SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Bounce Off Support

Stocks caught a bounce off 'hopes' that there will be a resolution, or at least a significant reduction, in Ukraine driven geopolitical tensions.

Next week may tell the tale of this, based on a look at the charts.

Have a pleasant evening.

Greatness In a Dark Time

Some say that most of the time everyone wants to be great, because they have a natural desire for acceptance, recognition, and praise. Perhaps this is so.

And in a dark and pathological time this means that everyone wants to have power. Power becomes the standard of value, the coin of the realm in a deeply fallen world.  And in such a perverse world the only virtue is greed. 

So they who serve the world want to be tough guys, unafraid, quick and intemperate on the attack, harsh.  Yes that is the mark of power, of one of the formidable wielders of weapons. As if there can be any just weapon that we may take up on our own, that is not given to us by the Lord for His purpose.

If by some chance that person may also wish to serve God, then they may desire that they could take up the sword like an avenging angel, and smite those enemies of God, who are all too often those who merely annoy and offend them. This is because their idea of what it is to be a human being has been subtly poisoned by the times; in their brokenness they exalt themselves.

And all too often that feeling of offense simply becomes a blind hatred of 'the other.' The other may merely be the different, and interfering 'do-gooders' who try to help them, and finally all of the weak.  The will to power despises weakness.  Then they are no longer of God, but have given themselves over to the darkness.  And they fully become its creatures.  Those who take up the sword for their own purposes in God's name will die by it in a death without redemption.

This is a subtle but very effective snare, a sin wholly against the Spirit. We embrace the world and its values not in our love of it, but in our hatred of it as we see it. And so we grasp that same sword of power wielded by the forces of darkness in high places. And we use it as we will with intoxication, and are lost.

 

This is not service, or greatness, not as counted in God's economy. This is a willfulness and a destruction of the self that comes from sin, but that in its own insidious way may encompass many of the trappings of a religion: the ornaments of ritual, and symbols, and all the showiness, the noise and pomp of human office-- but always and remarkably devoid of God's love. 

 

We may love the services and outward manifestations as we prefer them, the old and familiar or the hip and modern or whatever our personal preference may be, but come to hate the very Church that gives them life and meaning.  We destroy our beloved because we will to possess, to compel, not to love.

 

Worldly power is a perversion of heavenly power in that it expresses itself in the ability not to create and fulfill life, but to diminish and destroy it. And it exults in what it thinks is its power over life, which is death. How much money, how much power is enough? The will to power is a pathological sickness, that becomes all consuming and insatiable.  And thereby in the excesses it anoints its angels of death.

Be on your guard always, and do not allow yourselves to be among those simple ones who will be taken in during the dark times, as the love of many grows cold. Stand firmly, but humbly, to the end. And you will have your greatness.

"Do you desire to be great? make yourselves little. There is a mysterious connexion between real advancement and self-abasement. If you minister to the humble and despised, if you feed the hungry, tend the sick, succour the distressed; if you bear with the froward, submit to insult, endure ingratitude, render good for evil, you are, as by a divine charm, getting power over the world and rising among the creatures. God has established this law. Thus He does His wonderful works.

His instruments are poor and despised; the world hardly knows their names, or not at all. They are busied about what the world thinks petty actions, and no one minds them. They are apparently set on no great works; nothing is seen to come of what they do: they seem to fail. Nay, even as regards religious objects which they themselves profess to desire, there is no natural and visible connexion between their doings and sufferings and these desirable ends; but there is an unseen connexion in the kingdom of God. They rise by falling...

Let this be the settled view of all who would promote Christ's cause upon earth. If we are true to ourselves, nothing can really thwart us. Our warfare is not with carnal weapons, but with heavenly. The world does not understand what our real power is, and where it lies. And until we put ourselves into its hands of our own act, it can do nothing against us. Till we leave off patience, meekness, purity, resignation, and peace, it can do nothing against that Truth which is our birthright, that Cause which is ours, as it has been the cause of all saints before us.

But let all who would labour for God in a dark time beware of any thing which ruffles, excites, and in any way withdraws them from the love of God and Christ, and simple obedience to Him...

Such is the rule of our warfare We advance by yielding; we rise by falling; we conquer by suffering; we persuade by silence; we become rich by bountifulness ; we inherit the earth through meekness; we gain comfort through mourning; we earn glory by penitence and prayer. Heaven and earth shall sooner fall than this rule be reversed; it is the law of Christ's kingdom, and nothing can reverse it but sin."

