Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Longing for Virtue in the Darkness

 

"When a nation threatens another nation the people of the latter forget their factionalism, their local antagonisms, their political differences, their suspicions of each other, their religious hostilities, and band together as one unit.  Leaders know that, and that is why so many of them whip up wars during periods of national crisis, or when the people become discontented and angry.  The leaders stigmatize the enemy with every vice they can think of, every evil and human depravity.  Attacking another nation, then, acts as a sort of catharsis, temporarily, on men’s fear of their immediate neighbors.  This is the explanation of all wars, all racial and religious hatreds, all massacres, and all attempts at genocide."

Taylor Caldwell, The Devil's Advocate, 1952

"The myth that holds that the great corporation is the puppet of the market, the powerless servant of the consumer is in fact one of the devices by which its power is perpetuated.   People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.  The privileged feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977

“Corrupt citizens breed corrupt rulers, and it is the mob who finally decides when virtue shall die.”

Taylor Caldwell, Dear and Glorious Physician, 1958

“The mob believes everything it is told, provided only that it be repeated over and over.  Provided too that its passions, hatreds, fears are catered to.  The grosser, the bigger, the cruder the lie, the more readily is it believed and followed.  The mob can never comprehend that its own interests are what is at stake.”

Alexandre Koyré, Réflexions sur le Mensonge, 1943

"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.  All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, 1999

Stocks were taking a little respite and a bounce higher after their recent declines.

The Dollar moved higher.

Gold and silver extended their decline.

VIX declined.

There is quite a chunk of gold sitting in the Comex warehouses in Hong Kong. 

This often presages a smack down in the Western futures price, and an outflow of physical in Asia, when they can manage it.  Like a Non-Farm Payrolls report.

Let's see what happens.  Sometimes they like to flip the trade, when too many hangers on are leaning heavily on a directional move.  Like the last Comex option expiration in the metals.

Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday.

People can be very gullible about what causes moves in the equity markets.

Lately the shiny thing has been the perception of interest rates, moving up or pivoting towards cuts.

If you take these rationalizations at face value for the big daily moves in stocks, you might assume that the Wall Street crowd have the situational awareness and conviction of goldfish.

The small investor is not much of a factor in intraday pricing moves anymore.  They are mostly in cash or riding some favorite index fund.  The high frequency crowd preys on everyone, especially big fat managed funds.

Barring the big exogenous events, there is a relatively small but elite crew swinging a big money stick on the Street that sets the tone, and the rest follow the momentum that they declare.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Malignant Priorities - Non-Farm Payrolls

 

"Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct."

Sophie Scholl

"I write to you from a disgraced profession. Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably [intentionally and cynically, with plausible deniability aforethought. Jesse] to understand the forces behind the financial crisis.  Concepts including rational expectations, market discipline, and the efficient markets hypothesis led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices, that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur.   Not all economists believed this, but most did."

James K. Galbraith

“They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”

Franz Kafka, The Trial

"The truly savage and frenetic part of New York, the terrible, cold, cruel part, is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills this street believes that the world will always be the same, that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.

I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several billion dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness. I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings."

Federico Garcia Lorca, A Poet In New York, October 1929

"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty.   Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.  If the soul ceases to love, it falls into something here below that is nearly equivalent to hell."

Simone Weil

“National Socialism was a revulsion by my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government—against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving.  The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things, and never had."

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945

 

And so we finally had the rinse.

Stocks sold off.

Gold and silver had a classic 'smash and grab' in the futures market.  I have seen this many times.

They run the futures up in the thin overnight trading running the stops of the shorts.

And then they smack them down, running the stops of the longs.

The Dollar gained back some.

The Non-Farm Payrolls report this Friday could be interesting.

The year is swiftly drawing to a close.

I get the impression that I am not playing on the same team as many of our most powerful, and those that follow and serve them. 

Killing innocents in the name of justice does not seem particularly noble.  But there seems to be a lot of that going around.

Such are the ways of the worldly, and the allure of the abyss to which they have been consecrated.

The doctor took the stitches out of my eye Friday late.  Yikes.  Why do they always do this why you are awake.  Even with the local numbing it was a little disconcerting.

It made a positive difference.   I know longer have the feeling of something like an eyelash in my eye, and my vision is improving on the periphery since the slight warping of the cornea has been relieved.

Thanking God for his loving kindness and tender mercies.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Idylls of Mammon

 

"If you’re not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of 50% you’re not fit to be a common shareholder, and you deserve the mediocre result you’re going to get compared to people who can be more philosophical to market fluctuations.”

Charlie Munger

"You should thank God for bank bailouts— absolutely required to save your civilization.  So I think when you have troubles like that you shouldn't be bitching about a little bailout.  You should have been thinking it should have been bigger.  You should thank God the government saved the big banks and their investors.  

Now, if you talk about bailouts for everybody else [e.g homeowners], if you just start bailing out all the individuals instead of telling them to adapt, the culture dies.  There's danger in just shoveling out money to people who say, 'My life is a little harder than it used to be.'   At a certain place you've got to say to the people, 'Suck it in and cope, buddy.'"

Charlie Munger, Event at the University of Michigan, September 14, 2010

"Why couldn’t the banks 'suck it in and cope' Charlie?  But then again that wouldn’t have been so hot for the Berkshire portfolio, which includes TARP recipients: American Express, Bank of America, M&T Bank Corp, US Bank, and Wells Fargo.  And of course there was that $5 billion loan to Goldman Sachs in September 2008 when Wall Street was melting down.  Then Goldman received $10 billion in TARP the following month.  Charlie and Warren must be clairvoyants.  Forget the injustice and long-term damage of bailouts, if it’s good for Munger and Buffett we are supposed to thank God for it."

Douglas French, Warren Buffett's partner: Bank Bailouts Saved Civilization, Christian Science Monitor, September 30, 2010

"Inequality is a euphemism for all the things that have gone to make the lives of the rich so much more delicious for the last three decades.  And for the things that have made the lives of working people so wretched and so precarious.  You catch a glimpse of inequality every time you hear about someone that had to declare bankruptcy because a child got sick.   Inequality is about the way in which speculators, and even criminals, get a helping hand from Uncle Sam, while the Vietnam Vet down the street loses his house."

Thomas Frank, Listen Liberal

Stocks managed to put together another rally, with even the tech sector along for the ride.

The VIX fell.

The Dollar declined.

Gold and silver held a good push into their breakouts and put a spike near the highs at the close.

Wow.

There will be a non-farm payrolls report next week.

The problem with powerful organizations and people is that they lose focus on the bigger picture and eventually see only themselves.

Power and possessions will invoke  in their adherents a kind of moral astigmatism.

And over time these elite often foster and advance some rather cruel and unusual economics and domestic policies which their academic and media sycophants are only too happy to rationalize and support.

Such are the ways of the worldly, and the allure of the abyss.  As old as Babylon, and evil as sin.

Have a pleasant weekend.