Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Swine and Swindlers

 

"There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice, that does not live by secrecy." 

Joseph Pulitzer 

 

"An investigation later discovered that business journalists for at least eight papers promoted stocks in their writing in return for bribes.  The most embarrassing were at the Wall Street Journal, where reporters who wrote 'Broad Street Gossip' and 'Abreast of the Market' took payoffs for stock tips in the 1920s.   The revelations about the Journal reporters came out during hearings by the Senate Banking and Currency Committee in 1932, more than three years later, when Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia produced cancelled checks written to the Journal reporters from publicist A. Newton Plummer.  The stories based on the bribes had gone as far back as 1923." 

University of North Carolina, History of Business Journalism 

 

"This elite-generated social control maintains the status quo because the status quo benefits and validates those who created and sit atop it.  People rise to prominence when they parrot the orthodoxy rather than critically analyze it.   Intellectual regurgitation is prized over independent thought. 

Real change in politics or society cannot occur under the orthodoxy because if it did, it would threaten the legitimacy of the professional class and all of the systems that helped them achieve their status." 

Kristine Mattis, The Cult of the Professional Class

 

"I would say that practically all the financial journals were on the take.  This includes reporters for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Herald-Tribune, you name it.  A publicity man called A. Newton Plummer had canceled checks from practically every major journalist in New York City." 

Robert Sobel in PBS, The Great Crash of 1929

 

"The power which the moneyed interest can exercise, when concentrated under a single head and with our present system of currency, was sufficiently demonstrated in the struggle made by the Bank of the United States.

It is one of the serious evils of our present system of banking that it enables one class of society, and that by no means a numerous one, by its control over the currency, to act injuriously upon the interests of all the others and to exercise more than its just proportion of influence in political affairs." 

Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address

 

Stocks attempted to rally on the much weaker than expected Non-Farm Payrolls report, it being dovish and all that.

But alas, once again the realities of pandemic caused stocks to drop from their most recent bubble heights.

Gold and silver rallied, which is unusual for a Non-Farm Payrolls day.

The Dollar was flat.

The VIX remains elevated.

Have a pleasant weekend. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Are You Ready For Some Football?

 

"Not everyone who calls out to me saying 'Lord, Lord' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of my heavenly father.

Everyone who hears my teaching but does not live it is like a foolish person who builds a house on sand.  When the rains come, and the waters rise, and the winds blow and buffet against the house, it will collapse, and great will be its fall."

Matthew 7:21,26-27

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees— hypocrites!  For you are like whitewashed tombs which appear beautiful, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.  You outwardly appear righteous, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness."

Matthew 23:27-28 

 

"Understand this, my brothers and sister, that you ought to be quick to listen, slow to speak out, and even slower to anger.  Your anger does not serve the will of God.   So avoid all that is unworthy in this abundance of wickedness, and receive with humility the word that has been planted within you, to save yourselves.  Be doers of the word, and not just hearers, who are deceiving yourselves." 

James 1:19-22

Stocks managed to hold on to a rally attempt today, despite the wet blanket caution from Apple on iPhone demand.

The Dollar was slightly higher as VIX back off just a bit from yesterday.

Gold was lower while silver was just a little higher with stocks.

Smells like teen spirit.

Non-Farm Payrolls tomorrow.

Are you ready for some football?

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Are You Not Entertained?

 

"They have become foolish in their reasoning, and their senseless minds are darkened." 

Romans 1:21 

William Roper:  So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More:  Yes! What would you do?   Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper:  Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More:  Oh?  And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?   This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's!   And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?   Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons 

 

“Behold, your house is now yours, but is made desolate." 

Matthew 23:39 

Stocks were in buy-the-dip rally mode this morning.

But rude reality intruded, and a vicious whip saw ensued.  Ouch.

Even the pom poms of the spokesmodels were drooping into the close.

Most things that were not in the neighborhood of a flight-to-safety got hammered.

Gold and the Dollar finished slightly higher.

Silver got clobbered along with equities.   

It does not really ride on the usual flight-to-safety trade.

Miners took it on the chin a bit as well, because of their equity correlation.

Try not to seek out and listen to the lies of con men and sociopaths.  

Even though it seems to be fun and fashionable for a while.

The world has not changed and lost its way.  You have.  

And maybe it is time to come home.

"Remember us, O Lord, in thy loving kindness and tender mercies, as ever they have been from old." Psalm 25:6

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - American Values

 

"Days before his murder, as my father pulled ahead in the California polls, he began considering how he would govern the country.  Days before the California primary, seated next to journalist Pete Hamill on his campaign plane, my father mused aloud about his options. ‘I have to decide whether to eliminate the operations arm of the [CIA] Agency or what the hell to do with it,’ he told Hamill.  ‘We can’t have those cowboys wandering around and shooting people and doing all those unauthorized things.’ 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., American Values 

 

"One day he [RFK] came into my bedroom and handed me a hardcover copy of Camus’s The Plague.  ‘I want you to read this,’ he said with particular urgency. 

I spent a lot of time thinking about that book over the years, and why my father gave it to me. I believe it was the key to a door that he himself was then unlocking. 

It is neither our position nor our circumstances that define us, but our response to those circumstances; when destiny crushes us, small heroic gestures of courage and service can bring peace and fulfillment.  In applying our shoulder to the stone, we give order to a chaotic universe."

 Robert F. Kennedy Jr., American Values

 

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.   They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." 

Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

 

"But even leaving this crisis aside, there is now abundant evidence of widespread, unpunished criminal behavior in the financial sector.  The evidence is now overwhelming that over the last thirty years, the U.S. financial sector has become a rogue industry. As its wealth and power grew, it subverted America’s political system (including both political parties), government, and academic institutions in order to free itself from regulation. 

As deregulation progressed, the industry became ever more unethical and dangerous, producing ever larger financial crises and ever more blatant criminality.  Since the 1990s, its power has been sufficient to insulate bankers not only from effective regulation but even from criminal law enforcement. 

The financial sector is now a parasitic and destabilizing industry that constitutes a major drag on American economic growth.  This means that criminal prosecution is not just a matter of vengeance or even justice. Real punishment for large-scale financial criminality is a vital element of the financial re-regulation that is, in turn, essential to America’s (and the world’s) economic health and stability. Regulation is nice, but the threat of prison focuses the mind.

In this book, I demonstrate that much of the behavior underlying the bubble and crisis was quite literally criminal, and that the lack of prosecution is nearly as outrageous as the financial sector’s original conduct."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation

Stocks were attempting to rally back again today. 

 And early this afternoon in unprepared remarks during a routine Q&A Fed Chairman Powell surprised [shocked] the markets by indicating a change in outlook by the Fed, in terms of speeding up the taper, and in the manner in which they consider inflation as transitory. 

A perfect setup, a drive-by market shock, for those trading 'in the know.'

Stocks tanked.

 The Dollar which had been losing ground rallied sharply, climbing back over 96, but then gave it all up and finished lower by quite bit for the day in the 95 handle.

Gold and silver were hit hard and did not recover even as the Dollar dumped again into the close.

The VIX soared.

Have a pleasant evening.