John Henry Newman

" ...if I can help somebody as I pass along, If I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody he's travelling wrong, then my living will not be in vain."

Martin Luther King

"Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things...

Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people. Lacking any other purpose in life, it would be good enough to live for their sake."

Garrison Keillor

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - And the Times, They Are a Changin'

"In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

Eric Hoffer

There was intraday commentary here.   I was struck by the continuing erosion of gold from Western trusts and funds, in stark contrast to silver.   I like both metals, but gold is the deffest dog.  And from my perspective the reasons are pretty obvious.

We have come to the end of the informal Bretton Woods II agreement, which was to stay with the US dollar as the primary basis for world trade, an arrangement that had been in place since the end of WW II.  The US dollar based on a relationship to gold became the petrodollar when Nixon unilaterally closed the gold window in 1971. 

The banks agreed to continue to use it as the de facto standard for international currency valuation  The 'management' of gold as just another currency was carried out through leasing arrangements and targeted sales.  By 2004 at the latest, a number of the world's central banks broke from this arrangement, which started quickly falling apart. By 2006 the central banks turned from net sellers of gold to net buyers. 

The agreement finally succumbed to the Greenspan Fed, and the band of Merry Pranksters in the government, who finally played one too many one-sided games with the other sovereign nations.  The credibility of the US hit a virtual brick wall in the aftermath of the obtuse behaviour that followed the world's outpouring of favourable sentiment for the US after 9/11. 

Bush laid the egg, and Obama hatched it, to borrow a historical metaphor about another Reformation that came after a long period of abuses and a rising tide of nationalism after the long fall of an Empire.

We know who these central banks are, and we have a good idea of why they are doing it, if we are still a little rough on the details, which is understandable given the strategic nature of their actions.

There are still a range of outcomes, obviously, even if all these assumptions and estimations we are making are correct.  One outcome, that is very much desired by many in power, is to have a one world financial and currency system based on the dollar as it is defined and managed by a small elite group of bankers.  That deal has been on the table for so long that it might have died of old age.

The greedy shenanigans of Wall Street, and the slavish acquiescence of their friends at the Fed and in the government, have thrown a serious monkey wrench into those longer term aspirations. Propaganda may serves to persuade and relieve your own people in their confusion and anxiety, and make them more compliant in believing just about anything, but it doesn't always fool those who are looking in from the outside, and see things more objectively.

This seems to me to be one of those periods of very significant evolutionary change, that happen infrequently enough so that they do not seem to have much of a place in most people's models and mindsets.  And of course since they threaten the status quo, many of our modern King Canutes are standing on the shore, command the tide to stand fast, and exclaiming, "It ain't happening man, it ain't happening.'  Wait until the bloodbath in high yield garbage assets starts. 

I have taken the liberty of using a good general revolutionary change chart, and include it below.

Have a pleasant evening.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Slippage and Quippage

Stocks started out strong this morning on 'better than expected' short term macroeconomic results, but gave up ground on the news that the problems in the Ukraine remain elevated.

This serves to highlight the 'puffiness' that underlies the current pricing levels of both equities and bonds. It is like stocks and bonds are a paper construction, and the filling that gives it support is ping pong balls. If the right kind of spark hits these markets, the result will be impressive, but not pretty if you are too close.

It is hard to predict that sort of thing, so I do not try. The standard ploy is to predict it every so often, allowing the old predictions to die of old age, but to take one that happens to be right and carve it in marble and frame it. If someone had a really great system, you would be unlikely to hear about it until it stopped working. And most of the systems I have explored are not all that reliable, except the ones based on unfair advantage and what are essentially control frauds.

There are some times when the insanity of valuations do get painfully obvious, but if you see it one must generally end up fighting the cognitive dissonance of being a lone voice, fighting the animal spirits, or more plainly madness, of the mob, whipped to a frenzy by the con men and their establishment shills. I think we can remember a certain central banker who flat out stated that a bubble in housing was not possible, even as he inflated a massive bubble that shook the economy of the world to its foundations.

So what are we to do. Watch, listen, and learn. And recognize that things are not always what they may seem. One thing you might have noticed is that the louder that someone gets, the less that they generally know.

With the Fed at their back and the dollar machine holding up, there is no telling how long this 'recovery' and rally in stocks and bonds can continue. I do happen to think that at this point the equity and bond markets are an accident waiting to happen. The trick is not in predicting what and when, but rather accepting that we will be in the position of having incomplete information, and figuring out how to play it from there.

Have a pleasant evening.