Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Burning Dollars and Making Sense - Everybody Back in the Pool!

 

"Such unsustainable social arrangements are backed by force and fraud. And as the fraud loses its power over time, force must increase, until there is an end in genuine reform, or eventual self-destruction."

Jesse, Credibility Trap, 24 August 2012

"It is difficult to reduce a population of free men into debt slaves, without risking a significant reaction. Therefore, it seems most likely that the government and the Fed will try to 'muddle through' for the time being, and look for an exogenous event to break the stalemate.

The traditional solution has been a military conflict, which stifles dissent against the government while generating artificial demand sufficient to energize the productive economy. It is a means of exporting your social misery, official corruption, and fiscal irresponsibility to another, weaker people. [war, what is it good for?  Misdirection and distraction."

Jesse, The Speculative Bubble in Equities, 10 October 2009

"The lie is comfortable, an illusion easy to live with, familiar, and safe."

Jesse, Western Elite Are in the Firm Grip of Fear, Fraud, and Denial, 16 May 2010

"A value-dictated, purely fiat, currency exists through force and fraud. As the fraud grows thin and obvious, the greater and more pervasive the force must become. If imports are needed, wars of aggression will follow to extend and maintain the 'sphere of influence', a euphemism for control. When force finally falters, the currency collapses. A value-dictated, purely fiat currency is not an innovation— it is among the oldest forms of tyranny."

Jesse, Slip Sliding Away, 5 March 2019

"It can be useful to witness a currency die first hand in order for the true nature of a monetary system to be fully understood. Such a systemic failure strips the commonly held but essentially arbitrary assumptions about official valuations bare. It exposes the fraud behind the force, and the force that sustains the fraud."

Jesse, Force and Fraud, 20 February 2019

 

Chairman Powell and His Merry Prankster gave the markets the easy policy high sign today, and they responded with bullish vigor.

The SP 500 and the NDX went out on the highs, and all time highs at that.

Gold and silver headed north like rockets, and pretty much kept quite a bit of the gains.

VIX plummeted.

The Dollar plummeted.

This was not so much a risk on trade as a 'what risk' trade.

And this was a bit puzzling because the Fed overall raised their outlook for inflation and growth of the economy, but did not touch their projected three rate cuts.

It may not happen tomorrow or Monday, but I suspect fairly soon the markets will also take a closer look at this apparent mismatch, and then the next rinse may commence.

I made some nice coin today so it's not so much that.  It's just that I wouldn't care so much if I were watching this trainwreck unfolding from a much further way off. 

What the US has been doing to Julian Assange, through their servants in the UK et al. is a shameful and thuggish violation of everything they are supposed to stand for.

That the corporate media ignores this shows how worthless and unprincipled they have become. 

 Geopolitical risks are boiling, with the Neo-con chicken hawks running amok.

Wake up, Joe!  This is your legacy for which some day you will required to answer. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Big Squeeze

 

“People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.   They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

"And such was the attitude of their minds that a shocking crime was dared by a few, with the blessing of more, and the passive acquiescence of all."

Tacitus, Histories: Book I, XXVIII, The Murder of Galba

"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.

The next five years are not about winning, but surviving."

Jesse, The Men Who Sold the World, 5 August 2019

“In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.”

Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

"This is what a society looks like when the glue that holds it together starts to dissolve. This is the way ordinary citizens react when they learn that the structure beneath them is crumbling. And this is the thrill that pulses through the veins of the well-to-do when they discover that there is no longer any limit on their power to accumulate.

Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation." 

Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion

"The people who designed the plans are either in the pocket of the banks or they’re incompetent.”

Joseph Stiglitz, On the Obama Administration Bank Bailout Plans, April 17, 2009

"So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing [US sponsored Ukraine regime change] and to have the UN help glue it and, you know, fuck the EU."

Victoria Nuland, US senior diplomat, Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call, BBC, 7 February 2014

"After dinner, Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice.  I had a choice.  I could be an insider or I could be an outsider.  Outsiders can say whatever they want.  But people on the inside don’t listen to them.  Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas.  People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say.  But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: they don’t criticize other insiders."

Elizabeth Warren

"We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life."

Jimmy Carter, television interview, September 27, 2015

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

Job 21:13


It was a wobbly day, with a slight risk on bias. 

Stocks ended higher on the day.

Gold and silver were lower.

The VIX fell.

The Dollar rose.

The FOMC rate decision tomorrow is a pivotal moment for the markets.

Such is our failure to reform the financial system after a devastating series of financial debacles and serial bubbles.    And so we in the West seem trapped in an endless cycle of political betrayal, greed, war, hate, demagoguery, and fear.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Creatures of the Plutocracy

 

"Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; and when he yields to the forces of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on and on to the next and to the next, at a furiously accelerating rate."

Die Weiße Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich, 1942

"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

Thomas Clement Douglas

"When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.
The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. It limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination."

Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works

"In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.  I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.  I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories, and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.  I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’."

George Orwell, Looking Back On the Spanish War and Other Essays

"The democracy gap in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote, or listlessly vote for the least worst every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the least worst gets worse.  We’re told that we’re a polarized society, right?  That’s the way the ruling classes have manipulated people for more than two thousand years: divide and rule."

Ralph Nader

"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. There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House. You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the plutocracy.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel


 Contemporary American finance, underpinned by the dollar, is a confidence game, a masterful combination of both fraud and force.  As the fraud grows increasingly heavy-handed and its veneer of normality grown thin, force must inevitably increase, until all pretense of democracy and freedom and virtue are stripped away.

It is not a national policy or force, but rather the tool of a relatively narrow elite, which has been taking the best of the national wealth for their own for years.

Stocks rallied hard, for no particular reason, led by the overnight futures market.  

It was risk on.

They hold most of those gains, giving up ground into the close. 

The Fed will be announcing their latest rate decision this Wednesday.

Gold gained a bit, silver not so much.

The VIX fell.

There will be a Comex precious metal futures option expiration on Monday the 25th.

Biden has not done right by Julian Assange, among other moral outrages.  How could he, being a charter member of the corporate Democrats led by the Clintons, with all that this implies.    

Have a pleasant evening.