Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Wax On, Wax Off - Wash and Rinse Cycle Continues

 

"Control frauds in the financial markets are by their very nature conspiratorial in that they involve the suborning of regulators, ratings agencies, exchanges, the media, and legislators to ignore and facilitate misrepresentation that enable white collar crime.  They are difficult to prosecute because by their nature they involve twisting the legal into the extra-legal on a broad basis to achieve a particular financial effect, while limiting many specific aspects to the letter of the law, or at least the gray areas. 

 By and large they operate in the shadows, hiding behind secrecy and a general mindset towards short term greed and lapses in ethics.  Investigations following the Crash of 1929 and the S&L crisis demonstrated that the existence of such pervasive lapses in stewardship do exist. 

Light is a good disinfectant.  Fraud cannot bear exposure.  While some confidentiality must be maintained in trading, obsessive secrecy regarding significantly large positions and collateral matters is often an indication that something is not right, that it is hidden from the market participants view for a particular reason that is deleterious to market pricing and efficiency."

Jesse, 27 April 2010 

"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

 

"All frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar, with which men think to buttress up an edifice, always tend to the decay of what they are devised to support."

Richard Whately 

 

"Secrecy is completely inadequate for democracy, but totally appropriate for tyranny." 

Malcolm Fraser

 

Stocks slumped today.

The precious metals rallied.

The Dollar moved up a bit.

VIX had a little bounce.

Wax on, wax off.  

Bonuses on Wall Street this year are up on average by 27%. 

In general, the oligarchy is increasingly audacious.

They have exerted their will and influence over corrupt enablers and the easily distracted very well.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Repentance, Forgiveness, Thankfulness

 

“At this the servant fell on his knees before him. ‘Be patient with me,’ he begged, ‘and I will pay back everything.’ The servant’s master took pity on him, canceled the debt and let him go.

“But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a hundred silver coins. He grabbed him and began to choke him. ‘Pay back what you owe me!’ he demanded.

“His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay it back.’

“But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants saw what had happened, they were outraged and went and told their master everything that had happened.

“Then the master called the servant in. ‘You wicked servant,’ he said, ‘I canceled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?’ In anger his master handed him over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all he owed.

“This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brothers and sisters from your heart.”

Matthew 18:26-35

 

“The truth is that we were so spiritually and morally bankrupt that we could not even see some of those lines: we stepped over them blindly.  Other times we saw the lines alright, but we wanted to cross them.

It wasn’t God who was dead.  We were." 

Ray A.,  Practice These Principles

 

"But we have to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost, and now is found.’” 

Luke 15:32

 

It was risk on again today, as the masters of the universe decided that the direction of risky financial assets was up.  

And so they bought it with some abandon with stocks going out on the highs.

Gold and silver were hit hard early, but managed to snap back a bit from what appeared to be the usual bank shenanigans.

VIX continued to decline and is at a low for the short term.

There will be a gold and silver futures option expiration on the Comex this coming Monday. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Leaven of the Pharisees - Keeping Up Appearances

 

“Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.

In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative.  It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods. 

Thus I have come to think that the commandment on sabbath is the most difficult and most urgent of the commandments in our society, because it summons us to intent and conduct that defies the most elemental requirements of a commodity-propelled society that specializes in control and entertainment, bread and circuses, along with anxiety and violence.

The way of mammon (capital, wealth) is the way of commodity that is the way of endless desire, endless productivity, and endless restlessness without any Sabbath."

Walter Brueggemann

 

"They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control.  They will be cruel and hate what is good.  They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God.  They will act religious, but they will refuse the grace that could make them righteous." 

2 Timothy 3:3-5

 

"Then he said to them, 'The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.'" 

Mark 2:27 

"Beware the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy."

Luke 12:1

 

Hypocrisy is from the Greek and means acting, or playing a part.

Often people become unbalanced in their priorities, taking something which may be good to an extreme that makes it highly counterproductive for others and themselves.

