Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Loud Voices, Hollow Hearts

 

"For it is impossible to bring back to repentance those who were once enlightened— those who have experienced the good things of heaven and shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the power of the age to come— and who then turn away from God.

It is impossible to bring such people who were given the grace to see and then fallen away, back again to true forgiveness— for by accepting Him with their words, and then rejecting Him with their actions and in their hearts, they themselves have nailed him back on to His cross, and held Him publicly to shame."

Hebrews 6: 4-6

"You want to distance yourself to the degree possible from conflict entrepreneurs. These are people or pundits or platforms that intentionally exploit conflict for their own ends.   People who really delight in every twist and turn of the conflict.   And right now we tend to amplify those voices.  On social media and other places."

Amanda Ripley

"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


The emptier the hearts and minds, the louder the voice, the more elaborate the rules and ceremony.

The Fed released their Financial Stability Report late on Friday.

Not exactly prime time for the news media.

The Stability Report asks insiders about their concerns, which are general macro and exogenous.  It never touches on this concern that Wall Street On Parade highlighted from a US Office of Financial Research 2015 report:

“The larger the bank, the greater the potential spillover if it defaults; the higher its leverage, the more prone it is to default under stress; and the greater its connectivity index, the greater is the share of the default that cascades onto the banking system.  The product of these three factors provides an overall measure of the contagion risk that the bank poses for the financial system.  Five of the U.S. banks had particularly high contagion index values — Citigroup, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs.”

One might assume from the report that the massive leverage in the system was no longer a concern. 

If only we had some regulator which had the power and capability to directly address and temper the systemic risk of these overleveraged, derivative monstrosities of a national banking system. 

Oh yeah we do.  

It's called the Fed. 

And they have been serving the Banks, at the expense of the public, since 1913.

Stocks continued their bounce higher.

The US Dollar continued its recent decline, down to the 110 handle, which is still at high levels historically.

Gold and silver mostly marched in place.

The US will have its midterm elections tomorrow.

They may move markets, when the results are finally tallied.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Douce France - Precious Metals Stampede Higher

 

“Do not grieve or complain that you were born in a time when you can no longer see God in the flesh.  He did not in fact take this privilege from you.  As He says: ‘Whatever you have done to the least of my brothers, you did to me.’”

Augustine of Hippo


“To whom will the sublime beauty of a sunset or a Ninth Symphony of Beethoven reveal itself, but to one who approaches it reverently and unlocks their heart to it? To whom will the mystery that lies in life and manifests itself in every plant reveal itself in its full splendor, but to one who contemplates it reverently?

But those who see in it only a means of subsistence or of earning money, that is, something that can be used or employed, will not discover the meaning, structure, and significance of the world in its beauty and hidden dignity.”

Dietrich von Hildebrand


“A church that doesn't provoke any crisis, a gospel that doesn't unsettle, a word of God that doesn't get under anyone's skin, a word of God that doesn't touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed -- what gospel is that? Very nice, pious considerations that don't bother anyone, that's the way many would like preaching to be. Those preachers who avoid every thorny matter so as not to be harassed, so as not to have conflicts and difficulties, do not light up the world they live in.”

Oscar A. Romero


“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

Teresa of Calcutta


And the metals surprised to the upside. Yo buddy, did they. 

I had made a fairly substantial directional bet yesterday afternoon that we would get a bounce in the precious metals and miners today. 

But I have to admit, I absolutely did not see a rally of this size in the metals coming in one day.

Nevertheless, it was a good day, and I will take it.

And I withdrew back to the higher ground for the weekend.

The Dollar took a serious dive today, one for the record books.

I am not even going to lay out the rationale that the stooges put forward to explain this volatile stock market action.

They always sound good after the fact.

A rinse follows wash.  That was the long and short of it.

A lot of small dogs were making hay riding these easy shorts on certain economic events, shorting the miners and metals.  

And the big dogs were overdue to serve them up a 'Wile E. Coyote moment' and remind them who runs Bartertown.

We are becoming a nation of victims and con men. 

But the autumn day today was a gift from God.

And for this I am grateful, as we are all.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - How To Say Goodbye - Payrolls Report Tomorrow

 

“One day an aged beggar, covered with ulcers and almost naked, stretched out his hand, and Martin, seeing the Divine in him, took him to his own bed, ignoring to the fact that he was not clean.   One of the brothers, considering he had gone too far in his charity, reproved him.

And Martin replied: ‘Compassion, my dear Brother, is preferable to cleanliness.  Consider that with a little soap I can easily clean my bed sheets, but with even a torrent of tears I could never wash the stain from my soul that harshness toward the unfortunate would bring.’ ”

Arthur M. Granger, Vie du Bienheureux Martin de Porrès, 1941

“I imagine that the first question the priest and Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?'  But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'”

Martin Luther King Jr, Strength To Love

“Everything, even sweeping, scraping vegetables, weeding a garden and attending to the sick can be a prayer, if it is offered to God.”

Martin de Porrès

“What we would like to do is change the world—make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do.  And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute—the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words—we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world.   We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world.”

Dorothy Day

If you do good things for other people, in expectation of thanks or recognition or some favor in return, you may often be disappointed, because gratitude is as rare a thing as compassion.

But if you do all things well, and love your neighbor not for their own sake but for the sake of God's mercy for us, you will never be disappointed, and your life itself may over time become a continual prayer.

Stocks were weak again today in continuation selling from yesterday's 'Fed Hawkish Pivot.'

Gold and silver were lower, although silver showed some resilience.

The Dollar rocketed higher, almost to the 13 handle.

VIX fell.   

Non-Farm Payrolls Report tomorrow.

Good news is bad news, yada yada.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Blues En Mineur - Obvious Wash and Rinse De Luxe

 

"I write to you from a disgraced profession.  Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably to understand the forces behind the financial crisis. Concepts including 'rational expectations,' 'market discipline,' and the 'efficient markets hypothesis' led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices, that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur.  Not all economists believed this – but most did.

Thus the study of financial fraud received little attention.  Practically no research institutes exist; collaboration between economists and criminologists is rare; in the leading departments there are few specialists and very few students.  Economists have soft-pedaled the role of fraud in every crisis they examined, including the Savings & Loan debacle, the Russian transition, the Asian meltdown and the dot.com bubble.

They continue to do so now.  At a conference sponsored by the Levy Economics Institute in New York on April 17, the closest a former Under Secretary of the Treasury, Peter Fisher, got to this question was to use the word 'naughtiness.' This was on the day that the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with fraud."

James K. Galbraith, Why the 'Experts' Failed to See How Financial Fraud Collapsed the Economy, May 16, 2010

"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man a more clever devil."

C. S. Lewis

"The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929



Today was a classic 'wash and rinse' on Wall Street, an operation about as simple and obvious as a street game of 'three card monte.'

It is a waste of time and a kind of complicity to try and rationalize it.  

And on the surface many people seem to be asking for it.  

They can't get enough of con men and quackery.

Whacko-ness and hysteria drive out rational judgement.  By design.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Have a pleasant evening.