Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Increase in Lawlessness - The Imperial Presidency

“There are two ways to be fooled.  One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

Søren Kierkegaard


"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

Hannah Arendt


"Narcissists are unstable and go through repeated cycles of self-destruction, with other people usually paying the heft of the price.  Narcissists tend to be divisive, vindictive, confrontational, aggressive, hate-filled, raging, incoherent, judgment-impaired, and irrational.

Narcissists are liars, confabulators, and miserable failures, although some of them are geniuses at disguising the fact that they are, in fact, losers."

Sam Vaknin


"And because of the increase in lawlessness, the love of most will grow cold."

Matthew 24:12

Stocks took a bit of a dive today, as the weight of mispriced risk and the illusion of economic recovery continues to weigh on the speculative excesses of the markets grown corrupt and inefficient through lack of proper oversight.

Being based on the human profit motive and the principle of selfishness markets in themselves have  no basis for being a moral principle.  Profit can be obtained through fair means and innovation, but as we have seen can more easily and richly be gained through exploitation and lawlessness.

The campaign to overturn the laws that protect the markets, which served us well for so long, has been determined and well-funded.  And it has worked a great deal of damage on the public and the quality of the financial system.

As usual the stocks regained much of their losses in the quiet afternoon.

Gold and silver moved sideways and the Dollar was marginally higher.

I think the charts are fairly clear. The problem is that most other things are not.

The other day I said: "I am certainly no fan of Joe Biden, who has a long record as a corporatist tool. And certainly not of Trump, who I suspect may wish to be impeached, and be remembered by some as a martyr, and spare himself the humiliation of losing badly in the next election."

And I will certainly stand by that as a possibility.  But like so many others I may be giving Trump far too much credit as a thinker, and cunning strategist.   His strength is his weakness, and he has some distinct flaws that work to his political disadvantage.

Trump is the consummate narcissist, a king among the class of egotists, bullies, and weasels.   He does not make occasional mistakes in judgement like most people.  He is driven into error by recklessness and pathological excess.

Don't expect things to get any better—  they will become progressively worse, until something finally either works, or breaks.  And if it breaks, there will be plenty of collateral damage, and much of it among the innocents as well as true believers.

And I hope that the liberal establishment, who expended a great deal of political capital and energy on their own madness that was RussiaGate, will regret their foolishness when they try to surmount their losses and perform an adequate investigation of this genuine abuse of power.  

In her day Hillary and her machine seemed to be indestructible and unstoppable— and it fell apart like a house of cards.  And when he falters, Trump's 'supporters' are going to descend on him like a pack of jackals.

Trump is not 'good for the markets.'   He is not the state, and as President is not above the law, although he thinks that he is.  Trump is a symptom of a system that has crept well into disorder and imbalance out of a long buildig sense of hubris and greed.

“Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.”

Mary Midgley

He is corrosive and corrupting, and quite possibly the rope of excess with which the predatory capitalists and their cronies are going to hang themselves.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Quelle Coïncidence - Metals Hammered On Comex Option Expiration

“Any idea pushed into the popular mind with considerable force will keep on going until some opposing force—or the slow resistance of friction—stops it at last.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman


“Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now we are witnessing a transformation: a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, that we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz, The Discreet Charm of Nihilism


“Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.   Power is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the latter it crushes, the former it intoxicates. The truth is, no one really possesses it."

Simone Weil

It was looking a bit grim this morning as stocks were set to open up quite a bit lower.

And then Trumpolini threw out a major news distraction in the press discussion following the announcement of a limited trade pact with Japan.

"U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that a deal to end a nearly 15-month trade war with China could happen sooner than people think and that the Chinese were making big agricultural purchases from the United States, including of beef and pork.

“They want to make a deal very badly... It could happen sooner than you think,” Trump told reporters in New York. Trump said later after trade discussions with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe there was a good chance of reaching a trade deal with China.

He said China was trying to be nice to him and added to reporters: “I was nice to them.”

Reuters, Trump says trade deal with China could happen sooner than people think

And so the Dollar and stocks were off to the races.  What great news!  Who can argue with that?

Gold and silver were just hammered on the Comex October option expiration. What a coincidence.

I hope you were at least prepared a little for this nonsense.  I did mentoin it several times.

Better if you ignored the whole thing really, and just got right and sat tight and ignored all the madness and concurrent goofiness.

There is a bull market in cognitive dissonance.  And pathological lying. People often believe what they wish to believe, because it will give them advantage and riches and power.    After all, we have to be realistic, practical.  Right?

No one can serve both God and Mammon.  For he will come to love the one, and despise the other, and hate those who serve Him. And so the love of most will grow cold.

Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Variations on a Rococo Theme - Gold Option Expiration Tomorrow

"It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory


"Evil is ultimately self-destructive. Evil may set out to corrupt others, but in the process corrupts itself.”

John Connolly, The Infernals


Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum. Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall.


"Far be it from any of us to be of those simple ones, who are taken in that snare which is circling around us!  Far be it from us to be seduced with the fair promises in which Satan is sure to hide his poison!

Do you think he is so unskillful in his craft, as to ask you openly and plainly to join him in his warfare against the truth?  No; he offers you baits to tempt you.

He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you.  He bids you mount aloft.  He shows you how to become as gods.  Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

J.H.Newman, The Times of Antichrist

Stocks sold off quite hard today, although they did manage to find a footing on some key support.

Still, if there is more follow through to the downside this week, the situation could become more serious.

And in general you know that is it a hallmark of a major top if the rally back fails to set a new high.


Gold got some legs today in what was clearly a flight to safety.  Silver was flat, but surprisingly the Dollar itself was lower.   The VIX was elevated.

One can speculate about the cause of the decline.   Early thought pointed to the miss on Consumer Confidence, which seems a bit of a stretch.
 
I came into the day with a fairly good sized short index position, and took it off into the closing hour.
Why did stocks decline as they did today?   I think it was more buying exhaustion than anything else.  The chart looked like it was finally ready to roll over.
  
It seems like the madness of King Trump's recklessness is weighing on the markets.

I am certainly no fan of Joe Biden, who has a long record as a corporatist tool.  And certainly not of Trump, who I suspect may wish to be impeached, and be remember by some as a martyr, and spare himself the humiliation of losing badly in the next election.

Let's see the facts come out—  all of them.

Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Plus ça Change, Plus c'est la Même Chose - Comex Option Expiry Wednesday

"Our basic trouble was not an insufficiency of capital. It was an insufficient distribution of buying power coupled with an over-sufficient speculation in production. While wages rose in many of our industries, they did not as a whole rise proportionately to the reward to capital, and at the same time the purchasing power of other great groups of our population was permitted to shrink.

We accumulated such a superabundance of capital that our great bankers were vying with each other, some of them employing questionable methods, in their efforts to lend [leverage] this capital at home and abroad.  I believe that we are at the threshold of a fundamental change in our popular economic thought, that in the future we are going to think less about the producer and more about the consumer.

Do what we may have to do to inject life into our ailing economic order, we cannot make it endure for long unless we can bring about a wiser, more equitable distribution of the national income.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1932


"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason.  But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right."

John Kenneth Galbraith

"It’s not just political spin, however, that explains the rose-colored coverage [in the media]. Another explanation is that the media is plain stupid — quick to accept guidance from economists on Wall Street, for example, who have a vested interest in making everything wonderful."

John Crudele


“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair

The problem is not that we do not know what to do in order to revitalize and reform the economy, which has so badly lost its way beginning at least the 1980s.

The problem is that those with power and influence, and their servants and enablers, do not wish to change.  They have worked very hard and spent a great deal of money to get things exactly the way that they are.  It was a decades long campaign to overturn all the protections and safeguards that were instituted after the Great Depression in reforms of The New Deal.

And so they cannot even admit that there is a problem, much less identify the real source of the problem.  And they will certainly not do anything meaningful to address it, at least voluntarily.

This is the credibility trap in which we are now caught.  And it is leading us into madness.

Gold and silver were higher today, with silver showing an especially big kick after the quad witch option expiration on Friday.

I hope people did not get shaken out of their longer term positions.

There will be a Comex October gold futures option expiration on Wednesday the 25^th.

Stocks were iffy at best.  There are unmistakable signs of slowing in the world's economic activity.

Trade disruptions and wars are a problem, but they are mostly secondary to the great mistaken application of deeply flawed economic and fiscal policies, actively promoted by a wealthy few.

Why do we seem to love lies and the hatred of others so much?  Why do we repeat the extravagant pronouncements of conmen, and hate the truth?  Hate goodness, and justice?

Because although we like to think that we are new, and different, and the epitome of all that is human progress and evolution, in fact we are just deluded.   We are no different or better or stronger than any others.  We are not new, or special, or exceptional as we are, moreso than any other that we may look down upon, and even despise.

No one can serve two masters, for they will be devoted to one, and despise the other.  If they allow themselves to be dishonest in small things, they will be faithless in those things that truly matter, that have a lasting consequence.

It is a madness.  And while people grow mad in herds, they only come back to their senses, one at a time.  And the love of most will grow cold.

This will end.  But it is going to end badly for many.

You know what to do.  But we are such faithless cheats and swindlers that we convince ourselves that we do not, because we do not wish to do what we have been told to do, and has been written on our hearts.

Greed and pride kill.   Love covers a multitude of sins.

Have a pleasant evening.