Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - A Special Request From Me To You

"The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of (paper) gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present.

And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the Street believes that the world will always be the same, and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever."

Federico Garcia Lorca

Gold was hit by an opening bear raid that was fairly obvious, and then was hit again in the afternoon, together with a wash and rinse in equities, based on the Fed minutes from a month ago which reopened the repeated canard of Fed tightening.

There was negligible activity in or out of the Comex bullion warehouses today, typical for non-active month of November.

What can you say about a culture when the word of the year was selfie. And the runner up was twerking.   And there was an excess selfie twerking by the spokesmodels of Wall Street, and the bloviating windbags of Big Money, on the boob tube today. 

Gold is flowing from West to East.

This video below was made by the family of Joan, who accompanied her on a very special 'Make-a-Wish' trip to Rome. Joanie is the angelic looking young lady in the hat. She is being treated at St. Jude Research Hospital for Children for osteosarcoma.

As you know, my way is to rarely ask for anything, and certainly not money.  Your fellowship and occasional thoughts are more than enough. When I write, I write for both you and me. And when we pray, we pray for both another and ourselves. Love is never an exclusive thing, it does not diminish us.  And if we do things with love, they can never be for nothing.

Today I am asking that if I have ever done you any service, any good at all, have helped you to see anything in yourself or in the world that has touched your heart, that you remember Joanie and her family in your prayers, as I will remember you in mine.  

And perhaps you can forward this request to those who are like minded, and would be inclined remember a child and her family in their thoughts and prayers, especially during the coming holiday season. 

In prayer we find not only the grace to care for another who is in God's hands, but to also realize, through their own trials which we willingly share, that we also are in God's hands too. It is better to discover this now, while we are in some better position to act upon it.

I know, like so many others who have seen and who have said so to me, that our society, which is based on greed and the self, is becoming coarse.  And the hearts of many have grown cold, and harsh.  It will get worse before it gets better.   But as Dostoevsky once said, 'If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.'

Have a pleasant evening.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Fed Minutes Triggered Wash and Rinse

The market was clicking along, buoyed by weak economic news, until the Fed minutes from a month ago came out, and traders hit the markets on QE taper thoughts, despite what Chairman Ben said yesterday.

I think the corruption of some members of the Fed is unfortunate but inevitable, and sometimes barely hidden by the fig leaf of plausible deniability and the 'scientific objectivity' of economics.

The only possible remedy is a surplus of transparency, and not more secrecy and the centralization of power in the hands of a privileged few.  And where offenses are found, the correction must be swift, and forceful in its example. 

As they used to say, Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.

Have a pleasant evening.

Trickle Down Recovery: Monetary Expansion, Excess Bank Reserves, and Leftovers For Main Street

“Trickle-down theory - the less than elegant metaphor that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”

John Kenneth Galbraith


"There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below."

William Jennings Bryant


"Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country.

When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the Bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin.

Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out!

Andrew Jackson

It is not quite as straightforward as this, but the two charts below help to illustrate a point that the Fed, and the government, are pursuing a 'top down' approach to a recovery from the banking crisis as a matter of policy.

And one of the most consequential flaws in this policy error is that the financial system, and a fiscal policy that largely favors the one percent, are largely unreformed. Big money has thoroughly corrupted the political process.

I cannot tell from the Fed's descriptions whether these excess reserves include any funds which they may have committed to foreign owned banks that are not included within the Fed's definition of their own 'depository institutions.'

The Fed owns this policy error through its own actions, its complacent posture as regulator, and as a thought leader and key influencer for government economic policy. The Fed has not been neutral, and is certainly not blameless. It has been a critical enabler for a financial system that turned predatory under Alan Greenspan.

The Fed has been an aggressive advocate for the policy errors and imbalances that have led to both the tech and housing bubbles, widespread abuses and fraud in the financial system, and for the dangerously unbalanced 'recovery' that we have seen since the last bubble which they have created.

The notion that if you just leave the markets alone they will naturally distribute the fruits of our national labour and resources equitably is a corollary of the 'efficient markets theory.' That is to say, it is a fraud based on an outrageous load of hogwash.

And it is strangling the economy. But the political and privileged class could care less, because they are the primary beneficiaries of the system which they have substantially helped to create over the past thirty years. They are doing very well by it, taking everything that they can carry, bleeding the real economy with loans, frauds, bribes, graft, and fees. And they present the bill to their unfortunate victims by financing their schemes with the people's own money.

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

 

JFK's Report To America - Fifty Years Ago