Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Willful Blindness

 

“Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged against provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”

James Madison, Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 1798

“In truth, however, nothing is inevitable and very little is new.  Many of our most vaunted innovations are simply methods – electronic or otherwise – of pulling off some age-old profit-maximizing maneuver by new and unregulated means.”

Thomas Frank, Listen Liberal

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

"Our country is in a moment of crisis decades in the making, a moment in which America’s middle class has been hollowed out, working people have been betrayed, and democracy itself is under threat.  While it is easy to blame President Trump for our problems, the truth is that our challenges began long before him.  And without serious reforms, they are just as likely to outlast him."

Elizabeth Warren, A Foreign Policy that Works for All Americans ,, American University, November 30, 2018

“The combination of power, optimism and abstract thinking makes powerful people more certain.  The more cut-off they are from others, the more confident they are that they are right.”

Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness, 2012

Stocks wanted to bounce today, and they managed to pull it off, although finishing well off the highs.

VIX fell.

The Dollar rose sharply.

Gold and silver opened lower and pretty much finished up there unchanged for the day.

Alphabet reported after the bell, and the stock was sold.

Microsoft beat warnings and the stock was higher.

Meta, the vanity project formerly known as Facebook, reports tomorrow.

A shockingly large amount of the stock gains in the SP500 are attributable to just a handful of stocks.

Exogenous issues continue to weigh heavily, despite the assurance of the spokesmodels and strategists to just sit tight in equities or buy more. 

Apparently there has been an "unprecedented departure" of the Chinese banks from the LBMA Gold Price auctions.  

You probably have not heard about it.  You can read about it here.

 And in late breaking news after the bell, Trump's former chief-of-staff has accepted immunity from the Department of Justice, and presumably is going to be providing evidence for them.  

This is in addition to the earlier news that another one of Trump's attorneys Jenna Ellis pled guilty to a deal in the state of Georgia elections case.

If the GOP movers and shakers starts publicly distancing on Trump's candidacy you know he is done.   

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Blinding Power of Hate and Fear

 

“Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.  For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man?  But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself.

However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself.  There had never been the slightest difficulty about it.  In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man.  Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery.  We ought to hate them.  Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid.   But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.

The real test is this.  Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper.  Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.  Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?

If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.  You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker.  If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black.

Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952

"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

"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


Stocks had another wide ranging day, with the broader markets lower, which is unusual for a Monday of late. 

The NDX 100 finished higher, thanks to the Bloviating 7 of big tech.

Surprisingly the VIX was lower.

The Dollar declined.

Gold and silver declined.

Like the spokesmodels and talking heads one could spend quite a bit of time looking for triggers in today's wildly swinging action.    

Some fairly inconsequential remarks by Ackman, Gross, and Powell during the day would seemingly be suspects for the 'big moves.'

But at the end of the day it seems fairly obvious that investors are not in there moving things.

This is a market completely overshadowed by the smoldering powder keg in the Mideast, as well as a few other places where the big powers are shoving and pushing, like the Ukraine, the China Sea, etc.

Troubled times of exogenous risk make for volatile markets.

Traders may spot certain groups of bulls and bears leaning too heavily in some direction, and seek to foment a powerful technical move in the short run to take some scalps.

In a fundamentally broken market these short term technical trades can easily dominate. 

It is not capital allocation in the traditional sense.  It is all a game.  And it has been becoming moreso and for longer terms, year after year.   

This is the harvest of the moral hazard and the steadily PR campaign against the rule of law.

Nevertheless, the risks of a big even-driven move are unusually high.

Be ready for a dramatic move when it comes, but try not to feed the sharks by taking obvious long shot positions early on.  

Remember that in the aggregate they can read the hands you are playing, and have stacked the deck as well.   Yes it's a simple scam and a lot of informed people know it, and go along to get along.

It's what they do.  Blind themselves. 

Have a pleasant evening.

Why It Matters

 

"What is unrecognized about JFK's presidency, which then makes his assas­sination a false mystery, is that he was locked in a struggle with his national security state. That state had higher values than obedience to the orders of a president who wanted peace.

It’s unbelievable—or we’re supposed to think it is—that a president was murdered by our own government agencies because he was seeking a more stable peace than relying on nuclear weapons. It’s unspeakable. For the sake of a nation that must always be preparing for war, that story must not be told. If it were, we might learn that peace is possible without making war.

When we become more deeply human, as Merton understood the process, the wellspring of our compassion moves us to confront the Unspeakable. There is nothing so threatening to systemic evil as those willing to stand against it regardless of the consequences."

James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

"And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.  We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.  And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history."

Martin Luther King, Beyond Vietnam - A Time to Break the Silence, Riverside Church, New York City, 4 April 1967

Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee on 4 April 1968, exactly one year to the day after his sermon, Beyond Vietnam - A Time To Break the Silence.  It was the silencing of a voice, and a message to the rest.

"Ultimately you must do right because it's right to do right. And you've got to say 'But if not.'  You must love ultimately because it's lovely to love. You must be just because it's right to be just. You must be honest because it's right to be honest.  Wherever you are going this morning, my friends, show the world that you're going with truth. You are going with justice, you are going with goodness, and you will have an eternal companionship. And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you, but you'll go on anyhow.

But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow, before the gods of evil."

Martin Luther King, But If Not, Ebenezer Baptist Church, 5 November 1967

"Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation. Thousands of unknown men and women in Europe resisted the occupation of the Nazis and many died, but all added to the ultimate strength and freedom of their countries.  It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that the belief that human history is thus shaped.

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

Robert Kennedy, Day of Affirmation, Cape Town, South Africa, 6 June 1966

“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any practical result whatsoever, you've beaten them.”

George Orwell, 1984

"Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element: the struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist.  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; 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.

Everywhere, and at times of greatest trials, men have appeared, prophets and saints who cherished their freedom, who preached the One God, and who with His help brought the people to a reversal of their downward course. Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenseless against the principle of evil.  He is a like rudderless ship, at the mercy of the storm, an infant without his mother, a cloud dissolving into thin air."

The White Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich, 1942

"The real conflict is the inner conflict.  Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love.  And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”

Maximilian Kolbe, Auschwitz, 1941

"In the end, the only real tragedy is not to have been a saint."

Léon Bloy, La Femme pauvre

Everyone makes choices, many times, over and over.  And very often those choices reflect, in the end, what they love.

Sometimes it is their family, sometimes their friends.  Sometimes their country, and sometimes some ideal or ideology.  Sometimes it is a principle of conscience.   

And sometimes at the center of it all is God, of life and light, of all that is mercy and goodness, of all that endures.

But all too often people serve themselves, and thereby the world, and make themselves into beasts to escape the burning pain of their unquenchable emptiness.

Why would anyone choose to bear witness to the truth, in the marketplace, in the very heart of Rome, or the Reich, or some new Babylon?

What we love the most, we serve.  Or if we do not love, we become what we hate.

"But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow, before the gods of evil."