Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Appearance of a Crash in Slow Motion

 

"Through a set of economic policies designed to bail out and subsidize failed and often tainted corporate enterprises, while actively promoting a false sense of confidence to support those policies, the public has become exposed, by those very people entrusted to protect them, to dangerously high levels of hidden counterparty risks.

The cautionary functions of the media, the political class, and the regulatory bodies have been routinely directed, distorted, and even silenced for the benefit of a highly compromised and increasingly self-serving elite. And this corruption has begun feeding on its own momentum, resulting in increasingly blatant examples of deception, distortion, and outright theft. This is crony capitalism, and its deadly credibility trap."

Jesse, April 2012


"This great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts.   For evil to appear disguised as light, compassion, historical necessity or even social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Word, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.   Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior.   Christians are called to compassion and to action.

In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God. Thereafter, any attack even on the least of men is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all.

Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer


"They run all away, and cry, 'the devil take the hindmost'."

Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding


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

Stocks had another wide ranging day, and slumped ja little into the close.

Gold and silver caught a bounce after their recent shellacking.

The Dollar backed off the 108 handle just a little.

I redid the Crashtrak profile for the 2022 decline as I had suggested I might.

I am now using the mid June decline as the second low.

So bully has the rest of the summer perhaps to try and put together a sustainable rally and make a stronger attempt to exceed that second high and take the model off the charts.

The timeframes are well stretched, so if this is a crash, it is a crash in slow motion.

Have a pleasant evening.

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Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Darkness Rising - Index Option Expiration Friday

 

"In order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted."

William Hazlitt


"If at the start this cancerous growth in the nation was not particularly noticeable, it was only because there were still enough forces at work that operated for the good, so that it was kept under control.  As it grew larger, however, and finally in an ultimate spurt of growth attained ruling power, the tumor broke open, as it were, and infected the whole body.    The greater part of its former opponents went into hiding.  The German intellectuals fled to their cellars, there, like plants struggling in the dark, away from light and sun, gradually to choke to death.

Now the end is at hand.  Now it is our task to find one another again, to spread information from person to person, to keep a steady purpose, and to allow ourselves no rest until the last man is persuaded of the urgent need of his struggle against this system.  When thus a wave of unrest goes through the land, when 'it is in the air,' when many join the cause, then in a great final effort this system can be shaken off."

White Rose, Second Leaflet, Munich, 1942


"The period of financial distress is a gradual decline after the peak of a speculative bubble that precedes the final and massive panic and crash, driven by the insiders having exited but the sucker outsiders hanging on hoping for a revival, but finally giving up in the final collapse."

Charles Kindleberger

 

Stocks slumped back down to support.

Gold and silver were hit hard once again.

As a reminder there is an option expiration on Friday.

A big slug of physical showed up in Hong Kong to replenish their dwindling inventory.

Funny how this always seems to happen after a major raid on the price of gold in London and New York.

Gold is moving from West to East, and it may not return in our lifetimes.

The Dollar closed once again just shy of the 108 handle on the DX index.

VIX moved slightly higher.

The banksters are going to be launching their own national stock exchange MEMX.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - And They All Lived Together in a Little Crooked House

 

"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


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

Tacitus


"The problem of the last three decades is not the 'vicissitudes of the marketplace,' but rather deliberate actions by the government to redistribute income from the rest of us to the one percent. This pattern of government action shows up in all areas of government policy."

Dean Baker


"Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked. And they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy have the opportunity to become successful. That’s what I have a problem with. And I think most people agree with me."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation


"What is good?  All that increases the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself.  What is bad?  All that is weakness.  What is happiness?  The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.  Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but efficiency.  'The weak and the flawed shall perish' is the first principle of our charity.  And one should help them to perish.  What is more harmful than any vice?  Christian love."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

There will be a stock index option expiration on Friday.

Stocks fell again today, in the continuing ebb and flow of the Wall Street wash and rinse.

Gold and silver moved lower.

The Dollar is reaching for a high not of the 108 handle.

Or perhaps it might be better to think of it as the failings of the euro, for the obvious geo-political reasons.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Slowly, Then All At Once - Customary Payroll Shenanigans

 

“When fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically.  They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission.   Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom


“Human nature being what it is, small loopholes are likely to be exploited until they become big ones, and big ones until they turn into financial disasters.”

Seth Klarman


"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

Thomas Clement Douglas


"I am not so optimistic that this reform is possible, because there has in fact been a soft coup d'etat in the US, which now exists in a state of crony corporatism that wields enormous influence over the media and within the government.

Let's be clear about this, the oligarchs are flush with victory, and feel that they are firmly in control, able to subvert and direct any popular movement to the support of their own fascist ends and unslakable will to power.

This is the contempt in which they hold the majority of American people and the political process: the common people are easily led fools, and everyone else who is smart enough to know better has their price. And they would beggar every middle class voter in the US before they will voluntarily give up one dime of their ill gotten gains.

But my model says that the oligarchs will continue to press their advantages, being flushed with victory, until they provoke a strong reaction that frightens everyone, like a wake up call, and the tide then turns to genuine reform." 

Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup


The Non-Farm Payrolls report came in much stronger than expected, which seemed to lock in the next Fed interest rate benchmark action at 75 basis points.

In what seems to be a new daily event, stocks spent the morning with losses and managed to go out with gains in the quiet trading of the afternoon. 

Such markets do not inspire calm confidence, lacking all conviction, and seem extraordinarily vulnerable to data shocks and exogenous events. 

Gold and silver were marginally.

The Dollar fell back a bit.

The VIX fell further towards its key moving average support.

In surprising news, the former PM of Japan, Shinzo Abe, was brutally assassinated in public during a campaign speech. 

Such are the times.

Stock market option expiration next Friday.

Physical inventories of gold in Hong Kong are rather low.

Have a pleasant evening.