13 March 2024

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Safe Havens and Stores of Value

 

“Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood. For these few gold has been the asset of last resort.”

Antony C. Sutton, historian

"When a government overvalues one type of money and undervalues another, the undervalued money will leave the country or disappear from circulation into hoards, while the overvalued money will flood into circulation."

Gresham's Law

"'We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,' says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis.  'They were totally opposed to it,' Born says.  'That puzzled me.  What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?'"

PBS Frontine, The Warning


"You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability and intelligence of the members of the government. And with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold."

George Bernard Shaw


"Gold has worked down from Alexander's time. When something holds good for two thousand years I do not believe it can be so because of prejudice or mistaken theory."

Bernard M. Baruch

"There can be no other criterion, no other standard than gold. Yes, gold which never changes, which can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality and which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par excellence."

Charles De Gaulle, February 4, 1965

"Gold will be around, gold will be money when the dollar and the euro and the yuan and the ringgit are mere memories."

Richard L. Russell

"Like liberty, gold never stays where it is undervalued."

J. S. Morrill, historian

"Synthetic gold, sourced in pyramids of credit extended to bullion bankers by central banks with little or no claim on physical substance, have provided a more efficient, better-camouflaged form of intervention. The volumes traded are huge, and bear little resemblance to actual flows of physical metal.   Demand for physical gold has exceeded new mine supply for several years running; and while above-ground 400-ounce .995-gold bars located in London, New York, and other financial capitals (in cohabitation with speculative trading activity in paper markets) have steadily dwindled and disappeared into Asian financial centers reformulated as .9999 kilo bars."

Tocqueville Newsletter, 2Q 2015

"Gold is unique among assets, in that it is not issued by any government or central bank, which means that its value is not influenced by political decisions or the solvency of one institution or another."

Salvatore Rossi, Central Bank of Italy, 30 Sept 2013

“Gold is money.  Everything else is credit.”

John Pierpont Morgan, 1912


And this is why the central banks are quietly buying it, in size, and why gold has been steadily flowing from West to East. 

Stocks fell off a bit, as the rinse cycle in the latest wash and rinse kicked in.

Gold rallied, silver rocketed.

The Dollar was the usual chop.

VIX is seriously underrepresenting risks.

PPI tomorrow.

Fed next week.

This is like watching a train wreck in slow motion, memories of the asset bubbles of 1999. 

Have a pleasant evening. 




12 March 2024

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Perception Management - Creatures of the Plutocracy

 

"They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.  They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.  Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power."

Henry Wallace, 9 April 1944

"What is offensive is that they lie, and worship their own lying."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

"We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The US Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K."

Eddie George, Governor Bank of England, cited in Reg Howe v. BIS, JPM et al., September 1999

"Misdeeds, once exposed, have no refuge but in audacity.  And they had accomplices in all those who feared the same fate.”

Tacitus, Annals

"Financial institutions can hold low-quality securities for the period where no reporting is required. Temporarily increasing the supply of Treasuries makes this kind of deception easier. It helps remove market and regulator discipline."

Franklin Allen and Elena Carletti, Role of Liquidity in Financial Crises, September 14, 2008

"Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that make man into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer."

Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 1973

"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. You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the plutocracy.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel


They say that the first victim of war is the truth.  Maybe that's true.  

After all, the US has been at war for the past 30 years or so.   

And there is a bull market in whoppers.

Greed sustained by lies, hate, and fear.  What can go wrong?

The Consumer Price Index came in higher than forecast this morning, but the details of the composition of the number suggest it was 'warm' rather than 'hot.'

So stocks rallied back hard into the close.

Did I mention that there is a stock option expiration on Friday.

Gold and silver got nailed, because it was a risk on rally after all.  

And they were overdue for a correction.

VIX plummeted.

As expected.

And so for today, Goldilocks reigned supreme. 

Have a pleasant evening.




11 March 2024

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Daughters of Pride - 'How Do We Resist'


"The leaders of Judah, and their priests, and the people became ever more unfaithful, imitating all the shameful practices of the world, defiling the temple of the Lord which he himself had consecrated.   The Lord, God of their ancestors, repeatedly sent them word through his messengers because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place.  However, they continued to ridicule the messengers of God, despising his words and scoffing at his prophets, until the wrath of the Lord against his people became so fierce that there was no remedy."

2 Chronicles 36:14-16

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

Job 21:13

"There is a subtle temptation that encourages Christians to be 'practical.'  That is, they try to do God’s work in man’s way.  Getting results becomes the primary focus.  It almost seems that we believe that the end justifies the means.  Don’t be led away by the world’s reasoning. The world tries to convince you that as long as you can accomplish something for the kingdom of God, that’s all that matters.  God’s ways are not like man’s ways.  It is never wise to attempt to do God’s work in man’s way.  It is an age-old temptation that seems to make sense on the surface but often is at variance with the purposes of God."

Henry Blackaby, God's Thinking is not Man's Thinking

"See to it that no one takes you captive you with worldly philosophy and empty deceits, according to the tradition of men, according to the elemental powers of the world, and not according to Christ."

Colossians 2:8

"Those among the rich who are not, in the rigorous sense, damned, can understand poverty, because they are poor themselves, after a fashion; but they cannot understand destitution. Capable of giving alms, perhaps, but incapable of stripping themselves bare, they will be moved, to the sound of beautiful music, at Jesus’s sufferings, but His Cross, the reality of His Cross, will horrify them.  They want it all out of gold, bathed in light, costly and of little weight; pleasant to see, hanging from a woman’s beautiful throat."

Léon Bloy, Exégèse des Lieux Communs

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"There is probably no greater threat to the faithful than that of the sanctifying of success by worldly measures.  Invariably, when a principled belief aligns itself with the state, and the wealthy, and the powerful, it ends up as lost as if it was suffering persecution."

Jesse, Sanctifying Greed, 6 June 2023

"For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."

C. S. Lewis


Pride is the first sin, the very negation of the humility and devotion and sacrifice of the Cross.

Greed and indifference to others, lawlessness and betrayal, are the daughters of Pride, the father of all sin.  Pride and its sins are the chains that imprison Satan and the damned in their hell. 

Stocks were wobbly today, awaiting the CPI data tomorrow.

Why is this particular data so important?

Because financial assets are in a bubble, and the market is in the hands of the Fed, the father of bubbles.

Gold and silver pretty much also marched in place, along with the Dollar.

VIX rose, as did the yields on US debt.

Stock option expiration at the end of this week. 

The unsustainable will not be sustained.   God's wrath grows fierce.  Nemesis awaits.

Have a pleasant evening.