Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Fragility of Empire

 

"The great multinationals are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of their own behavior - producing in low-wage dictatorships and selling to high-wage democracies.  Indeed, the striking quality about global enterprises is how easily free-market capitalism puts aside its supposed values in order to do business.  The conditions of human freedom do not matter to them so long as the market demand is robust.  The absence of freedom, if anything, lends order and efficiency to their operations.

Democracy is held captive, not just by money, but by ideas — the ideas that money buys. Americans cannot teach democracy to the world until they restore their own."

William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy, 1992

“The downfall of every civilization comes, not from the moral corruption of the common man, but rather from the moral complacency of common men in high places.”

E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America, 1966

"Throughout the world financial interests have taken control of government and used neoliberal policies to promote their own gain-seeking – financial gains without industrialization or agricultural self-sufficiency. Betting against one’s own currency is more remunerative than making the effort to invest in capital equipment and develop markets for new output. So unemployment and domestic budget deficits are soaring.

The neoliberal failure to distinguish between productive and merely extractive or speculative forms of gain seeking has created a travesty of the kind of wealth creation that Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations. The financialization of economies has been decoupled from tangible capital investment to expand employment and productive powers.

Central to any discussion of financialization is the fact that credit creation has been monopolized in the United States and Britain for their own national gain."

Michael Hudson, The Collapse of the Neoliberal Model, May 2009

"Narcissus so himself, himself forsook,
And died to kiss his shadow in the brook."

William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

Stock did usual thing today, falling in the morning and then coming back to unchanged and even a little green.

VIX rose and then fell back, again.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

Gold and silver were slammed ahead of the Non-Farm Payrolls report.

Perhaps the report will not be so negative, so the wiseguys are doing their usual scams early.

Biden and crew seem to be bent on going out of their way to pick fights with most of the world that is not us.

This is probably inadvisable strategically.

But considering the people involved in the decision making these days, it's not all that surprising.

"When chaos has become the supreme law, then the time for the empire of lawlessness will have come."

Friedrich Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse

As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools return to their follies.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - They Thought They Were Free - Uncommitted in Babylon

 

"Empires have always succumbed to the same disease. With each new conquest, Rome thrust forward her frontiers and retreated from her principles.

The government was in the hands of a few opulent families of the world of finance, supported by the military junta. These families knew how to protect their interests: they disguised them as national necessities. The preservation of Rome was identified with that of the ruling families.

The Roman people consisted of a small oligarchy of landowners, bankers, speculators, merchants, artisans, adventurers, and tatterdemalions, avid for pleasure, excitement, and sudden gain, proud, turbulent, corrupted by the life of the city, and placing their own interests ahead of even the most salutary reform.

Guglielmo Ferrero, The Greatness and Decline of Rome, 1909

When mass dictatorship occurred in Russia, then in Italy, we said to one another, 'That is what happens in backward countries.  We are fortunate, for all our troubles, that it cannot happen here.'

The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn't know.  They didn't know because they didn't want to know.  They could have found out, at the time, only if they had wanted to very badly.

I fooled myself.  I had to.  Everybody has to.  But I didn't want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent.  I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community.  To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these little measures that no 'patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.   One day it is over his head.

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45, 1955

Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element.   Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate.

White Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich 1942

 

Yet another interesting day in the risk markets, as stocks dropped sharply earlier in the day, but then gradually rallied in the quiet of the afternoon, to close unchanged or even positive.

Hardly anyone talks about it anymore, but as far as I can tell the Exchange Stabilization Fund, colloquially known as The Plunge Protection Team,  is still functioning in secret with little to no oversight as to its criteria for action.

The Fed and the Machine are throwing around huge amounts of money in a very sloppily regulated financial system, so the sources of certain things are hidden, or at best obscure.

Gold and silver rallied a bit, but were held back once again.  They rally in Asia, and are dampened in London and New York.

VIX rose sharply and then fell, consistent with the adjustments in the risk markets as the day wore on.

The Dollar dropped quite a bit, as it vacillates around.

The disastrous foreign policy of the US is alienating a significant portion of the global economy, with a few powerful entities reacting badly to what they perceive as 'bullying.'

Well, it's fair to say that there are a number of key factors that seem to show a divergence in the future paths of the different principalities and powers. 

It will be interesting to see how this resolves, in what surely will be looked back upon as an historic period of transition from a unipolar to multipolar world.

But as it goes, the biggest risk is not the geopolitical, or the social, but the personal, with regard to our ability to remain standing as a moral human being, in an increasingly hysterical and hostile environment characterized by ruthless lawlessness exercised by sociopaths and marginally contained psychopaths. 

But this is a familiar pattern in history.  We read about it, but do not expect it in our own case.

In the end, our standing as a moral human being is the only thing that truly matters— how God sees us, and how we are received by Him in judgement.

The days of judgement are coming; the days of reckoning are at hand.
Israel cries out, 'The prophet is a fool, the righteous men are mad.'
Because your sins are great, all the greater still your hatreds.

Hosea 9:7

Our faith is purified in the crucible of trials and temptations.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Desolation of Abomination

 

"It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.   The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent.  

In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being.  Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.   This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

"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

“Addiction might be the best word to explain the lostness that so deeply permeates society. Our addiction make us cling to what the world proclaims as the keys to self-fulfillment: accumulation of wealth and power; attainment of status and admiration; lavish consumption of food and drink, and sexual gratification without distinguishing between lust and love. These addictions create expectations that cannot but fail to satisfy our deepest needs.

As long as we live within the world's delusions, our addictions condemn us to futile quests leaving us to face an endless series of disillusionments while our sense of self remains unfulfilled. In these days of increasing addictions, we have wandered far away from our Father's home. The addicted life can aptly be designated a life lived in 'a distant country.' It is from there that our cry for deliverance rises up.”

Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son

“When you see the desolation of abomination standing where he should not be, let those who seek knowledge understand, then let those in Judea flee to the mountains."

Mark 13:14

Today was the end of May.  And the markets took a wild ride.

Let it suffice to say that these guys are shameless, and increasingly brazen.

And not just in the markets.  

They lie, and fall in love with their lying. 

Have nothing to do with them and their ways.

Non-Farm Payrolls and FOMC next week.

Have a pleasant weekend.