Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Downward Spiral of Dumbness

 

“Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective.”

Timothy Kreider, We Learn Nothing


Q.  If you could travel back in time and change something in the financial world that would benefit society, what would it be?

A.  I would go back in time to help Alan Greenspan achieve a wonderfully rewarding career as a professional clarinetist.   And then I would skip forward ten years or so and stop the Bankers' campaign to repeal Glass-Steagall.

Jesse, Interview with MindfulMoney.UK, August 2012


"The deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.  The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people."

Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment


Stocks ran through a quick 'wash and rinse' cycle. 

What a surprise. 

The Dollar edged slightly higher.

Gold and silver gave back some recent gains.

Consumer inflation data tomorrow.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Light Shines in the Darkness

 

"The Lord is my light and my salvation;
   whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the refuge of my life;
   of whom shall I be afraid?

Hear my voice, Lord, when I call;
    have mercy, and answer me.

Wait on the Lord; be of good courage,
   and He shall strengthen your heart.
Wait, I say, on the Lord!"

Psalm 27


"The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them a light has shined."

Is 9:1


"You are the light of the world.   A city built on a mountain cannot be hidden.   No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket; instead it is set on a stand, where it gives light to all in the house.  Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father in heaven."

Matthew 5:14-16


"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

John 1:5

Stocks were selling off this morning, as the markets took a bit of gloom from things in the overnight.

But things seemed to stabilize during the day, with stocks finding a bottom and turning around.

A mild short squeeze took stocks well into the green.

The Dollar chopped sideways for most of the day, but slid into the red in the final hours.

The VIX moved lower.

Gold and silver rallied off the recent Non-Farm Payroll related lows.

Can gold and silver build on their gains and even make another attempt at a breakout?

 Let's see how the rest of the week goes.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Lackluster and Repetitive - The Banality of Monetary Policy

 

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago


“The primary purposes of the political pamphlets of the early 1700s were neither to enlighten nor educate the masses, but to incite partisan conversation and spread commensurate ideas. Facts were not permitted to fetter the views they espoused, and the restraints of objective journalistic credibility were discarded by pamphleteers bent on promoting subjective slant to an insatiable general public for whom political dissonance was an integral part of social interaction.”

Gavin John Adams, Letters to John Law


"You are the very cause of your ignorance, yourselves. You put away the light, yourselves; you first pluck out both your own eyes, yourselves; and after that other men’s too, so that the blind may lead the blind, until you both fall into the pit.”

Thomas More, The Sadness of Christ


"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science, 1966



Even as pump and dumps go, today was rather lackluster, even boring to the point of banality.

It contained all the cutting drama of a Jackie Vernon vacation slide show.

Gold and silver rallied early and then were pressed back down.

Stocks rallied early and then largely faded into the afternoon.

The dollar chopped sideways but managed to finish slightly higher.

The VIX wallowed.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - What a Surprise - The Endless Wash and Rinse

 

"It seemed as though the markets thought that there would be a weak jobs number tomorrow, which would put a chill on the Fed's zeal of rate increases.  

Or it could just be a bulltrap, yet another means of skinning the speculators."

Jesse, 2 June 2022


"Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful (though sometimes badly mismanaged) industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry.

If allowed to continue, this process will turn the United States into a declining, unfair society with an impoverished, angry, uneducated population under the control of a small, ultrawealthy elite. Such a society would be not only immoral but also eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism.

Thus far, both political parties have been remarkably clever and effective in concealing this new reality. In fact, the two parties have formed an innovative kind of cartel—an arrangement I have termed America’s political duopoly, which I analyze in detail below.  Both parties lie about the fact that they have each sold out to the financial sector and the wealthy.  So far both have largely gotten away with the lie, helped in part by the enormous amount of money now spent on deceptive, manipulative political advertising."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation, May 21, 2013


"Why are people so reluctant to believe that sociopaths and narcissists can use the power of the pen to prey on people? Because they are well spoken and organized? We would contend that these are the most dangerous of the emotionally warped with a need to acquire, dominate and control, because they are smarter and more calculating than the impulse murderers, burglars, rapists, thieves, and pedophiles.

There is a need for economic law and enforcement as there is a need for the less cerebral, hairy knuckled criminal law and enforcement. The notion that people become naturally good, rational and well-adjusted because they are wearing a suit is ludicrous, especially to anyone who has worked with many of those who move in the upper echelons of money and power.

Some of the scariest people we have ever met were articulate and pathologically driven borderline psychopaths with a need to acquire political and economic power. It is the focus of their illness that makes them powerful. They are not distracted by the diffusion of emotional responses that color most people's actions. They have a need, and the will to satisfy it, no matter what it takes.

There will always be those at the extremes who need to 'take it to the limit,' with a well stocked foreign retreat in case things get ugly. But for most of us, restoring a sense of justice and order and putting the nation back into some kind of working balance will be high on the priority list, if not for ourselves, then for our families."

Jesse, Predator Class, 26 December 2008


A bulltrap it was indeed.

Whipsaw city.

A little of the old wash and rinse.

What a surprise.

I played it as a trap and it worked out fairly well.  It was worth a go.

So, in honor of the Non-Farm Payrolls report gold and silver were smashed.

Stocks declined.

The dollar strengthened.

And Wall Street insiders win again.  Hi ho.

I made some modifications to the CrashTrak model in the data for 1929. I tightened up the timeframes to bring it more into line with a 'crash' as a singular event, and not the ensuing depression that resulted from the numerous policy errors by the Republican government and the Fed.

The 1929 event was about three months in duration, and the 1987 was about two months.

Given the amount of government and Fed intervention in markets which became policy after 1987 I think we can be flexible about our current timeframes however.

A crash in slow motion?

Let's keep an eye on that second high and the principle of lower highs and lower lows.

I am also including a analysis of the 1987 crash that I did in 2004 for my old Geocities blog.

Have a pleasant weekend.