Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - At the Gates of Hell

"The gates of Hell are terrible to behold, are they not?  The lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making.   If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves."

E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World

"If at the start this cancerous growth in the nation was not particularly noticeable, it was only because there were still enough forces at work that operated for the good, so that it was kept under control.   As it grew larger, however, and finally in an ultimate spurt of growth attained ruling power, the tumor broke open, as it were, and infected the whole body."

The White Rose, Second Leaflet, Munich 1942

"It does not matter how small the sins are, provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one— the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

"Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.  On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’  And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you servants of lawlessness.’"

Matthew 7:21-23

"He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you.  He bids you mount aloft.  He shows you how to become as gods.  Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

J.H.Newman, The Times of Antichrist

The economic data came in hot this morning, and so the wash and rinse cycle switch to 'rinse.'

Stocks fell.

Interest rates and the Dollar rallied.

Gold and silver fell.

Stock option expiration tomorrow.

Fed rate meeting next week. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Safe Havens and Stores of Value

 

“Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood. For these few gold has been the asset of last resort.”

Antony C. Sutton, historian

"When a government overvalues one type of money and undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear from circulation into hoards, while the overvalued money will flood into circulation."

Gresham's Law

"'We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,' says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis.  'They were totally opposed to it,' Born says.  'That puzzled me.  What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?'"

PBS Frontine, The Warning


"You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability and intelligence of the members of the government. And with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold."

George Bernard Shaw


"Gold has worked down from Alexander's time. When something holds good for two thousand years I do not believe it can be so because of prejudice or mistaken theory."

Bernard M. Baruch

"There can be no other criterion, no other standard than gold. Yes, gold which never changes, which can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality and which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par excellence."

Charles De Gaulle, February 4, 1965

"Gold will be around, gold will be money when the dollar and the euro and the yuan and the ringgit are mere memories."

Richard L. Russell

"Like liberty, gold never stays where it is undervalued."

J. S. Morrill, historian

"Synthetic gold, sourced in pyramids of credit extended to bullion bankers by central banks with little or no claim on physical substance, have provided a more efficient, better-camouflaged form of intervention. The volumes traded are huge, and bear little resemblance to actual flows of physical metal.   Demand for physical gold has exceeded new mine supply for several years running; and while above-ground 400-ounce .995-gold bars located in London, New York, and other financial capitals (in cohabitation with speculative trading activity in paper markets) have steadily dwindled and disappeared into Asian financial centers reformulated as .9999 kilo bars."

Tocqueville Newsletter, 2Q 2015

"Gold is unique among assets, in that it is not issued by any government or central bank, which means that its value is not influenced by political decisions or the solvency of one institution or another."

Salvatore Rossi, Central Bank of Italy, 30 Sept 2013

“Gold is money.  Everything else is credit.”

John Pierpont Morgan, 1912


And this is why the central banks are quietly buying it, in size, and why gold has been steadily flowing from West to East. 

Stocks fell off a bit, as the rinse cycle in the latest wash and rinse kicked in.

Gold rallied, silver rocketed.

The Dollar was the usual chop.

VIX is seriously underrepresenting risks.

PPI tomorrow.

Fed next week.

This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion, memories of the asset bubbles of 1999. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

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.