Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - And the Love of Most Will Grow Cold

 

"I urge you, brothers and sisters, to be wary of those who cause divisions and undermine the faithful, in opposition to the teaching that you have learned.   Avoid such people, who do not serve our Lord, but their own appetites.  And by clever words and flattery they deceive the hearts of the innocent and naive."

Romans 16:17-18

"Nor will love be seen coming from the hearts of those who are fallen into wickedness: they are the fruit of hate, deceit, greed, fear, pride, possession, and aggression.  And they will not only forsake love by washing their hands of it, they will eventually come to condemn it, and persecute it— and thereby condemn themselves.

For the people of God love is the touchstone of faith, the way to know if what we believe is with Him, or from something else; if we are walking with Him, or with something else; if the one who speaks is speaking for Him, or for something else; if we are keeping Him in our hearts, or something else; if we love Him, or ourselves, or something else.

Love does not speak with hate or fear or derision, but with the fullness of existence which is joy and mercy. Love is ridiculed and trampled upon by that which is in opposition to His creation.  When you are in doubt or confusion about what is true and what is false, look for the light of love.  This is the hallmark of the spirit in the world.

Love is not what we do, but how we do what we do.  Love is found in the most ordinary things, not in grand gestures and elaborate mannerisms.   It resides in small daily acts of kindness and fellowship, done lovingly and with care, for His sake.  It is how we carry our cross, not in front of a cheering crowd, but in the quiet moments, and the little things, while walking with Him.

The hardened heart judges others, while ignoring its own sins, thinking itself good.  Love is mercy, as it shows us our commonality with our fellow humanity as a weak and sinful creature.  We do not need to hate and reject the world, and despise and subdue His creation.  Creation is a gift from God, to which we bring our own good use and order in His name.  And if we are wise, with our reverent humility and wonder.  We can work with His gifts lovingly, and not abuse them from an excess of greed.  It is not the world itself that is a source of evil, but the willfulness of our hearts, hardened by pride.

Only love is creative and productive.  Only love is accepting and uplifting, able to bring all things forward to His plan and make them new.  Love consecrates, while sin desecrates and destroys in its lust for possession and the will to power."

Jesse, Love is the Refuge of the Way, 24 June 2017

"Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength— but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it."

Léon Bloy

And so we had a triple witch option expiration today.

Stocks were slammed.

Wash, rinse repeat.

Gold and silver soared, although they pulled back some into the close.

As we have seen before, the mischief of heavy selling was done in the days before expiration, particularly in the mining sector where stock options are more of a factor.

The VIX rose sharply.

The Dollar chopped sideways.  It is at a relative higher end of its recent trading range.

They have no shame.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - History Will Not Absolve Us

 

"Acts that are wrong in themselves can be expected to have bad effects of a particular kind that is not just accidental.  Their badness follows from what is wrong in the act itself, so that there is a rational, conceptual link between them and their results.  These consequences are a sign of what was wrong with the act in the first place.  Acts of lying or injustice are themselves expressions of disrespect and untrustworthiness, so they unavoidably call for more of the same.  Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started."

Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By, 2003

“The world says: 'You have needs — satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.' This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.

Such damage is justified by its corporate perpetrators and their political abettors in the name of the 'free market' and 'free enterprise,' but this is a freedom that makes greed the dominant economic virtue, and it destroys the freedom of other people along with their communities and livelihoods.  We need to confront honestly the issue of scale.  Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary.  There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. We have allowed them to be used against us, not just by public submission and regulatory malfeasance, but also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferances impossible to justify."

Wendell Berry, Compromise, Hell!, September 30, 2004


The ECB hiked its key interest rate by 25 bp to 4% this morning.

Retail sales and PPI came in stronger than expected, boosting the US Dollar.

But nonetheless stocks rallied, on the familiar refrain of 'soft landings.'

The spokesmodels were gibbering the usual bullish songs of selective dissonance.

Did I mention that there is a quad witch option expiration tomorrow?

Wash, rinse, repeat.

This November we will be remembering the 60^th anniversary of the first of the assassinations that set the stage for the decline of the American Republic.

The Latest Declassified Evidence on the Assassination of JFK

How easily we close our unfeeling eyes and forget, drifting senselessly with the tides.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Phantoms and Shadows

 

"For now we see through a glass, darkly— but then face to face.  Now I know in part, but then shall I know, even as also I am known."

1 Corinthians 13:12

"The one desire which should move us should be, first of all, that of seeing Him face to face, who is now hid from us; and next of enjoying eternal and direct communion, in and through Him, with our friends around us, whom at present we know only through precarious and partial channels, which give us little insight into their hearts.

These are suitable feelings towards this attractive but deceitful world.  To those who live by faith, every thing they see speaks of that future world; the very glories of nature, the sun, moon, and stars, and the richness and the beauty of the earth, witnessing and teaching the invisible things of God."

John Henry Newman, The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life, 23 Oct 1836

"The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.  The devil is no fool.  He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell.  He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin.  And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows."

Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

"In the famous simile of the cave Plato compares men to prisoners in a cave who are bound and can look in only one direction. They have a fire behind them and see on a wall the shadows of themselves and of objects behind them. Since they see nothing but the shadows, they regard those shadows as real and are not aware of the objects. Finally one of the prisoners escapes and comes from the cave into the light of the sun.

For the first time he sees real things and realises that he had been deceived hitherto by the shadows. For the first time he knows the truth and thinks only with sorrow of his long life in the darkness. The real philosopher is the prisoner who has escaped from the cave into the light of truth, he is the one who possesses real knowledge. This immediate connection with truth or, we may in the Christian sense say, with God is the new reality."

Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy

Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.   
Out of the images and the shadows into the truth.

John Henry Newman, Epitaph, 1890

There will be a quarterly quad witch option expiration this Friday.

Stocks rallied.

VIX fell.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

Gold and silver were hit.

Just another day in the phantoms and shadows of the fallen republic.

Have a pleasant evening.