Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Desolate Delusion of Evil - Three Day Weekend

 

"What is good?  All that enhances the feeling of power, the will to power, and the power itself in man.  What is bad?  All that proceeds from weakness.  What is happiness?  The feeling that power is increasing— that resistance has been overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence.  The first principle of our humanism is that the weak and the failures shall perish.  And they ought to be helped to perish.   What is more harmful than any vice?   Active pity for all failure and weakness — Christianity."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

"Satan's monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament.  Certainly, he has no choice.  He has chosen to have no choice.  He has wished to be himself, and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted.  The Hell he carries with him is, in one sense, a Hell of infinite boredom.

To admire Satan, then, is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."

C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942

"All of Hell, which seemed so immense to the narrator, would fit into a practically microscopic space in Heaven.  Lewis [The Great Divorce] is illustrating here the Augustinian principle that sin is the state of being incurvatus in se (curved in around oneself).  It is the reduction of reality to the infinitely small space of the ego’s concerns and preoccupations."

Robert Barron, Self-Obsession and Hell, 2016

"Wherever you are going this morning, my friends, show the world that you're going with truth.  You are going with justice, you are going with goodness, and you will have an eternal companionship.  And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you, but you'll go on anyhow.  But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow, before the gods of evil."

Martin Luther King, Ebenezer Baptist Church, 5 November 1967

“I have been to many countries and seen much poverty and suffering.  Everywhere I go people tell me of their hardships and struggles, and ask for help, and I give what I can.  But of all the countries I have been to, the poorest one I have been to is America. America suffers most from the poverty of loneliness."

Teresa of Calcutta

"This is not capitalism.   Capitalism does not demand that we destroy human lives for the sake of maximizing profits using any and all means which that end justifies.  The Market is not an end to itself. The Market is not God.  This is beyond capitalism.  This is tyranny.  It is a pernicious form of selfishness and self-indulgence, a privileged arrogance.

To paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith, 'The modern economist is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior justification for selfishness.'

And this is not a choice between poverty for the sake of truth and a very comfortable living, but the overwhelming need for a fabulous, ostentatious wealth and power that seems to have become the god of  this generation.   And it is a sickness, a sickness unto death."

Jesse, The Careerists and the Banality of Evil, 24 July 2012

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You who murder the prophets, and abuse those whom God has sent to you.   How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings.  But you were not willing.  So your house is now yours to command— but is made desolate.”

Matthew 23:37-38

The markets were well positioned by the week's action for today's relatively quiet quad witch option expiration.

Stocks were off a bit.

The VIX declined, again to the lows.

Gold and silver held their ground.

The Dollar was up a bit.

The cafe has always enjoyed a wide international clientele, but for the first time another country has edged out the US in readership over a sustained period of time.  It is the city-state of Singapore.

This has been going on for a month or so and I have no idea what may be driving it.  I have considered a few scenarios but since I don't use any analytics or tracking except the very basic macro traffic counts that are included with Blogger it is only speculation. 

US markets will be closed on Monday for the 'Juneteenth' national holiday which commemorates the end of slavery.

Need little, want less, love more.  

For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Markets Smash and Grab - Die Finanzwirtschaft Über Alles

 

”The barbarian hopes — and that is the very mark of him — that he can have his cake and eat it too.  He will consume what civilisation has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.

We sit by and watch the barbarian.  We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid.  We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh.  

But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

Hilaire Belloc, The Barbarians

“Pity the nation that raises not its voice, except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero and aims to rule the world with force and by torture."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, New Poems, City Lights

"It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste.  But in practice such a society could not remain stable. 

For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupified by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.  In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance."

George Orwell, 1984

"Plunderers of the world, when nothing remains on the lands to which they have laid waste by wanton thievery, they search out across the seas. 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. Robbery, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus, Agricola

 

It looked like the revenge of the interest rate chicken-hawks this morning as stocks and the metals were plunging.

But tomorrow is a quad witch option expiration, so this was just another algo-driven, bankster smash and grab as part of the ongoing transfer of wealth from producers to the financiers.

Gold and silver set a fairly impressive low early on, which most likely had a harrowing effect on those option holders in the miners and metals.

Same with the major stock indices.

But voila, as the day wore on the rinse ran its cycle into a new wash with higher highs in equities, and a recovery in the metals, with a sharp decline in the Dollar, doulour du monde.

Wax on, wax off.

And so we shamble on into the quad option expiration tomorrow.

What will the wiseguys and pampered princes think of next.

Who cares?

Rejoice, for He is risen.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Fed's 'Super-Hawkish' Pause - Quad Witch Expiration on Friday

 

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.  Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.  Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.  

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty.

Simone Weil

"Kolbe looked directly and intently into the eyes of those entering the cell.  Those eyes of his were always strangely penetrating.  The SS men couldn’t stand his glance, and used to yell at him, Schau auf die erde, nicht auf uns!   Kolbe was a psychic trauma, a shock for the SS men who had to bear his look, a look that hungered not for bread, but to liberate them from evil."

Bruno Borgowiec, prisoner at Auschwitz

“The real conflict is the inner conflict.  Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love.  And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”

Maximilian Kolbe

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

Ephesians 6:12

The spokesmodels were aghast at the 'super-hawkish' manner in which the Fed paused from their crusade to stem supply chain/profit driven inflation today by crushing the real economy as part of The Bubble Part Three.

After the sturm und drang of hawkish angst the markets translated this drama into an intraday wash and rinse.

Gold and silver managed to end the day higher after a thrilling rally and plunge.

VIX fell.

The Dollar dropped again. 

And so Jay Powell had his moment, and then the markets got back to setting up the suckers for the big quad witch option expiration on Friday.

There will be a  rinse for this overbought rally, but not until the time is ripe.

The spice must flow.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Extravagant Fallacy

 

"Those who directed the state in the time of Solon and Cleisthenes did not establish a polity which trained the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and licence to do what they pleased as happiness, but rather a polity which detested and punished such men, and by so doing made all the citizens better and wiser."

Isocrates

"With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made ‘legal.’  Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.”

Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer

"I know that my retirement will make no difference in its [my newspaper's] cardinal principles, that it will always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Joseph Pulitzer

"It’s not that the former Fed boss Greenspan was incompetent that is remarkable. Incompetence is common enough after all, even in important jobs. What’s remarkable is that so many people don’t seem, even now, to get it. Do people just believe high-quality self-justifying blarney? Or is it just that they apparently want to believe that critical jobs in a great country attract great talent by divine right."

Jeremy Grantham, Immoral Hazard, May 22, 2008

"The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. Looking back at that belief during hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud, 'I have found a flaw.'  Congressman Henry Waxman pushed him, responding, 'In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it was not working.'  'Absolutely, precisely,' Greenspan said.  The embrace by America—and much of the rest of the world—of this flawed economic philosophy made it inevitable that we would eventually arrive at the place we are today."

Joseph Stiglitz, Capitalist Fools, January 2009


Stocks continued to rally higher into seriously overbought territory ahead of the FOMC decision tomorrow.

Gold, silver, and the Dollar fell.

VIX declined.

It's really all about how the Fed approaches its expected 'pause' tomorrow and the words that are used to shape the expectations around it.

The Fed has, through a series of overreaching policy errors and regulatory missteps, become the market.

The sweeping under the rug of their most recent insider trading scandal and the abuse of confidential information is appalling.

This will not end well.

Quad witch option expiration on Friday.

Have a pleasant evening.