Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Worst Is Likely Yet To Come - Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday

 

"Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage.

And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."

Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater


"Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be with the coming of the Son of Man.   People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given away in marriage, up until the very day that Noah entered the ark.  Then the flood came, and swept them all away... 

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

Luke 17:26-27, 37

 

"Everyone knows that plagues have a way of recurring throughout history, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that crash down on us out of the sky.  There have always been plagues and wars, yet they always take us by surprise.  When war breaks out people say it's stupid and won't last long. Stupidity has a knack of getting in the way, which we would see if not wrapped up in ourselves.  In this our townsfolk were like everybody else— they did not believe in plagues." 

Albert Camus, The Plague

Stocks gave up some of their gains from yesterday, or as the spokemodels quaintly and charmingly put it, 'Yesterday there was optimism about the Ukraine: today there was not.' 

 Or as someone who is not afraid to say it might have put it, 'Yesterday was a very calculated and determined short squeeze.   Today they let some of the air out of the bubble.'

Bully needs to set a new high.   A failure to do so will put the risk imbalance higherl.  

Gold and silver rebounded sharply, because of the artificial magnitude of the selloff the last two days in observance of the April contracts option expiration.

The Dollar continues its slide for much the same reason.   There are no markets more manipulated than the currency and interest rate [LIBOR] markets.   It is the dark heart of our financial system.

There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls Report on Friday.   This has often been an occasion for shenanigans, operating behind a thin veneer of 'fundamentals.'

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - We Learn Nothing

 

“I have spoken to the heads of various Wall Street equity derivatives trading desks and every single one of the senior managers I spoke with told me that Bernie Madoff was a fraud.  Government has coddled, accepted, and ignored white collar crime for too long.   It is time the nation woke up and realized that it's not the armed robbers or drug dealers who cause the most economic harm, it's the white collar criminals living in the most expensive homes who have the most impressive resumes who harm us the most.  They steal our pensions, bankrupt our companies, and destroy thousands of jobs, ruining countless lives.”

 Harry Markopolos

 

"A kleptocracy is sucking the life out of working men and women by force and fraud.  They pervert and corrupt so many, filling their hearts with their passionate lies, appealing to what is the very worst in them." 

Jesse, September 2012

 

"The report [by author John Detrixhe] found that as of December 2020 the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) had a 19.9 percent share of stock market trading versus 13.4 for Citadel Securities and 9.4 percent for Virtu Financial.  This gave Citadel Securities and Virtu a combined stock market trading share of 22.8 percent versus 19.9 for the NYSE. 

The big problem with this picture is that neither Citadel Securities or Virtu Financial are registered as stock exchanges and neither are regulated by the SEC as stock exchanges. Citadel Securities is a broker-dealer that pays for order flow from at least nine online brokerage firms and has a dubious history of regulatory fines and abusive behavior.  Virtu Financial is a market maker and high frequency trading firm that bragged in its IPO prospectus that it had only one losing day in 1,238 days of trading."

Wall Street On Parade,   Unregistered 'Exchanges' Carry More Volume Than NYSE

 

 "And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not.  And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions.   And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of -- and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent -- to the detriment of everyone else."

Neil Barofsky

 

"Price discovery is not a sexy function of markets, but it is critical to the efficient allocation of scarce capital and resources, and to the preservation of the long term wealth of investors and the economy as a whole. If price discovery is compromised by manipulation, then we will all be gradually impoverished and the economy will be imbalanced and unstable."

London Banker, Lies, Damned Lies, and LIBOR

Stocks were in rally mode today on a most likely false optimism about the progress of a truce in the Ukraine.

Rising rates, inflation, global pandemic, supply chain breaks - meh.

At least for today.   The wash and rinse must flow.

Gold and silver were brazenly hit again this morning, in the familiar day after option expiry smackdown to dislodge all those new holders of April metals contracts.

They are no longer subtle, not bothering to even disguise their blatant manipulation of markets.

Stocks were on a tear, managing to take out another level of failed rallies from the past.

Bully needs to make a new high.   Or all that has failed thus far is going to be just a warmup.

Bitcoin managed to go higher, which makes sense given its positive correlation with the equity bubble.

The Dollar fell.   

It's sad to see how many have given themselves over to the madness, and blithely skip along towards the abyss. 

And the beat goes on.

"It turns out that you can blow life off for as long as you want, but you still have to take the finals.”

 Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

 

Stocks and Precious Metal Charts - Players Playing - Children of the Blight

 

“Political decisions helped to create the super-elite in the first place, and as the economic might of the super-elite class grows, so does its political muscle.”

Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats 

 

"Flagrant evils cure themselves by being flagrant." 

John Henry Newman 

 

"I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that they may not wish to come out of hell, but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good." 

C. S. Lewis 

 

"If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves.” 

E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World 

 

“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty.  Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction." 

Simone Weil 

 

"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

 

Gold and silver were visibly slammed today for the April contract option expiration on the Comex.

What a surprise.

Stocks were trading weakly, but managed to rally strongly in the quiet afternoon trade.

It never gets old.

There will be a Non-farm Payrolls report on Friday.

“The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned...
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!”

Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus

The wrath of God.  What a quaint concept.

Winning....

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Weekend Reading: That Perverse Individualism and the Supremacy of Selfishness

 

"Truth be told, most politicians couldn't care less about the plight of the poor. There's so much profit to be made from poor people - think payday loans, high-interest rent-to-own stores, for-profit colleges, and overpriced mobile homes - that politicians and their crony-capitalist donors have a vested interest in keeping them poor."

Joshua Wilkey


"For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality.

They want independent central banks. And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses."

Pierre Bourdieu, L’essence du néolibéralisme


"To some who were confident of their own superiority, and looked down upon and despised others, Jesus told this parable: ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ''God, I thank you that I am not like other people – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.''

‘But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

‘I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.’"

Luke 18:9-14

Pride, intended as a recognition of our achievements, ironically diminishes our fullness as human beings, and often quite dramatically.   Pride can make people act in ways that, from a distance, seem very pompous and silly.

And among these proud ones there are often those who not only go beyond a simple agnosticism and indifference to the vastness of creation, but actively refuse to acknowledge anything greater than themselves.  And they do so almost with a kind of fervor, aggressively despising any forms of humility and simplicity among others as a weakness of mind and character.

They proudly build their castles, made of money and honors and power, on the weak sands of their own ego and worldly achievements.   That form of worldly pride is easier for us to understand.   We see it clearly in the self-proclaimed elite of our time.   The balance of things may only be restored for them by the four last things, death, judgement, heaven and hell, the hard realities which are irresistible, even to the mighty.

But less obvious perhaps is the spiritual form of pride, that reduces us into a distorted order of things that would be equally silly if it were not so insidious.   Spiritual pride blinds and binds us to our faults, of course.  But even worse than that, it leads us to magnify and fix ourselves upon the faults of others.

In doing so we seek to justify our own imagined achievements, and at the same time dismiss our bad treatment and low regard for them.  Like the worldly and wealthy, it is often used to justifiy the swindles and deceptions they inflict upon the weak and the troubled and the poor: the least of these. 

There is no person who is spiritually proud whose heart will serve as a home for the Holy Spirit, the spirit of humility, and mercy, and of love.  They are too full of the law, and of judgement, and of the trappings of righteousness, and themselves.

Pride makes us think that we are a superior specimen of all creation, a model for others, if they were only able to rise above their weakness.  Even if we acknowledge a greater God intellectually, or so we think that we do, in fact we are accepting Him on our own terms, terms that we ourselves have set, and often in a very legalistic manner.  God becomes the perfection of our own goodness, and not the other way around.  This is the leaven of the Pharisee, the exacting experts of the law, as noted so often in the gospels, and in the parable above.

Spiritual pride leads to a lingering spiritual death.   It turns the living being into a whited sepulcher, all bright and polished on the outside, proudly ornamented with scrupulous attention to detail, and ostentatious adherence to the letter of the law— but inside full of corruption, and festering foulness, and 'dead men's bones.'

This is all too common among those whose love is directed to the rituals and the forms of religion, but wanting nothing to do with the human realities of it, the acts of mercy to others which are the second great commandment.  

It is a sickening romance with the self, a sickness unto death.

But isn't this just what it means to be human?   If Mother Teresa had decided to hell with the poor and the dying, and run off to join a reality cooking show in Hollywood, to seek her own fame and fortune, wouldn't that only be human?

No.  There is a difference is between the things that people may do that are beneath their calling to be fully human, and what they do that strives to achieve the fullness of their humanity.  

It is the general lack of moral aspiration and the glorification of that perversion of individuality which is selfishness that marks our time, as it has done so many times in the past.  It distorts our vision, and makes the saints incomprehensible, laughable, almost repulsive and contemptible to us.   And it is a sickness, the lingering death of a soul and of a society.

Jesse August 2017