Ideology often makes people into hypocrites, because they lose sight of the why of things and become obsessed with the what and the how. 

This is why I have shown the chart at the very bottom of this posting that shows a convergence of the far right and the far left, in their disordered sense of priorities.

Bruggerman makes these points about the Sabbath, and to its reason for being, which is our awareness and growth in the love of God above all else.   

This is why our Lord himself said, 'The Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath.'  The Sabbath is for our benefit.

If we take a strict adherence to the law, and lose sight for its reason for being, we can fall into the trap of legalism and hypocrisy.

Many of God laws are primarily for our own growth and development, not because God requires it for Himself, or His justice demands it.     He does not need our suffering, or our denial of things, or other sacrifices.   He does not desire sacrifice for its own sake, but mercy.

The person who becomes obsessed with legalisms loses sight of the reason for these things, and is like the servant who buried their talent in strict observance to what they perceive as a harsh and unreasonable master, and fail to accomplish the purpose of their task, which is to be fruitful in His creation through our actions.

Strict observance without love is an attractive error, because it allows us to believe that we are the best in observing and obeying God, even while we worship something else with our hearts.  It is a mask of self-delusion.

And such rigid and harsh thinking is like leaven, it spreads and permeates the whole.

This is why so often we see the harshest and least loving people wearing the mask of perfect ideologist of both the right and the left.  

They think 'yes I can hate, because I love God or my political party or economic theory just that much.  And so I can negate the other, reduce them to cartoons, and feel very superior to them and their failings.'

And this deadening of self conscience permits even otherwise ordinary people to become part of unspeakable actions and horrors. 

The banality of evil is to think that 'I am just a player of a part, an actor, serving a greater power.'

As old as Babylon, and self-deceivingly evil as sin.

Stocks took a dive in the earlier trading, but managed to come back to unchanged in the quiet trading of the afternoon.

Chairman Powell made some hawkish seeming noises today, which helped to take stocks to their lows. 

Gold and silver rallied after the quad witching option expiration of last Friday.

The VIX continued to fall, to a level that seems low in the short term.

Although it fluctuated in a choppy trade, the Dollar managed to go out near the day highs in the mid 98 level.

Geopolitical events will continue to add uncertainty and risk to the market.

As with the economy and money, things may not be what they seem.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bubble

 

"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis.  "They were totally opposed to it," Born says.  "That puzzled me.  What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"

"I walk into Brooksley's office one day; the blood has drained from her face," says Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. "She's hanging up the telephone; she says to me: 'That was [former Assistant Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers. He says, "You're going to cause the worst financial crisis since the end of World War II."... [He says he has] 13 bankers in his office who informed him of this. Stop, right away. No more.'" 

Greenspan, Rubin and Summers ultimately prevailed on Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation of derivatives. "Born faced a formidable struggle pushing for regulation at a time when the stock market was booming," Kirk says. "Alan Greenspan was the maestro, and both parties in Washington were united in a belief that the markets would take care of themselves." 

PBS Frontline, The Warning, 20 October 2009
 

"The banks were central to the scheme from the inception as they spent years and many hundreds of millions of dollars to overturn Glass-Steagall to allow this coup de grâce to be delivered to all holders of US dollars."

PBS Frontline: The Long Demise of Glass-Steagall, 8 May 2003


"The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States.  One of the most alarming, says a chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government - a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.  If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation; recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform." 

Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2009 

 

“Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but audacity.” 

Tacitus

 

Stocks cast aside all concerns about war, pandemics, and debt, and rallied higher, going out on the highs.

Gold and silver were sold, as is traditional for a quad witching stock index expiration.

The Dollar moved a bit higher, gaining a firmer grip on the 98 handle.

It is not so much what the elites and their unspeakable enablers would do to maintain control of the financial system and the economy. 

The real question is, what wouldn't they do? 

Have a pleasant weekend.