Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Risk On - Stocks Pumped for the Trump GOP Convention Extravaganza

"The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true. It really happened. These suspicions are valid.”

Neil Barofsky, TARP Inspector General


"Narcissists are unstable and go through repeated cycles of self-destruction, with other people usually paying the heft of the price. They are aware of what they are doing to others — but they do not care. Narcissists tend to be divisive, vindictive, confrontational, aggressive, hate-filled, raging, incoherent, judgment-impaired, and irrational."

Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self-Love


“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


“Many politicians are tantalizing storytellers, as they mix facts with fiction, grab our emotion and tell things they want us to believe. Their factoids are unremittingly reiterated, take a life on their own, and in the end become the very truth— until the bubble bursts."

Erik Pevernagie


"Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion."

George Orwell

This is going to end badly.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - We're Off To See the Wizard - Shenanigans For Stock Option Expiration

“I know not why any one but a schoolboy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another.”

Samuel Johnson


“A mighty bubble of wealth is blown before our eyes, as empty, as transient, as contradictory to the laws of solid material, as confuted by every circumstance of actual condition, as any other bubble which man or child ever blew before.”

Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost


"The wealthy, not only by private fraud but also by common laws, do every day pluck and snatch away from the people some part of their daily living. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely without fear of losing that which they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labor of the people for as little money and effort as possible."

Thomas More, Utopia


"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, The Myths We Live By

A crash is coming. The only question now is when.

This next bust may be the pièces de résistance of the bust and bubble economy which we have been enjoying for over thirty years now, compliments of the moneyed interests, the captive regulators, enablers in politics and the media, and their pliable Federal Reserve Bank.

Stocks hit new highs today.

The Dollar rallied a little.

Gold and silver were off a bit.

Don't get in front of this, but know that this is a castle of glitter, built on a sandy foundation of corruption and illusions.

Sing goddess, the rage of Achilles...

The mighty rise and are fallen, forgotten— but the word and the spirit endure.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Flight To Fantasy - A Gathering of Vultures

"The failure of normal empathy is central to sociopathy, which is marked by an absence of guilt, intentional manipulation, and controlling or even sadistically harming others for personal power or gratification.”

Bandy Lee


"I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man.   Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."

G. M. Gilbert


“Once they’re in power, narcissists consolidate their position by firing everyone who challenges them. In their place rise a plague of toadies, opportunists, and enablers equally guided by self-interest and short on scruples.  So you end up with these individualistic cultures with no teamwork and low integrity."

Lee Simmons, Stanford Business School


"As in all periods of speculation, men sought not to be persuaded by the reality of things but to find excuses for escaping into the new world of fantasy."

"John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929


“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


"And they said to him, 'Where will this happen, Lord?' And He said to them, 'Where death is, there a gathering of vultures will be.'”

Luke 17:37

Today's market action was driven by a handful of 'new era' stocks.

In the SP 500, about 350 stocks were in the red.

Gold and silver gained again, despite the persistent price manipulation by the Hedge Funds and the Banks who are gaming the markets even further, now that it appears we are reaching the endgame.

There is a gathering storm.   And like the pandemic, its mark on history may be lasting, and a sign and warning for the next generation.

Lord have mercy on us, and forgive us our rebellious ignorance and our impenetrable pride.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Wax On, Wax Off - Thinning Façade of The Recovery™

"Americans once had a coherent and clear understanding of political tyranny, one crafted by Thomas Jefferson and updated for the industrial age by Louis Brandeis.  A concentration of power, whether in the hands of a military dictator or a JP Morgan, was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy.  This idea stretched back to the country’s founding.

In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few whose misuse of their power induced a financial collapse.  They drew on this tradition to craft the New Deal."

Simon and Schuster, Review of Matt Stoller's Goliath


"He who does not shout the truth when he knows it makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers."

Charles Péguy


"The reason America can’t handle the coronavirus is the same reason we can’t do anything else right. We don’t let the people who do the work have any say over how or whether the work is done. American institutions are organized entirely around the short-term horizon of financiers, and these financiers seek to create monopolies and to grab cash by thinning out supply lines and generating hidden risk."

Matt Stoller


“We must speak truth to power, and confront ignorance with facts. But facts are threatening to those invested in fraud.”

DaShanne Stokes


"It is possible to make people contented with their servitude. I think this can be done. I think it has been done in the past. I think it could be done even more effectively now because you can provide them with bread and circuses and you can provide them with endless amounts of distractions and propaganda.

Aldous Huxley


"The banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, and balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained recovery."

Jesse, July 2009

Today was neither a risk on or risk off day.

Rather, it was a wax on, wax off day, also known as the old wash and rinse, ahead of the August stock options expiration on Friday.

In simpler terms, the small specs were leaning hard in one direction and the wise guys get to look at what they are holding in their hands.

The financiers spent many millions to buy their current privileged positions, including the long campaign to overturn Glass-Steagall.   And it was worth it.

The Dollar moved higher, reversing its trend.

And gold, silver and stocks all moved lower.

I imagine that those holding options on miners, also known as leverage on leverage, did not have a good time of it.

Well, let's see if the shenanigans will continue for another day, or will change again, based on what the poor beleaguered small specs did today.

The purported precipitant for all this was the FOMC minutes, and their apparent lack of commitment to unbridled money printing for unrestrained capitalism.

Two Fed economist have identified an increase in corporate monopoly power as a key negative trend in the US economy.

They failed to note the tragic overturning of New Deal restraints on the Banking Cartel which occurred in the 1990s and 2000s. The Fed must not speak ill of its masters.

Have a pleasant evening.