Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - No Capitulation Yet

“The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few people as possible escape the common misfortune. The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another.

In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost. The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains. The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall. Even the man who waited for volume of trading to return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next 24 months. The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon. The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable.”

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929

Stocks went back down to test the lows.

Market manipulation just doesn't stick like it used to.

Gold and silver moved higher as the Dollar weakened.

Goldman continued to take contracts for gold on the Comex.

Next week is going to let us know if Santa is coming to town.

Have a pleasant weekend.

What Do China and Goldman Sachs Have in Common?

Gold is not only flowing from West to East.

It is also flowing into the house account at Goldman Sachs.  Or at least the paper claims for it in New York.

Below is the monthly report showing the large amounts of physical gold which have been steadily flowing through the Shanghai markets into strong hands in China.

Few commentators are talking about this.

What is less familiar, and what I have not read about much, is the very large amount of gold that Goldman Sachs has been taking delivery on the Comex this month.

Attached are a few of the clearing reports below.

Notice that the big takers are the house account at Goldman, and some presumably large customer at JPM.

What's up with that?

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Mr. Trump's Wild Ride - Santa Takes One for the Team

"Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!’ he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d."

Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade



“I think the Fed right now is a much bigger problem than China. I think it’s -- I think it’s incorrect what they’re doing.  I don’t like what they’re doing.  I don’t like the $50 billion.  I don’t like what they’re doing in terms of interest rates.

And they’re not being accommodative at all.  And I’m doing trade deals, and they’re great trade deals, but the Fed is not helping.”

Donald Trump

This would be funny if we were not stuck in the back seat of this crazy train.

Never in the field of financial endeavor have so many, been so roundly abused, by so few.

The Exchange Stabilization Fund stuffed Santa into a cannon this afternoon, and shot him into a hole in the popular narrative, plugging up the selling in stocks.

The turnaround was breathtaking, as the FANGS, minus AAPL, helped to lead the turnaround in US stocks that threatened to spoil the Christmas bonuses on Wall Street.

The buying panic was aided by Trump, who said "I didn't know" about the request for detention and extradition of the CFO of China tech giant, Huawei.

I suspect he will be saying "I didn't know" quite a bit for the rest of his term. It's the CEO thing to do.

Non-Farm Payrolls tomorrow.

Have a pleasant evening.

Bernie Sanders: Concentrated Wealth Is Concentrated Power

"I will never forget, Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, came to Congress a few years ago. And this is after the taxpayers of this country bailed them out because of their greed and their illegal behavior.  This is chutzpah.  These guys, after being bailed out by the middle class and working families of this country, after causing incalculable harm, which–the Wall Street crash cost us millions of jobs, people lost their homes, they lost their life savings.

These guys, after getting bailed out, they come to Congress.  They say, you know, what we think Congress should do is you gotta cut Social Security, and Medicare, and Medicaid.  And by the way, lower corporate tax rates and give more tax breaks to the wealthy. 

That’s power. That’s chutzpah.  We have it all, we can do whatever we want to do.  And I think the power of Wall Street—  you’ve got a half a dozen banks that own over 50 percent, equivalent to 50 percent of the assets in our GDP. 

And we have got to stand up to them."

Bernie Sanders

Financial reform is necessary and essential, but of little interest to the established elite.

And so it receives little attention and even less meaningful discussion.

They will discuss any other distracting issue, event, meaningless squabble and gossip, first.  They will play the fear card, and identity politics, but won't touch the flow of money that helps to make a few and their enablers, unbelievably rich.

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


The source and a transcript for this interview are here.