Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Corruption of the Public Mind and Flight Into Fantasy

"It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalised, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud. The behaviour that caused the mortgage bubble and financial crisis of 2008 was a natural outcome and continuation of this pattern, rather than some kind of economic accident.

This behaviour is criminal. We are talking about deliberate concealment of financial transactions that aided terrorism, nuclear weapons proliferation and large-scale tax evasion; assisting in major financial frauds and in concealment of criminal assets; and committing frauds that substantially worsened the worst financial bubbles and crises since the Depression.

And yet none of this conduct has been punished in any significant way."

Charles H. Ferguson, Heist of the century: Wall Street's role in the financial crisis


"Gold is a trust anchor.  With shares, bonds and other securities: there is a risk to everything.  If things go wrong, prices may fall.  But, crisis or not, a gold bar always holds value.  Central banks such as DNB have traditionally had a lot of gold in their house.  Gold is the ultimate 'nest egg': the trust anchor for the financial system.  If the entire system collapses, the gold stock provides a collateral to start over.   Gold gives confidence in the power of the central bank's balance sheet.  That gives a safe feeling."

Dutch Central Bank Statement


"Being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences.”

Albert Speer


"Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."

Captain G. M. Gilbert, Army Psychologist, Nuremberg Trials


"Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse."

Adlai Stevenson

The oligarchs and demagogues of Rome famously provided their public with 'bread and circuses.'

We are being given platitudes and fantasy, often designed to keep the readers in a continual state of distraction, and outrage, addicted to the consumption of junk food and cheap thrills for the mind. 

Stocks vacillated around unchanged today. They could not really bring themselves to admit that the 'trade deal' was just another story.

But it was an odd sort of day. The VIX dropped again, but the Dollar, gold, and silver were all higher together.

Let's see how earnings and the international news affect prices this week.

There will be a stock options expiration on Friday.

Have a pleasant evening.

Precious Metals Holdings and Commitments of Traders

Thanks to Nick at goldchartsrus.com for the charts as always.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Let's Make a Deal - Working for the Weekend

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man


"Some day an absolutely correct verdict—if you like, a perfect critique—will be passed on what each of us is.   We shall not only believe, we shall know, beyond doubt in every fibre of our appalled or delighted being, that as the Judge has said, so we are: neither more nor less nor other.  We shall perhaps even realize that in some dim fashion we could have known it all along.  The unanswerable and (by then) self-evident truth about each will be known to all."

C. S. Lewis, The World's Last Night


"We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe."

John Henry Newman


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

Matthew 24:12

Stocks soared on the the optimistic hopes for the trade deal with China that was announced today, and were further inflamed by the 'teasters' leaked out during the day about the expanded scope of the deal.

And safe havens like the precious metals and bonds and the Dollar were sold.

The market's ardent faith in the pronouncements coming from the White House about the dea' was almost touching.

We eagerly wait for the details of the complete deal, in addition to the agricultural purchases which both countries needed and wanted.

"Time to buy land, farmers!" says the President, always the real estate developer.

The existing 25% tariffs will not be increased to 30% in October.  No decision has been made on the broader December tariffs yet.

Stocks faded into the close on profit-taking, and the metals regained much of their losses.  Silver actually closed up for the day.

On Monday the Bond market will be closed for Columbus Day.  Equity markets will be open.

Let's see what additional information and analysis comes out.

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

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Banquet of Consequences

"Twenty-five years ago, when most economists were extolling the virtues of financial deregulation and innovation, a maverick named Hyman P. Minsky maintained a more negative view of Wall Street; in fact, he noted that bankers, traders, and other financiers periodically played the role of arsonists, setting the entire economy ablaze. Wall Street encouraged businesses and individuals to take on too much risk, he believed, generating ruinous boom-and-bust cycles. The only way to break this pattern was for the government to step in and regulate the moneymen.

Many of Minsky’s colleagues regarded his 'financial-instability hypothesis,' which he first developed in the nineteen-sixties, as radical, if not crackpot. Today, with the subprime crisis seemingly on the verge of metamorphosing into a recession, references to it have become commonplace on financial web sites and in the reports of Wall Street analysts. Minsky’s hypothesis is well worth revisiting."

John Cassidy, The Minsky Moment, The New Yorker, 4 February 2008.


"The more people rationalize cheating, the more it becomes a culture of dishonesty. And that can become a vicious, downward cycle.  Because suddenly, if everyone else is cheating, you feel a need to cheat, too."

Stephen Covey


"The prevalence of the corporation in America has led men of this generation to act, at times, as if the privilege of doing business in corporate form were inherent in the citizen; and has led them to accept the evils attendant upon the free and unrestricted use of the corporate mechanism as if these evils were the inescapable price of civilized life, and, hence to be borne with resignation.

Through size, corporations, once merely an efficient tool employed by individuals in the conduct of private business have become an institution— an institution which has brought such concentration of economic power that so-called private corporations are sometimes able to dominate the state.

Coincident with the growth of these giant corporations, there has occurred a marked concentration of individual wealth; and that the resulting disparity in incomes is a major cause of the existing depression [1933].

We must make our choice.  We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis


“You can know the value of every item of merchandise, but if you don’t know the value of your own soul it is all a vanity.

This, this then is the essence of all wisdom— that you should know who you will be when your Day of Reckoning arrives.”

Rumi

Stocks dove and the precious metals overnight as the Chinese press cast gloom on the rosy predictions coming out of the White House with regard to the China-US trade talks.

And stocks recovered their losses and posted new gains as the White House issued some rosy forecasts about the meeting between Trumpolini and the Chinese Vice-Premier tomorrow.

And so the Dollar and the metals sold off, the metals having an assist from the big shorts on the Comex who sold gleefully into the market, driving the price lower.

For some time now Wall Street and the professional class have been thriving. And they believe they continue to do so, if they are able to maintain for themselves an inexhaustible supply of lies and easy money.

But all is not happiness among the financiers, despite the big drop in the VIX today, and the continuing faith that Desperate Donnie will do whatever it takes to prop the markets in order to uplift his flagging interests and prospects.

The Street and their assorted enablers and sycophants are becoming increasingly edgy, with fears that their easy money good times may be over, if Elizabeth Warren comes to change things.

And do not underestimate what they may do in order to sustain their exorbitant privileges.

Have a pleasant evening.