Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - He Sets Before Us Life and Death

 

"Behold, today I set before you life and good, and death and evil.  If you obey the command that I give you, to love the Lord, your God, and to walk in his ways, and to observe his commandments, statutes, and decrees, then you will live and multiply, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.

But if your hearts turn away so that you will not listen, and you are drawn away to worship other gods and to serve them then, as I pledge to you today, you will perish. You will not live a long time in the land that you are crossing over the Jordan to enter and to possess.

I call upon the heavens and the earth to witness that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that you and your descendants might live."

Deuteronomy 30:15-19

"When the just flourish, the people rejoice;
       but when the wicked rule, the people groan."

Proverbs 29:2

"I am the Lord, your God
       who teaches you what is for your own good
       and who leads you in the way you should go.
If only you had listened to my commandments,
       your prosperity would have been like a river
       and your success like the waves of the sea.
Your descendants would have been as numerous as the sand
      and your offspring like its countless grains.
Their name would never be erased
       or blotted out from my sight."

Isaiah 48:17-19

It was a fairly quiet triple witch option expiration, perhaps so because all the fireworks had already taken place with so many economic events earlier this week and last.

Gold and silver were so steady in the early morning that I wondered if we should request a wellness visit for the Wall Street wiseguys.

But never fear, the Dollar rallied, and gold and silver retreated. 

Stocks also did a bit of reversal, with Big Tech leading a small rally higher, while the broader Russell 2000 slumped a bit.

Wash and rinse, fait accompli.

We'll always have next week.

Our hypocrisy seems to have no bounds.

Trading should be thinning out steadily now as we coast into the year end, and the holiday season.

But one always must keep an eye on exogenous events, too big to paper over.

Have a very pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Slouching Back to Babylon

 

"We live in an age when breaking the rules for personal profit, cheating if you will, and telling lies about it has become an accepted means of acting in public, quietly fashionable, almost admirable to some, provided that the lying is done skillfully, more as a distortion than an outright whopper, and with style.

What is truth? This could be the vulgar motto for the generation that is passing. Truth is whatever we say it is, and woe to any who dare to disagree with the lie, or bring any light to our fanciful imaginings.  The children of the darkness of this world will hate them for it.  For they are given over to greed and power, not truth."

Jesse, What Is Truth, 15 June 2016

“The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects.  And for the elite to sufficiently coalesce to commit itself to murdering its own citizens, there must be a near fanatical, driving interest.

Power can now achieve its potential.  Where also the elite have built up frustrations regarding those who have lost power or nonetheless feel threatened by them, where they see them as outside the moral universe, where they have dehumanized them, where the outgroup is culturally or ethnically distinct and the elite perceive them as inferior, or where any other such factors are present, Power will achieve its murderous potential.  It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, that will justify beginning the murder en masse.

R. J. Rummel, Death By Government, 1994

“Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation: a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz, Discreet Charm of Nihilism

 

The equity rally fizzled in the big dogs, aka The Magnificent Seven of tech, grandchildren of the Nifty Fifty, but did spread to the lesser knowns of the Russell 2000.

Gold and silver rallied again, as the The Dollar weakened further.

Gold did give up quite a bit of its gain, but silver stood firm impressively.

VIX bounced a little but remains subdued.

Stock Index option expiration in a triple witch tomorrow.

At some point the most recent gold pool is going to collapse, and the metal may see $100+ rally days.

But until then we can only watch the elites attempting to breath some life back into an obvious equity bubble.

Is this for the year end, a traditional hand off to the bigger fools, or something presaging a miraculous 'soft landing' in which inflation subsides while the economy grows with vigor.

Will otherwise good, educated people throw away their morals, and join the forces of pillage and murder?

Be as mindful of your own soul as your coin purse and stock portfolio, for that is what this is all about.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bubble

 

"As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to his folly. "

Proverbs 26:11

"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, 2012 interview with Bill Moyers

"Now why don't you just take it easy, Group Captain, and please make me a drink of grain alcohol and rainwater, and help yourself to whatever you'd like."

General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), Dr. Strangelove

"Where are the leaders? Has our political process become so compromised by powerful interest groups and the threat of character assassination that even the best among us will not dare to speak honestly about the solutions that might bring us back to common sense and fundamental fairness?"

Senator Jim Webb, A Time to Fight, 2008

"General Turgidson, I find this very difficult to understand. I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons."

President Merkin Muffley, Dr. Strangelove

From Wall Street to the White House, it's all about serving the oligarchy, the 1 percent, while maintaing plausible deniability. 

The market came in broadly expecting a whipsaw, with the FOMC standing pat with dovish verbiage, and then Jay Powell coming in and raining on the parade with skeptical cautions.

No way Zimbabwe Jay.  

Although it must be said that the Street took it much further than he allowed.  It reminded me of a college friend who kept seeing 'signs' from a girl for which he pined, but would not actually approach.

I think it would have been interesting to see the FOMC commentary on bubblevision performed by the voice-over actor from The Curse of Oak Island.

Stocks rallied very hard, parabolically surpassing their bubble peaks.

The Dollar dropped off a cliff.

Gold and silver rallied like rockets.

And there is the second phase of the wash and rinse.

VIX did not drop but marked time in place.

Stock option expiration on Friday.

I can feel the hammer getting closer, and closer, to the retail bulls.  

But give it some time.

This is not sour grapes.   I snagged some serious coin in the  miners today, buying them into this recent pounding down the last two days.  It was just too contrived and cliché.  

Pretty much like all the official 'verbiage' we get these days. 

You know how they ran gold up to a new high, ran all the short stops, and then smashed it down into yesterday?

Patented move.   

And I think they may have the same play in store for stocks.  

But timing and leverage are everything.

Meanwhile, we've got two wars a leaping. 

Changed my mind about not using twitter. 

Have a pleasant evening.