Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Capping and Coiling

The metals are capping are coiling under some fairly stubborn price resistance.

Let's see how they do if stocks take a short term drop.

Otherwise this looks like a delaying action, a cosmetic appliqué.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Technical Trade

Priceline getting hammered after hours for its miss.

Disney is slightly down after hours

This is all light volume technical trade. I think the wiseguys are pumping up a dull market to cheapen the costs of downside insurance (puts) in order to set up the next dump to the lower end of the trend channel.

But, one can never really tell which way the fraud is blowing.

Supposedly stocks rallied today because of the BLS' JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) which came out flat. Consumer Credit came in quite a bit light.

As I said, this was all technical, and one can apply whatever rationale they prefer.

BBC: Banking With Hitler

It is little known that some American and British banks and businessmen continued to do business with the Third Reich, even benefiting from slave labor and the victims of the Holocaust, while the war raged.

If you do not believe that this same mentality, and these same kind of people doing the same things, are at work today, then you may be quite the optimist, or perhaps naive.

Profit has no loyalty and greed has no conscience. And where there is no penalty, few of the nationless oligarchy will be discouraged from participating.

NY Times
Regulator Says British Bank Helped Iran Hide Deals
By JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG
August 6, 2012

Using its New York-based operations, a major British bank schemed with the Iranian government for nearly a decade to launder $250 billion, leaving the United States financial system vulnerable to terrorists and corrupt regimes, New York’s top banking regulator charged on Monday.

The New York State Department of Financial Services accused Standard Chartered, which the agency called a “rogue institution,” of masking more than 60,000 transactions for Iranian banks and corporations, motivated by the millions of dollars it reaped in fees.

Senior management at the 150-year-old bank used the New York branch “as a front for prohibited dealings with Iran — dealings that indisputably helped sustain a global threat to peace and stability,” according to a regulatory order sent to the bank. The order requires the bank to explain the apparent violations of law in a hearing later this month and justify why its license to operate in New York shouldn’t be revoked...

Read the rest here.

IMPACT 2012 in NYC: Chris Hedges and Robert Johnson

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained growth and recovery.