Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Spiegel im Spiegel

“Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter.  On judgment day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.’  But I will reply, ‘I never knew you.  Be gone from me, you who flout His laws.’"

Mark 7:21-23

Stocks were wobbly today, taking some time to digest their recent gains, which have been substantial.

I do not think that we have made our blow top yet, but I have an open mind given our lofty valuations.

Gold and silver continued to show some strength, as the Dollar largely moved sideways.

It will be interesting to see how our the status quo of our financial system will maintain itself in the collapse of this next asset bubble fomented by soft corruption and the abuse of the monetary power.


Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Earnings in the Wings

Stocks were in a slow 'melt-up' for most of the day after a lower opening and morning.

The Dow Industrials were a bit of an outlier closing lower, thanks to Boeing and GE.

Gold and silver finished up thanks to a weakened Dollar.

Wall Street will be looking at the economic data for inflation this week.

Earnings season starts on Friday with JPM and Wells Fargo.

We will see if the earnings back up the market euphoria that we have seen since the Fed did their turnabout on rates.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Pushing Towards a New High

"Lying, deceiving, and manipulation are natural talents for psychopaths. When caught in a lie or challenged with the truth, they are seldom perplexed or embarrassed— they simply change their stories or attempt to rework the facts so that they appear to be consistent with the lie. The results are a series of contradictory statements and a thoroughly confused listener.

Psychopaths have a grandiose self-structure which demands a scornful and detached devaluation of others, in order to ward off their envy toward the good perceived in other people.

Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience

Stocks closed within 'spitting distance' of a new high today.

At least that is what the spokesmodels said.

Let's see if they can make it, and stick a close for a new high.

And how long after that it takes to set up and initiate a fourth 'blow off top.'

Gold and silver were mostly unchanged today along with the Dollar.

The metals made it through another Non-Farm Payrolls report reasonably well.

I will not be surprised at all to see the gold bulls take a sharp gut check at least once next week.

But gold has been holding with remarkable tenactiy to a trend line, on the closes at least.

Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Mark Blyth On Brexit, the Euro, Austerity, and the Rise of the Technocrats and Oligarchs

"Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.”

Jean Monnet, Memoirs


"I’m very pro-European, but I’m against the euro, so if I still lived in the UK I would have an interesting choice.  Now if you look at Larry Elliott in The Guardian, he thinks he should vote for exit because this might be the existential crisis that blows up the euro. Now why would you want to blow up the Euro, because 'that would be terrible etc. et cetera'.  Because the long-term effect of the euro is going to be to drive Western European wages down to Eastern European levels in global competition for export share with the Chinese.

That’s one interpretation as to where this all goes.  And that’s going to be fine for the Eastern Europeans coming up.  It’s going to be great for very efficient exporters in the North.  It’s going to be a disaster for France and parts of Italy, if not all, and certainly for Greece.

Now if you have a system in which one side runs a surplus and the other side cannot run a deficit because of the rules, the only thing the other side can do is permanently contract their economies to allow someone else to make money selling BMWs.  I don’t see this ending well so perhaps it’s better to nip it in the bud when you’ve got the chance."

Mark Blyth

While in some ways this analysis by Mark Blyth (and similarly by Thomas Frank) can be construed as an over-simplification.  But on the other hand it represents an insight into a fundamental reality that is driving much of what we are witnessing today, a reality that seems inexplicable to the political class of both left and right.

The liberals blame the irresistible imperatives of globalization and technology, and the conservatives blame immigration and everyone who isn't them or completely like them in outlook and customs.

Each has their own extreme prescriptions for the problems, many of which they have a part in causing, from free money gifted within the status quo structure,  to debt serfdom for most except the few.

And both are tragically misplaced in their judgements, because they are caught in a credibility trap of their respective ideologies that have displaced fundamental morality, fairness, and goodness.

It is hard to tell which side is more reluctant to see the systemic forces which are at play, and where they are leading. Both are willfully blind at their core, taking refuge in contempt for others (cf. Hillary and Romney) and elaborately conceived condescension towards any form of dissent, even the mildest.

At the best of times the powerful will not listen, and at times like these most have joined them on either side to escape the pain of thinking.   The decline and fall of a privileged class that is out of touch with the people, and the extremes committed by their enablers, are so common as to be a cliché of history.

So why bother even bringing it up at all?   For the same reasons perhaps that groups like the White Rose and the early church wrote their pamphlets, in their respective times of general madness— to keep a light burning in the dark, for those who follow.

Hopefully our own situation will resolve well before we reach such an extreme disassociation of reason and power and justice.

"Caesar was swimming in blood. Rome and the whole pagan world was mad.   But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins.

When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one—  happiness and love."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis: In the Time of Nero