Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Liberty Dies At the Hands of a Savage Few

 

"Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same.  For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land.

What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice?  We sought liberty; freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves.  This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning.

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.   And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women?  It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes.  That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. 

A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few, as we have learned to our sorrow."

Judge Learned Hand, 21 May 1944


“The world says: 'You have needs— satisfy them. You have as much right to it as the rich and the mighty. Do not hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.' This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, and for the poor, envy and murder.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov


"Freedom is not the ability to do whatever we wish when we wish however we wish, to serve our passions as ends unto themselves, to be rude and demeaning to those who we think are weaker at the moment.   This self indulgence is the act of small and mean spirited souls when they yearn to show that they have a little power.

True freedom is to know what is good, what is the right thing to do, and to have the will to do it, even when it goes against our selfish inclinations. It is to free ourselves from fear and all those things that hold us down, which prevent us from finding and fulfilling our part in the great renewal of creation and the triumph of life over death, of being over nothingness.

The most powerful in the eyes are the world are often the most enslaved, victims of basest passions, servants to the most undeserving and meanest of ambitions, lashing out in their insatiable misery.  With obeisance they serve and nurture the willfulness that delivers them first up to slavery to themselves, and then to darker powers, and finally into the jaws of self destruction.

Jesse, A Light on the Road to Damascus, December 2010

 

Truth dies from the neglect of many, and thereafter liberty, at the hands of a savage few.

The adults have taken a long holiday weekend, and left the markets on this holiday shortened day in the hands of the most junior, who are under strict instructions to do as little as possible.

And so we see a flatness across the markets.

Have a pleasant holiday here in the US.

And for the rest of the world, please try to carry on without us.

See you on Wednesday.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Painting the Tape - Non-Farm Payrolls Next Friday

 

"It is hard to imagine a more inherently ineffective system of capital and resource allocation than crony capitalism.  It is like playing a game in which the rules are rigged to deliver most of the money in the system to a relative minority of insiders, thereby bankrupting all their customers.

Greed compels the materially obsessed to obtain the greatest piles of chips, but in the long term renders their chips to be almost worthless because they are unable to stop their fraud and plundering, even when it is in their best interests.  

They are not governed by rationality or conscience or even common sense.  For periods of time oligarchies are able to survive in an uneasy equilibrium enforced by power, but ultimately these wickedly wealthy wither and die on their great piles of gains."

Jesse, Crony Capitalism: The Fed's Frankenstein, 17 December 2010

"Proclaim the truth and do not be silent in fear. We have had enough pressure to be silent. Cry out with a thousand voices. The world is rotten because of silence. You know that every evil is founded in the love of self. Self-love is a fog that takes away the light of reason, which sustains itself by the light of faith. One is not lost without the other.

Love transforms us into what we love.  Out of darkness is born the light.   Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire."

Catherine of Siena

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.  Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense you make long prayers; therefore you will receive greater condemnation.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, but neglect the weightier provisions of the Law: justice and mercy and faithfulness.  You blind guides, who strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, so that the outside of it may become clean also.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. In this way, you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. You serpents, you brood of vipers.  How will you escape the sentence of hell?

Matthew 23:13-33

Stocks managed to go out with a bang, ending the 2nd quarter and the first half of the year.

The spokesmodels were shaking their pom-poms, beckoning the public to get on board the rally train. 

The Fat Lady may not yet be singing, but she is most likely warming up.

The VIX continues to show complacency in the face of interest rate and recession risks.

Gold and silver bounced on Dollar weakness.

Tuesday will be the 4^th of July holiday and the markets will be closed.   

Monday the 3^rd will be a light half day, with most of the adults already gone on holiday.

As you may recall the story of the latter part of the 1930s was a conservative Supreme Court overturning public programs of the New Deal on constitutional grounds.

