Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Sliding Down Quietly Into the Abyss

 

Easy is the descent into hell;
Its dark doors stand open, night and day.
But to retrace one's steps,
To return to the upper air,
That is the task, that is our labour.

Publius Vergilius Maro, Aeneid

'Simon, Simon.  Satan has asked to have you, and to sift all of you, like wheat.  But I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail.  And when you have returned to the faith, you must help to strengthen your brothers.'

Luke 22:31-32

They spend their days in prosperity, and slide down quietly into the abyss.  They say to God, 'Leave us alone!   We do not want to learn your ways.   Who is the Almighty that we should serve him?   And what would we gain by praying to him?  Is not the prosperity of the wicked the result of their own efforts, since they have never sought God’s help?'

Job 21:12-16

The Lord reached down and rescued me;
      he drew me out from raging torrents.
He delivered me from powerful adversaries
      who hated me, and were too strong for me.
They assaulted me in the time of my distress.
      But the Lord sustained me and brought me to safe harbors.
      Because he delights in me, he saved me.

Psalm 18:16-19

Fathers and teachers, I ponder, 'What is hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Stocks were wobbling around, but managed to finish the day in the green.

Gold and silver in particular rallied.

VIX rose slightly.

Today was a quiet option expiration on the Comex for Precious Metals.

Most of the work had been done in slamming prices in the days leading up to today.

Sometimes we see another gut punch to test the new longs who were holding call options that were in the money, and have been converted into new futures positions.

Have a pleasant evening.

C. Wright Mills: The Causes of War

 

"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts

War is hugely profitable.  It creates so much money because it's so easy to spend money very fast.  There are huge fortunes to be made.  So there is always an encouragement to promote war and keep it going, to make sure that we identify people who are 'others' whom we can legitimately make war upon.

Roger Waters, Concept Tour, Rolling Stone, 23 February 2017

An expensive arms race, under cover of the military metaphysic, and in a paranoid atmosphere of fright, is an economically attractive business. To many utopian capitalists, it has become the Business Way of Life.

In crackpot realism, a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands.  The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists; it also confronts them with many new problems.

Yet these, the problems of war, often seem easier to handle.  They are out in the open: to produce more, to plan how to kill more of the enemy, to move materials thousands of miles.  So instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe.

They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines.  Being baffled, and also being very tired of being baffled, they have come to believe that there is no way out—except war—which would remove all the bewildering paradoxes of their tedious and now misguided attempts to construct peace. In place of these paradoxes they prefer the bright, clear problems of war—as they used to be.  For they still believe that 'winning' means something, although they never tell us what.

The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.

Some men want war for sordid, others for idealistic, reasons; some for personal gain, others for impersonal principle.  But most of those who consciously want war and accept it, and so help to create its 'inevitability,' want it in order to shift the locus of their problems.

C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III, 1960

Memorial Day

 

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."

Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865

"The selling of the Iraq War to the American public was an exploitation of mass gullibility. Current circumstances give little or no hope that the public response would be much different to the selling of some future untoward war."

Paul Pillar, Selling the Iraq War: Gullibility and Mass Hysteria, March 15, 2023

"The present war crisis is something we have made entirely for and by ourselves.  There is in reality not the slightest logical reason for war, and yet the whole world is plunging headlong into frightful destruction, and doing so with the purpose of avoiding war and preserving peace!  This is a true war-madness, an illness of the mind and the spirit that is spreading with a furious and subtle contagion all over the world."

Thomas Merton, The Root of War, The Catholic Worker, October 1961

"In all these instances the large multinational bankers were actively supporting both sides. It is a shocking fact that both British and American banks continued to do business with the Nazis even after the War was well underway, even as Germany was invading Europe and bombing London."

BBC, Banking with Hitler, 1998

"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1999