Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Jobs Miss, Rate Cuts Expected to Rescue Financial Assets, Recovery Falters

"Peter's feelings were hurt because Jesus asked him for a third time, ‘Do you love me?’ And Peter said, ‘Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said, ‘Feed my sheep.'

'Verily, verily, I say to you, when you were young, you dress yourself, and walked where you liked. But when you are old, you will stretch out your your hands, and another will dress you, and will take you where you would not like to go.'

Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him at last, ‘Follow me!’

John 21:17-19


"Our Lord has no body now but yours,
no hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which He looks
with compassion on this world,
yours are the feet with which He walks to do good.
Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world."

Teresa of Avila

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Lies Owe a Debt to the Truth - Non-Farm Payrolls Tomorrow

"There was time when average Americans could be counted upon to know correctly whether the country was going up or down, because in those days when America prospered, the American people prospered as well. These days things are different.

Let's look at it in a statistical sense. If you look at it from the middle of the 1930's (the Depression) up until the year 1980, the lower 90 percent of the population of this country, what you might call the American people, that group took home 70 percent of the growth in the country's income. If you look at the same numbers from 1997 up until now, from the height of the great Dot Com bubble up to the present, you will find that this same group, the American people, pocketed none of this country's income growth at all.

Our share of these great good times was zero, folks. The upper ten percent of the population, by which we mean our country's financiers and managers and professionals, consumed the entire thing. To be a young person in America these days is to understand instinctively the downward slope that so many of us are on."

Thomas Frank, Kansas City Missouri, 6 April 2017


"When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error."

John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the older male anchors on financial TV today noted, in a very condescending tone, that for some reason Elizabeth Warren 'has an attitude' when it comes to corporations.

I hope she and some of her like minded fellows get their opportunity to extend the hand of equal justice to these smug serial felons, pampered polecats, and corporatist clowns.   It has been a long time coming.

Stocks pushed higher today into the afternoon and the close.

Gold and silver backed off some of their earlier gains, again.

The other day 'someone' dumped 15,000 contracts on the paper gold market to keep the price from breaking out above 1350, and pushed it back down below 1340. And they seem determined to keep it there.

Tomorrow we will get the Non-Farm Payrolls Report for May. The number has implications, not so much for the real economy, but rather for the policy of the Fed in raising or lowering rates, and continuing to feed hot money into the financial assets bubbles, or not.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Saving Private Equity

"In particular, over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance."

Hyman Minsky, The Financial Instability Hypothesis


"It is always the soul that dies first, even if it's departure goes unnoticed. And it always carries the body along with it. Man is nourished by the invisible, man is nourished by that which is beyond the personal. He dies from preferring the opposite."

Jacques Lusseyran, Poetry at Buchenwald


"Thus we see how the neoliberal utopia tends to embody itself in the reality of a kind of infernal machine, whose necessity imposes itself even upon the rulers. Like the Marxism of an earlier time, with which, in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia evokes powerful belief - the free trade faith - not only among those who live off it, such as financiers, the owners and managers of large corporations, etc., but also among those, such as high-level government officials and politicians, who derive their justification for existing from it.

For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks.

And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses."

Pierre Bourdieu, L’essence du néolibéralisme

I am out of pocket this afternoon.

Here are the charts and other information for today.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Risk On! - Powell Pumps Equities With Rate Cuts Talk

"The mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control."

Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address


"Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world."

Alexander Pope


"And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
And call Alice, when she was just small.

When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she'll know
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the white knight is talking backwards
And the red queen's off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head, feed your head."

Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit

It's all just a game when you make it up, isn't it?

Stocks were on a tear higher today on the double barreled talk about a quick and favorable resolution to the Mexican tariffs question and suggestions of Fed rate cuts this year.

If the economy is so vibrant, so expansive, and the recovery is so strong, why would it be necessary for the Fed to cut rates?

Ah but that is just earthbound logic, and we have decided to create and live by our own logick and magick, and a panopoly of other profane mysteries now.  

The dollar was lower, but despite the risk on frenzy both gold and silver managed to finish higher.

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

Have a pleasant evening.