and end in self-destruction.   Every uncompromising ideology reduces faith to an idolatry. The way of mammon (capital, wealth) is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath ”

Walter Brueggemann, Chosen

"Fear not, little flock, for your Father delights to give you His kingdom."

Luke 12:32

The Sabbath is a gift from God, not for its own sake, but for the sake of His children, that in their rest and reflection in righteous obedience to His word they many not so easily fall captive to the endless demands and possessions of Mammon.

Stocks managed to maintain their relative  fearlessness, and resisted the impulse to retreat from their recent gains.

VIX fell back again.

The Dollar rose slightly.

Gold and silver were both under pressure.  

Who needs a refuge or safe harbor or even forgiveness, when you are the masters of the universe.

"When the young man heard this, he went away sadly, for he had many possessions."     Matthew 19:22

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Rhyming - Busts and Bubbles

 

"It was around July 2020, when we were all locked down and not knowing what was going on with our lives, our personal economies, our health, and our families, when I realized that the Federal Reserve had doubled the size – or even more so — of its book of assets.  It had created about $5 trillion worth of money in a very short period of time.

During that time, the markets went from being very afraid and down to being very, very high.  A lot of people said, well, we’re all at home using Zoom, so therefore the market just rebounded by so much.   But that was just a small part of it.  The bigger part was that money became available at such an immense level and therefore the distortion between where money goes in the financial markets and where it doesn’t go in the real economy became permanent.  At that moment I saw that this can happen in any amount, at any time.  There’s no restriction, no transparency, no responsibility."

Nomi Prins, You’re Living in a World Wrought by the Fed, 17 November 2022

"Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand. As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers, with approving smiles.  Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty."

Simone Weil

"Once central banks unleashed monetary policy to accommodate mega-banks, subsidize Wall Street financiers, and bolster global markets, the very idea of free and open markets and laissez-faire investing died.  No one wanted to call the Fed’s QE a Ponzi scheme.   But it was.

Whether it was done to soothe a stock market crash, a ruptured subprime housing market bubble, or a pandemic, the Fed’s response to the financial crisis of 2008 and later crises has confirmed that it will always seek a way to grease the wheels of capitalism for its wealthiest participants and private banks.   The results speak for themselves."

Nomi Prins, Permanent Distortion: How the Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy, October 11, 2022


As you may have likely heard the economic data this morning from the Non-Farm Payrolls report was a big miss, but apparently not great enough to swing the fear vector all the way around.

Hence, we have the 'goldilocks' effect.

Stocks roared higher, on expectations of no more Fed rate increases anytime soon.  

And wistful yearnings for a rate cut.

The Dollar tanked.

Gold and silver rallied.  Gold was held below the optic resistance at $2000.

VIX fell again, showing some abandonment of risk concerns, and a generally happy-go-lucky attitude, at least compared to the short term.

I rewatched the movie Margin Call last night.   I think the last time was closer to its release around 2011.  Has it really been that long?   

My son said it was a good movie to watch.   I said I had seen it, and had lived it.  And the crash before that.  And that.  And that.

A stunning cast illuminates a realistic but somewhat spare depiction of unbridled greed going badly, for some.  It was spare, perhaps, reflecting the characters who were really that banal.

The same sorts of people make the same egregious errors and fiduciary lapses, again and again, and are richly rewarded and rarely punished, pleading ignorance and benign intentions.

Bubbles and busts are acts of nature, right?   Maybe the unnatural nature.

Who could have seen it coming— with their eyes closed and their greedy maws open?

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Where Are You Going, Lord?

 

“Seneca had made the bargain that many good men have made when agreeing to aid bad regimes. The Rome he has been trained to serve, the Rome of Augustus and Germanicus, was gone.  In its place stood Neropolis, ruled by a megalomaniac brat.”

James Romm, Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

"Modern capitalism is masterful at producing services people don't need and in large part probably don't want.  It is brilliant at convincing people that they do need and want them.  But it has difficulty turning itself to the production of those services which people really do need.   Not only that, it often spends an enormous amount of time and effort convincing people that those services are either unrealistic, marginal or counterproductive."

John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards, 1992

"Most politicians couldn't care less about the plight of the poor. There's so much profit to be made from poor people - think payday loans, high-interest rent-to-own stores, for-profit colleges, and overpriced mobile homes - that politicians and their crony-capitalist donors have a vested interest in keeping them poor."

Joshua Wilkey, My Mother Wasn't Trash

"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.'  They say that the Christian religion with its preaching about love is a thing of the past. 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.  We shall not forsake love. Take the days as they come, the good with a grateful heart, and the bad for the sake of those which follow.  I see God in the work of His hands and the marks of His love in every visible thing.   Do not yield to hatred. We are here in a dark tunnel, but at the end, an eternal light is shining for us."

Titus Brandsma, executed at Dachau, 26 July 1942

"And Peter understood that neither Nero, nor all his legions, could overcome the living truth— that they could not overwhelm it with tears or blood, and that now its victory was beginning.   He understood with equal force why the Lord had turned him back on the road.  That city of pride, of crime, of wickedness, and of a lust for power, was beginning to be His."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis

It was a 'risk on' day all the way, with strong rallies in equities.  Stocks went out near their highs.

VIX reflects this new wave of confidence, and continued to fall.  

The ebb and flow of fear and greed is taking back what was lost with the war fears of not too long ago.

Gold finished unchanged, with silver losing a little more ground despite the weakness in the Dollar, which continued to decline, in addition to the strength in equities.

What is this telling us?

It may become much clearer by next week.  Risk may recede from our perception, but it has not gone way.

As you may know I grew up in northeastern Ohio, and most of my friends from earlier days were 'salt of the earth' people, the children of the working class, such as myself. 

I was stunned a few months ago in a phone call to discover that almost all of my buddies from young adulthood after college are gone now.  When you move some distance away and start your own family you naturally tend to lose contact. Many of them worked in the trades, and have passed away. 

So its nice to hear from someone who brings fond memories of pleasant times, my good friend Phil who called unexpectedly.  He was always quick-witted and full of good humor.  We worked together after high school, which at that time was in an aging, if not deteriorating as it is all gone now, section of southeast Cleveland, in an old furniture warehouse next door, a cavernous place, full of opportunities for the kind of carefree fun and camaraderie that make a student's life more passable.

It's nice to be reminded of who we are and how deep our roots go, in sharing memories and laughs, shared experience from times gone by.  It is easy to lose perspective and a sense of your core being, of who you really are and what you believe, swept along in this tumult of events, and endless waves of mind-numbing controversies.  The modern world overwhelms and isolates us with the shallowness of its values, full of illusions and falsehoods, binding us to a wheel of fire shifting quickly between greed and fear.

Family and friends are always important, as well as the institutions that helped to shape us, and sustain us, which often remain there for us, as we travel the world, and through time.  They help us to resist the hate and the madness of the moment, and even if our knees are just a bit more wobbly now, to remain standing firm against the tide.

Such is His loving kindness, and tender mercies. 

Non-Farm Payrolls report tomorrow, and then into the weekend.

Have a pleasant evening.