Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - On the Road to Emmaus - Comex Precious Metals Options Tomorrow

 

‘I am the good shepherd.  The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  The hired hand is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep.  So when he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away.  Then the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it.  The man runs away because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.

I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me – just as the Father knows me and I know the Father – and I lay down my life for the sheep.  I have other sheep that are not of this fold.  I must bring them also.  They too will listen to my voice, and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.'

John 10:11-16

“Woe to the shepherds, who have been feeding only themselves.  You eat the fat, you take the wool, and you slaughter the fattest animal, but you do not feed the flock.  You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bandaged the injured or brought back the strays or looked for the lost; rather, you have ruled them with harshness and tyranny."

Ezekiel 34:1-4

"We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.  With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. 

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.  Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures."

Abraham Lincoln, Baltimore Maryland, April 18, 1864

Stocks waffled around today, ahead of the start of the big Tech earnings reports this week.

The Dollar fell.

Gold and silver rallied a bit.

VIX popped and flopped.

There will be a Comex option expiration tomorrow.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - So Shall They Reap

 

“National Socialism was a revulsion by my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government—against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving.  It was the final fruit of the common man's repudiation of 'the rascals'.  Its motif was, 'Throw them all out.'

I fooled myself.   I had to.  Everybody has to.  If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it.  But I didn't want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent. I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community.”

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, 1933-1945

"The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny. The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."

Michael Parenti

“'I just got this down from upstairs — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office— today.'   And he said, 'This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.'  I said, 'Is it classified?'  He said, 'Yes, sir.'   I said, 'Well, don’t show it to me.'”

General Wesley Clark, Seven Countries in Five Years, 2007

"Be not deceived, for God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man sows, so shall he reap."

Galatians 6:7

"The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well.   Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them.  Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich.   Plunder, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus

Ladies and gentlemen, another intraday wash and rinse for the stock index option expiration.

The Dollar rocketed higher, and gold and silver were slammed.

Stocks plunged.

And by the end of the day everything was all flat again, except for gold and silver perhaps.

The VIX fell again into the diminished expectation of uncertainty.

There will be a precious metals option expiration this coming Tuesday the 25^th on the Comex.

Need little, want less, love more.  For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Beware the leaven of the Pharisees, which is a hollow, pretentious hypocrisy.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Oligarchy Is Audacious

 

"The reputation of economics and economists, never high, has been a victim of the crash of 2008.  An even more serious criticism is that the economic policy debate that followed seems only to replay the similar debate after 1929. The issue is budgetary austerity versus fiscal stimulus, and the positions of the protagonists are entirely predictable from their previous political allegiances.

The preposterous claim that deviations from market efficiency were not only irrelevant to the recent crisis but could never be relevant is the product of an environment in which deduction has driven out induction and ideology has taken over from observation.

The belief that models are not just useful tools but also are capable of yielding comprehensive and universal descriptions of the world has blinded its proponents to realities that have been staring them in the face. That blindness was an element in our present crisis, and conditions our still ineffectual responses.

Economists – in government agencies as well as universities – were obsessively playing Grand Theft Auto while the world around them was falling apart."

John Kay, An Essay on the State of Economics, October 4, 2011


"With a monetary expansion intended to help cure a credit bubble crisis that is not accompanied by significant financial market reform, systemic rebalancing, and government programs to cure and correct past abuses of the productive economy through financial engineering, the hot money given by the Fed and Treasury to the banking system will not flow into the real economy, but instead will seek high beta returns in financial assets. 

The monetary stimulus of the Fed and the Treasury to help the economy is similar to relief aid sent to a suffering Third World country.   It is intercepted and seized by a despotic regime and allocated to its local elite and warlords, with very little going to help the people.

Those who have taken a huge share of the last three bubbles would like to stop the bubble now, keep their gains, and return to a system of fiscal restraint with light taxation on their windfall of assets. So why does this not just simply happen?

It is difficult to reduce a population of free men into debt slaves, without risking a significant reaction. Therefore, it seems most likely that the government and the Fed will try to 'muddle through' for the time being, and look for an exogenous event [such as a war] to break the stalemate."

Jesse, October 2009


“Stand up for what you believe, even if you are standing alone.”

Sophie Scholl

The transfer of wealth through cycles of bubble and bust continues unabated.

The oligarchy is audacious.

Stocks slid lower.

Gold bounced while silver remained flat.

VIX chopped sideways.

The Dollar was moving sideways.

Expiration tomorrow. 

The spice must flow.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Cycle of Selfish Indifference and Objectifying The Other

 

“By intensity of hatred nations create in themselves the characters they imagine in their enemies.  Hence it is that all passionate conflicts result in the interchange of characteristics.”

George William Russell

"What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed people will not know who is responsible, and when the problems get bad enough some one person will come forward and say: ‘Give me total power and I will solve this problem.’"

David Souter, US Supreme Court Justice

“We cannot understand Fascism, but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard, because what happened can happen again.  For this reason, it is everyone's duty to reflect on what happened. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous.  More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

Primo Levi

"Communism and fascism or naziism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority."

James A. C. Brown

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

"A small number of zealous advocates can have an impact on the law that defies both science and conventional wisdom.”

Paul A. Lombardo, Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell

"The perpetrators were scholars, doctors, nurses, justice officials, the police and the health and workers’ administration.   The victims were poor, desperate, rebellious or in need of help.  They came from psychiatric clinics and childrens' hospitals, from old age homes and welfare institutions, from military hospitals and internment camps."

 Tiergartenstraße 4, Berlin, Commemorative Tablet

Stocks did the usual drop and then drift back up, going out nearly unchanged at the close.

Earnings are starting to come in more heavily now.

The VIX has fallen to a level not seen since the beginning of 2022.

Gold and silver were slammed this morning in a preliminary observance of the upcoming stock options expiration.

They recovered into the close.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

The Dollar did a similar pop and drop.

Proceed with caution. 

To paraphrase George William Russell, we become what we hate.

And then we sacrifice the weak and the helpless and the other to the Moloch of our passionate emptiness. 

The Iowa Senate decided in an early morning decision to roll back their anti-abuse of child labor laws on behalf of the Molochs of business. 

Have a pleasant evening.