Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - They Harden Their Hearts

 

"O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter.  If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king.  But if not, even if he does not preserve us, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the false images you have set up and commanded us to worship."

Daniel 3:16-18

"Take a stand for that which is right, and the world may misunderstand you and criticize you, but you never go alone.  Wherever you are going this morning, my friends, tell the world that you're going with truth.  You're going with justice, you're going with goodness, and you will have an eternal companionship.  And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you, but you'll go on anyhow.

But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow before the gods of evil."

Martin Luther King, But If Not, Atlanta, Georgia, November, 1967

"We may boast that we are the chosen people; we may even thank God that we are not like other men.  But after all it will be but flattery, and the delusion, the self deceit of the Pharisee."

John Adams, Letter to John Taylor, 29 July 1814

"Time and again we hope for better leaders, but all too often those hopes are dashed. The reason is that power causes people to lose the kindness and modesty that got them elected, or they never possessed those sterling qualities in the first place. They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition. They’re shameless.”

Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History

"Greed is not good.  Greed is a disease, an aberration of simple honest ambition and necessary provision taken to excess.  And yet this generation would make a god of it.  Greed is contagious, and attacks the very contentment of society at its heart, turning it towards oligarchy and oppression.

Jesse, Greed Is Not Good, 19 December 2010

“Hear now, O Israel: Is my way not just?  Is it not your ways that are not just?  When a righteous person turns away from his righteousness and does injustice, he shall die for it; for the injustice that he has done he shall die.  Again, when a wicked person turns away from the wickedness he has committed and does what is just and right, he shall save his life.  Because he considered and turned away from all the transgressions that he had committed, he shall surely live; he shall not die."

Ezekiel 18:25-28


No, they seem to never learn.  Because the dark forces they have taken into their hearts do not want to leave: fear and greed, lust for possessions and power.  They want in their bitterness to remain, and to destroy and devour creation.

And if you tell them, they will hate you, and silence and abuse you.

But you will tell them anyhow.   Because that is what is demanded by love.

Stocks popped and flopped today.

VIX continued to fall towards an oddly displaced disregard for the world.

The Dollar was flat.

Gold and silver rallied and the miners recovered after their recent flogging.

The gold inventories in Hong Kong are scraping the bottom of the barrel.  Time for a recharge.

Wash - rinse - repeat.

God's justice will not remain silent for much longer.

Have a pleasant weekend.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Risk On! - Our Brave New World

 

"Strive for peace with all, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord,  Take care that no one loses the grace of God, and that no bitterness takes root and flourishes, by which many will become corrupted."

Hebrews 12:14-15

"Bitterness has a tenacious way of taking root deep within the soul and resisting all efforts to weed it out.  Bitterness occurs for many reasons. Time, rather than diminishing the hurt, only seems to sharpen the pain.  You find yourself rehearsing the offense over and over again, each time driving the root of bitterness deeper within your soul.  Bitterness can derive from a sense of being unjustly treated.

Bitterness is easy to justify.  You can get so used to a bitter heart that you are even comfortable with it, but it will destroy you.  Only God is fully aware of its destructive potential. There is nothing so deeply embedded in your heart that God’s grace cannot reach down and remove it.  No area in your life is so painful that God’s grace cannot bring total healing. No offense committed against you is so heinous that God’s love cannot enable you to forgive.

When you allow bitterness to grow in your life, you reject the grace of God that can free you.  If you are honest before God, you will admit the bitterness and allow God to forgive you.  Bitterness enslaves you, but God is prepared to remove your bitterness and replace it with His peace and joy."

Henry Blackaby, Bitterness

"Anyone who does not do what is good is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their neighbor."

1 John 3:10

"But the lawyer, wanting to justify himself, said to Jesus, 'And who is my neighbor?'”

Luke 10:29

"Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles and snares of evil.  For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.  Therefore, take on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand the evil of this day and, at the end of all things, remain standing."

Ephesians 6:11-13

Nvidia's forecast after hours lit a fire under the bulls.

And they came in snorting and short-squeezing this morning, across the board.

No worries, risk on it was.

Those who hedged a bad number out of Nvidia got smoked.

Gold drifted a little lower along with silver and the Dollar.

VIX fell.

Like I said, risk on.

The miners were beaten with an ugly stick.

A man might have been tempted to selectively buy a few of the more absurd valuations.

Wash - rinse - repeat.

We have the most efficiently shameless con men in the world.

Today is the anniversary of the execution of Sophie Scholl on  February 22, 1943.

Have a pleasant evening.

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.