Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Daughters of Pride - 'How Do We Resist'

"The leaders of Judah, and their priests, and the people became ever more unfaithful, imitating all the shameful practices of the world, defiling the temple of the Lord which he himself had consecrated.   The Lord, God of their ancestors, repeatedly sent them word through his messengers because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place.  However, they continued to ridicule the messengers of God, despising his words and scoffing at his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord against his people became so fierce that there was no remedy."

2 Chronicles 36:14-16

"They live out their days in prosperity, and slide peacefully down into hell."

Job 21:13

"There is a subtle temptation that encourages Christians to be 'practical.'  That is, they try to do God’s work in man’s way.  Getting results becomes the primary focus.  It almost seems that we believe that the end justifies the means.  Don’t be led away by the world’s reasoning. The world tries to convince you that as long as you can accomplish something for the kingdom of God, that’s all that matters.  God’s ways are not like man’s ways.  It is never wise to attempt to do God’s work in man’s way.  It is an age-old temptation that seems to make sense on the surface but often is at variance with the purposes of God."

Henry Blackaby, God's Thinking is not Man's Thinking

"See to it that no one takes you captive you with worldly philosophy and empty deceits, according to the tradition of men, according to the elemental powers of the world, and not according to Christ."

Colossians 2:8

"Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand poverty, because they are poor themselves, after a fashion; but they cannot understand destitution. Capable of giving alms, perhaps, but incapable of stripping themselves bare, they will be moved, to the sound of beautiful music, at Jesus’s sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will horrify them.  They want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, hanging from a woman’s beautiful throat."

Léon Bloy, Exégèse des Lieux Communs

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"There is probably no greater threat to the faithful than that of the sanctifying of success by worldly measures.  Invariably, when a principled belief aligns itself with the state, and the wealthy, and the powerful, it ends up as lost as if it was suffering persecution."

Jesse, Sanctifying Greed, 6 June 2023

"For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."

C. S. Lewis


Pride is the first sin, the very negation of the humility and devotion and sacrifice of the Cross.

Greed and indifference to others, lawlessness and betrayal, are the daughters of Pride, the father of all sin.  Pride and its sins are the chains that imprison Satan and the damned in their hell. 

Stocks were wobbly today, awaiting the CPI data tomorrow.

Why is this particular data so important?

Because financial assets are in a bubble, and the market is in the hands of the Fed, the father of bubbles.

Gold and silver pretty much also marched in place, along with the Dollar.

VIX rose, as did the yields on US debt.

Stock option expiration at the end of this week. 

The unsustainable will not be sustained.   God's wrath grows fierce.  Nemesis awaits.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Terrible Visions: To Bear Witness To Power

 

"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty.  Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening.  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."

Simone Weil,  Gravity and Grace

"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people."

Theodor Adorno, Education After Auschwitz

"Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,
     for your sins have brought you down.
Bring your confessions, and return to the Lord.
     Say to him,
'Forgive all our sins, and graciously receive us,
     so that we may offer you our praises.
 Worldly power cannot save us,
     nor can our warhorses.
Never again will we say to the idols we have made,
     "You are our gods."
No, in you alone
     do the fatherless find mercy.'"

Hosea: 14:1-3

"Banality is a symptom. Men hide behind their cliches."

Eugene Ionesco

"The truth is, there are not two kinds of people. There’s only one: the kind that loves to divide up into gangs who hate each other’s guts. Both conservatives and liberals agree among themselves, on their respective message boards, in uncannily identical language, that their opponents lack any self-awareness or empathy, the ability to see the other side of an argument or to laugh at themselves. Which would seem to suggest that they’re both correct. Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective.”

Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

 Stocks ignored the higher than expected Non-Farm Payrolls Report jobs added, choosing instead to draw some bullish cheer from flat wages and higher than expected unemployment.

But alas, it was just another wash and rinse after all.

What a surprise.

Gold moved higher, further into the record territory.

Silver not so much.  

VIX wallowed between its moving averages.

The Dollar was flat.

The markets seem to be winding up for a move.

I had thought it would be coming today.  

But not quite yet.

The market moving exogenous events are simmering, and at some point will boil over.

We are breaking heaven's heart.

The madness serves none but itself.   No one. 

We must stand to the end and bear witness to the truth, in fear and trembling.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Truth Has Perished, and Is No Longer On Our Lips

 

"This is what I commanded them: listen to my voice, and I will be your God, and you will be my people.  

But they did not obey or pay heed to my words.  Instead they walked in the hardness of evil hearts, and turned their backs to me,and  not their faces.   From the day your ancestors left Egypt until today, I faithfully sent my servants the prophets to them.  Yet they have not listened to me or paid attention; instead they stiffened their necks and proved to be worse than their fathers.  And then you are to say to them, 'This is the nation that did not obey the Lord, their God, or accept correction. Truth has perished. It no longer on their lips."

Jeremiah 7:23-28

"Capitalism is at risk of failing today not because we are running out of innovations, or because markets are failing to inspire private actions, but because we’ve lost sight of the operational failings of unfettered gluttony. Unless we regain our moral bearings our scope for collective action will be lost. The day may soon arrive when money fully owns our politics, markets have utterly devastated the environment, and gluttony relentlessly commands our personal choices. Then we will have arrived at the ultimate paradox: the self-destruction of prosperity at the very moment when technological knowhow enables sustainable prosperity for all."

Jeffrey Sachs, Self-interest, without morals, January 2012

"He will perish for lack of self-restraint; and will be lost because of an abundance of foolishness."

Proverbs 5:23

"Or could it just be that current events and crises bring out and show us who we really are, and hopefully, offer to change us?  The would be masters ever more deceitful, and obsessive greed leads the few into rough hands and dark cellars. Is there not some pathology clearly in evidence with these minor deities on Wall Street?  Sad little boys and broken men become dark spirits, seeking to fill the hole in their beings with things, people, possessions without savor, a wreckage of devices.  And even more sad are the husks and shadows of people drawn along, never at peace, who follow after in their wake, like swirling leaves pulled fitfully with the wind."

Jesse, On Recovery, Reform, and Events of the Day, 23 February 2011

"But God said to him, ‘You fool, this very night your life will be demanded of you; as for the things you have hoarded, whose will they be?’"

Luke 12:20

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.  The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity... 

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919


Stocks were relieved that Chairman Jay didn't drop any jawbombs in his congressional testimony, and spoke some sweet nothings about rate cuts, so stocks managed to move higher again.

The Dollar dropped on interest rate complacency, and a growing lack of interest from the rest of the world.

Gold and silver moved higher again.

Non-Farm Payrolls tomorrow may move the markets.

It's all about the Benjamins, and their masters are the Fed.

Joe will be giving us the state of the union address tonight.  Bread and circuses.   

Mostly circuses.  False flags, and willful blindness to the Unspeakable.

As for the rest of the world, dancing on a volcano.

“All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.  I can’t even give you hope that it will be different someday— that they’ll come out, and forget death, and lose their technology’s elaborate terror, and stop using every form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level— and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive.”

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Let's see what happens.

Have a pleasant evening.