Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - When Majesty Falls Into Folly

 

“There was a rich man whose land produced a bountiful harvest.  He asked himself, ‘What shall I do, for I do not have space to store my harvest?’ And he said, ‘This is what I shall do: I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, 'Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!'  But God said to him, ‘You fool, this very night your life will be demanded of you; as for the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’

Luke 12:16-20

"Having fallen from the eternal, the evil one's desires are endless, insatiable. Having fallen from pure Being, he is driven by the desire to possess, to fill his emptiness. But the problem is insoluble, always. He is compelled to have and to hold, to possess and consume, and nothing else. All he takes, he destroys."

Denis de Rougemont

"Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil.  One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force.  Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable.  Against folly we have no defence.  Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can be just pushed aside as trivial exceptions.

 If we are to deal adequately with folly, we must understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect.  They are under a spell, they are blinded, their very nature is being misused and exploited.  Having thus become a passive instrument, the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.  Here lies the danger of diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, After Ten Years, December 1942

"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

 

The stock that the world awaited, Nvidia reported a decent beat of the revenue and earnings estimates after hours.

It was enough so that the stock did not sell out, but not enough to boost the stock appreciably.

So stocks overall finished pretty much unchanged today, after some continuing weakness in the earlier trade.

Gold finished unchanged as well, with silver down a bit.

VIX fell.

The US markets continue on pretty much in a bubble of their own, without much of a care.

The US vetoed another UN proposal for a cease fire in Gaza.  

It was the sole objection although the UK voted to abstain.

The extradition hearing for Julian Assange in London continues.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - You Who Murder the Prophets and the Innocent

 

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who murder the prophets and abuse those whom God has sent to you as messengers.  As you have willed it, so your house is now yours to command— but it is made desolate.”

Matthew 23:37-38

"During the years of the Weimar Republic Carl von Ossietzky's political commentaries gained him a reputation as a fervent supporter of democracy and a pluralistic society. He was convicted in 1931 of revealing state secrets, the illegal German militarization, and served 18 months in prison. He was released in 1932. Ossietzky continued to be a constant warning voice against militarism and Nazism when, in January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor and the Nazi dictatorship began.

On 28 February 1933, after the Reichstag fire, he was taken by the police and held without trial in Spandau prison.  He was detained afterwards at the concentration camp KZ Esterwegen near Oldenburg. He was visited while in the camp by Swiss historian Carl Jacob Burkhardt, as a representative of the International Red Cross.  Burkhardt described Ossietzky as 'a deadly pale broken creature, who seemed numb, with one eye swollen over, and his teeth broken.'"

Jesse, In memory of Journalist Carl von Ossietzky, 16 June 2012

"Tell my friends that I have come to the end.  I hear my wife tried to visit me.  We cannot speak to the conscience of the world when our own conscience is asleep. 

I only wanted peace."

Carl von Ossietzky, German Journalist, winner in absentia of 1935 Nobel Peace Prize, died after a long brutal imprisonment on 4 May 1938

"Only one who spent the years following the First World War in Germany can fully understand how hard a battle it was that a man like Ossietzky had to fight.  He knew that the tradition of his countrymen, bent on violence and war, had not lost its power.  He knew how difficult, thankless and dangerous a task it was. to preach sanity and justice to his countrymen who had been hardened by a rough fate and demoralizing influence of a long war.  In their blindness they repaid him in hatred, persecution and slow destruction; to heed him and to act accordingly would have meant their salvation and would have been a true relief for the whole world.  It will be to the eternal fame of the Nobel Foundation that it bestowed its high honor to this humble martyr and that it is resolved to keep alive the memory of his work."

Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years, 1956

"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

Stocks wobbled today.

Gold rallied, as the Dollar fell.

Silver moved lower with equities.

VIX rose.

Earnings may dominate the stock market action, with tech and the miners reporting results this week.

It is hard to believe some of the things that are happening, even if one forecasted them, and anticipated them.  What are we becoming?

The moral cowardice of the West is, once again, our shame.

"But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

Hilaire Belloc

 Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Rough Seas Ahead, Mateys

 

"I cannot imagine any condition which would cause a ship to founder.  I cannot conceive of any vital disaster happening to this vessel. Modern shipbuilding has gone beyond that."

Captain Edward John Smith, RMS Titanic

"It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, perjury, and treachery.  These may, perhaps, succeed at first, and limp along on hope for awhile with a flourishing appearance.  But time betrays their weakness, and they eventually fall into ruin of their own designs."

Demosthenes

"Monetary and regulatory policy encourage asset bubbles to proliferate.  Hot money seeks out the conscious mispricing of risk. Capital, in the form of both money and personal talent, increasingly flows into malinvestment and the gaming of markets.   The productive economy languishes, left wanting for the lack of creative resources and attention. The bubble rises to unsustainable valuations— and fails, and a nation's capital is consumed."

Jesse 5 August 2019, The Men Who Sold the World

“When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, you may be certain that her desolation is near.  Then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains, and those who are within the city must escape from its boundaries, and those who are in country areas must not return.  For those will be days of retribution when all that is written will come to pass."

Luke 21:21-22

"Everyone knows that plagues have a way of recurring throughout history, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that crash down on us out of the sky. There have always been plagues and wars, yet they always take us by surprise. When war breaks out people say it's stupid and won't last long. Stupidity has a knack of getting in the way, which we would see if not wrapped up in ourselves. In this our townsfolk were like everybody else— they did not believe in plagues."

Albert Camus, The Plague


Stocks went out near the lows. 

The Dollar was flat.

VIX is on a coffee break.

Gold and silver rallied.  Silver is feisty.

PPI came in hot today but stocks failed to rally with the good 'bad news.'

Markets closed on Monday for President's Day. 

Why so serious?

Have a pleasant weekend.

Fed's Economic Outlook: Steady as She Goes