Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Perception Management - Creatures of the Plutocracy

 

"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.  They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.  Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power."

Henry Wallace, 9 April 1944

"What is offensive is that they lie, and worship their own lying."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

"We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The US Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K."

Eddie George, Governor Bank of England, cited in Reg Howe v. BIS, JPM et al., September 1999

"Misdeeds, once exposed, have no refuge but in audacity.  And they had accomplices in all those who feared the same fate.”

Tacitus, Annals

"Financial institutions can hold low-quality securities for the period where no reporting is required. Temporarily increasing the supply of Treasuries makes this kind of deception easier. It helps remove market and regulator discipline."

Franklin Allen and Elena Carletti, Role of Liquidity in Financial Crises, September 14, 2008

"Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer."

Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 1973

"I know nothing that I may say can influence you. You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the plutocracy.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel


They say that the first victim of war is the truth.  Maybe that's true.  

After all, the US has been at war for the past 30 years or so.   

And there is a bull market in whoppers.

Greed sustained by lies, hate, and fear.  What can go wrong?

The Consumer Price Index came in higher than forecast this morning, but the details of the composition of the number suggest it was 'warm' rather than 'hot.'

So stocks rallied back hard into the close.

Did I mention that there is a stock option expiration on Friday.

Gold and silver got nailed, because it was a risk on rally after all.  

And they were overdue for a correction.

VIX plummeted.

As expected.

And so for today, Goldilocks reigned supreme. 

Have a pleasant evening.

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 with 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.