Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Bank of Japan Roils Markets - Christmas Week Blizzard of 2022

 

“No servant can serve two masters.  For you will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other.  You cannot serve both God and greed.”

Luke 16:15

"Sweating in his cell in the evening, Göring was defensive and deflated and not very happy over the turn the trial was taking.  We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

'Why, of course, the people don't want war,' Göring shrugged.  'Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece.  Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany.  That is understood.

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.  That is easy.  All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.  It works the same way in any country.'"

Gustave M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Samuel Johnson

"The inability (unwillingness) 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.  What is called 'fellow traveling' was primarily business interest: one pursues one’s own advantage before all else and, simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much."

Theodor Adorno

“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”

C. S. Lewis

The Bank of Japan shocked markets with a change in stance on their bond rates, fueling a rally in the Yen.

And that in turn took the DX Dollar Index lower.

Gold and silver rallied sharply.

Stocks had a ranging day but managed to hold a little bounce after yesterday's drop.

Accuweather warns that the central US is in for a pre-Christmas blizzard later this week. 

Be careful out there and stay warm.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Heal Our Blindness

 

“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

"The selfishness of an age that has devoted itself to the mere cult of pleasure has tainted the whole human race with an error that makes all our acts more or less lies against God.  The devil is no fool.  He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell.  He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. 

And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not by realities but by shadows; not by clarity and substance, but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis.  And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything."

Thomas Merton

"The world would be better off if people tried to be better.  And people would become better if they stopped trying to be better off.  For when everybody tries to become better off, nobody is better off.  But when everybody tries to become better, everybody is better off.  And everybody would be what we ought to be if everybody tried to be what we want the other one to be. 

What we give to the poor, for Christ's sake, is what we carry with us when we die." 

Peter Maurin

Stocks slumped in this first trading day of the Christmas holiday week.

Chalk up another leg down, from the howler of a failed rally on the 'CPI news' last week.

Trading was light and a bit lackluster.  I suspect many of the adults have already taken their gains for the year and gone on an extended holiday vacation.

Is Santa going to be walkabout on Wall Street this year?

Almost a quarter million ounces of gold bullion went walkabout from the Comex certified warehouses in Hong Kong. 

The Dollar went sideways.

Gold and silver slipped a bit lower.

The stock bulls would like to find a footing and drift a little higher this week. 

Let's see if reality meets their expectations.

Lord, heal our blindness, pierce our hardened hearts, enlighten our minds, and break the chains of our pride and self-deception, so that we may choose repentance, forgiveness, and life.

Have a pleasant evening.

Will God Dwell With His Creatures on Earth

 

"Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveler, thousands of miles away, back to his own fire-side and his quiet home.”

Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

“God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken. The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect, and who look forward to something greater to come.

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

"He became what we are, that he might make us what he is."

Athanasius of Alexandria

"Our Lord has no body now but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which He looks with compassion on this world, yours are the feet with which He walks to do good. Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world."

Teresa of Avila

"Those of us who are no longer present in body at the Christmas hearth may still be there in spirit with us, as we will some day be with them.  Not bound up in crippling self-pity, not immobilized by faceless fear, not fleeting as a merely morose remembrance, but to be there vitally in our lives as our good angels.

What greater gift could we possibly desire to receive, than the ability to do good, to persevere in love, and to thereby live in the love of those for whom we care and who care for us, always?  That gift is there, if only we will not shut the door of our hearts, and be open to it. 

Christmas is a time of life, remembrance, forgiveness, tolerance, and love. And so God bless us, everyone."

Jesse, 16 December 2015

May God open our hardened hearts, that He may dwell among us.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - $4 Trillion Triple Witch Option Expiration - Caught in a Credibility Trap

 

"Hot money seeks out the conscious mispricing of risk.  Capital, in the form of both money and personal talent, increasingly flows into malinvestment and the gaming of markets.  

The productive economy languishes, left wanting for the lack of creative resources and attention.  The bubble rises to unsustainable valuations— and fails, and a nation's capital is consumed.   The next five years are not about winning, but surviving."

Jesse, The Men Who Sold the World,  5 August 2019

"When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself.  To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality.   It is to disguise the reality."

John Kenneth Galbraith

“Reality denied comes back to haunt.”

Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

"This elite-generated social control maintains the status quo because the status quo benefits and validates those who created and sit atop it.   People rise to prominence when they parrot the orthodoxy rather than critically analyze it.   Real change in politics or society cannot occur under the orthodoxy because if it did, it would threaten the legitimacy of the professional class and all of the systems that helped them achieve their status."

Kristine Mattis, The Cult of the Professional Class

"The banks engage in fraud for two reasons. First, they profit from swindling the public. Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique. They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions."

Laurence Kotlikoff, When Banksters Buy Regulators and Prosecutors, Forbes, October 21, 2014



And so the last and one of the biggest quarterly option expirations for 2022 comes to an end.

It was, all in all, a wonderfully obvious and heavy-handed wash and rinse of the nation's capital markets.

Stocks slumped and went out on the lows, totally negating the phony CPI headfake rally from early in the week. 

Gold and silver bounced off the drubbing they took yesterday in honor of the expiration.

The Dollar edged a bit higher.

The VIX fell.

And now we slide out to the end of this year on holiday volumes, but with plenty of room for lightly regulated shark tanks to move prices around as they will.

Are you not entertained?

Have a pleasant weekend.