Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Gold & Silver Drop, Stocks Pop on Resolution of Phony Mexican Tariff Crisis

"Cult leaders [demagogues] arise from decayed communities and societies in which people have been shorn of political, social and economic power.  The disempowered, infantilized by a world they cannot control, gravitate to cult leaders who appear omnipotent and promise a return to a mythical golden age.

The cult leaders vow to crush the forces, embodied in demonized groups and individuals, that are blamed for their misery.  The more outrageous the cult leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity.

Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal.  Cult leaders demand a God-like power.  Those who follow them grant them this power in the hope that the cult leaders will save them."

Chris Hedges, Cult of Trump


"Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation."

Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion


"We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease.  We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of disaster.    In this we Americans were discovering no wholly new truth; we were writing a new chapter in our book of self-government.

Franklin Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address


"The problem of the last three decades is not the 'vicissitudes of the marketplace,' but rather deliberate actions by the [corporatist] government to redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent."

Dean Baker

The  the public at large, and their leaders and the professional classes, have lost their sense of common purpose and mutual dependency.   And sooner or later that is going to bring some serious consequences to bear.

Stocks popped on the phony trade tariff conflict with Mexico being created and then resolved by Trumpolini.

Alas, the sugar high of such antics did not last, and stocks gave up much of their gains from the open, but managed to hang on to the phony pop.

Gold and silver were hit hard, which was not entirely unexpected for the day after a Non-Farm Payrolls report and the recent run up to some very stiff resistance at $1340.

The Dollar was slightly higher against the DX index of currencies.

Tomorrow we will be getting the PPI inflation number, and CPI the day after. This will all be input to the FOMC meeting next week.

Have a pleasant evening.

Physical Holdings of Gold and Silver and Commitments of Traders - A Word From Joe the Angry Hawaiian

This just in from the Big Island. The natives seem restless.

Joe the Angry Hawaiian

"Imagine if you will, in a few short years, that information on current events will only be available from a narrow band of sources sanctioned by the government/corporate media. And this Orwellian future will be embraced by the majority of people because it provides security, both ideological and emotional.

Any dissension, criticism, whistle-blowing, anti-exceptionalism coming from critical voices will be labeled extremist.   And this has been embraced by the two monopoly political parties.

I just received a questionnaire from the Democrats posing the question, "What's the most important issue in the upcoming election?"

The very first multiple choice answer to pick from was - "Russian aggression and increasing global influence"   Russia, a country with a small population and an economy that is a fraction of the US or Europe is our dire threat?  Let's just ignore the expansion of NATO onto Russia's borders, or that the US State Dept. spent 5 billion dollar to change the politics of Ukraine.

Second most important issue asked on the questionnaire, "Protecting America from foreign cyber attacks"   Let's ignore the fact that the NSA is spying on all Internet traffic, that the CIA has misinformation programs like, "Operation Mockingbird" and many other covert activities to influence perceptions domestically.

The third Democratic Party priority question is "China's increasing economic and military strength"   China's state controlled mercantile success lies directly on the twin shoulders of the US Government and it's multi-national corporations. The US granted China, Most Favored Nation status in 1979, which gave it exposure to US markets with low tariffs. Almost immediately, corporations went to China and invested in factories because of the cheap Chinese labor while abandoning the US worker. And in May 2000 Bill Clinton backed a bipartisan effort to grant China permanent normal trade relations, effectively backing its bid to join the WTO.

We live in a country whereby the US Government has made it possible for corporations to pay little or no taxes, to be deregulated from government laws designed to protect the public, and allow corporate crimes to go unpunished while maintaining vast influence over the political system through campaign contributions and corporate ownership of the mass media.

This US Government/corporate partnership smells a lot like Fascism.  Instead of Mussolini we have Trumpolini.  And so our time's brand of corporatism has descended over the eroding infrastructure of America."

Joe the Angry Hawaiian

Rodd the Happy Hawaiian owns Silver

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.