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

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Irresponsibles - End of the 2nd Quarter

 

"There is now abundant evidence of widespread, unpunished criminal behavior in the financial sector.  The evidence is now overwhelming that over the last thirty years, the U.S. financial sector has become a rogue industry.   As its wealth and power grew, it subverted America’s political system (including both political parties), government, and academic institutions in order to free itself from regulation.  The financial sector is now a parasitic and destabilizing industry that constitutes a major drag on American economic growth. The financial sector is the core of a new oligarchy that has risen to power over the past thirty years, and that has profoundly changed American life."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation, 2012

"The market ideology is now the new form of imperial power and many of us, without any critical reflection, have signed onto that and organized our lives in that way so we do not have any time, energy or capacity for the things that are rightly important to us"

Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks to Power

"Nations that have been blessed can blind themselves to their excesses and offenses, while taking sole credit for the blessings that have been given to them.  And so they misuse their power and wealth and great fortunes, granted to them by God, to oppress and subjugate others.  And in their hardened hearts they hold their selfishness aloft, profanely, as the greatest good, the exceptional— even as they oppress and plunder and murder their own and others.  Until at long last God humbles them, and breaks the backbone of their power."

Jesse, Lazarus and the Rich Man, 12 March 2020

"God has no pleasure in afflicting us, but He will not keep back even the most painful chastisement if He can but thereby guide His beloved child to come home.  A believer may pass through much affliction, and yet secure very little blessing from it all.  Abiding in Christ is the secret of securing all that the Father meant the chastisement to bring us."

Andrew Murray

 

Stocks turned in a mixed performance today as big cap techs lagged and the broader market moved higher.

Gold was slammed early as the Dollar rocketed higher, but managed to end the day unchanged. 

Silver gave up a little ground but remained positive for the week.

The VIX contines to wallow in complacency.

Let's see how we stumble into the quarterly close tomorrow.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Leviathan

 

"Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues."

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan


"Beginning in the late 1970s, America's major industries discovered, and began to exploit, a critical weakness in the American national system, one that enabled them to escape or at least soften competitive discipline.  Stated bluntly, they discovered that buying people off was much easier than doing their job properly.  It turned out that American politicians, academics, regulators, auditors, and political parties were highly corruptible.

The structural concentration of American industry has continued over the last thirty years. At the same time, economic power in America also became more concentrated at the individual level, with a small number of households owning the majority of America's financial wealth and providing a high fraction of individual political campaign contributions.  The combined result is that the United States is increasingly controlled by an amoral oligarchy that has progressively corrupted the federal government and the political system, including both political parties.

This political corruption has in turn further entrenched the wealthy and the financial sector, and has now become a major driver of America's economic and social decline.  The wealthy are safe from the effects of this decline, at least for now; indeed, they have benefited from it.   They are also increasingly insulated by parallel, private systems for education, security, infrastructure, and financial services. The absence of significant political or social protest in response to these changes has emboldened them to continue.

At the same time, and in part as a result of these changes, the bottom two-thirds of the American population has become less educated, less informed, less prosperous, angrier, and ever more cynical about its political leadership.  There is good reason for this cynicism.  In their stomachs, most Americans know that their leaders are lying to them and that the system is rigged.  The American people have become increasingly scared, frustrated, and angry.  In this environment it has proven all too easy for politicians, who are so easily hired by America's new oligarchy, to exploit popular anger and fatigue while actually delivering oligarchic policy.

Anyone who has ever lived or worked in a corrupt dictatorship knows what happens. When the system is rigged, when ordinary citizens are powerless, and when whistle-blowers are pariahs at best, three things happen.  First, the worst people rise to the top.  They behave appallingly, and they wreak havoc. Second, people who could make productive contributions to society are incented to become destructive, because corruption is far more lucrative than honest work.   And third, everyone else pays, both economically and emotionally; people become cynical, selfish, and fatalistic.  Often they go along with the system, but they hate themselves for it.  They play the game to survive and feed their families, but both they and society suffer."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America, 2012


The moderns have cultivated a taste for perpetual war, not only for the profit they can find in it, but the power and license it extends to their deceits.  

Deceits which they have come to love, over time, as an end in themselves, as an expression of the will to power.

As he often does Charles Ferguson boldly lays it out there for anyone to plainly read.  

Perhaps this is why no one in the 'establishment' wants anything to do with him and his ideas, or anyone else who casts the current state of affairs to the public with a similar moral clarity.

Stocks were wobbly a bit with another failed rally attempt. 

Gold and silver had the kind of downward pressure that so commonly follows an option expiration, whereby the resolve of the new holders of contracts from in-the-money call options is tested.

 The Dollar rose.

The VIX declined again.  

A posture of complacency is stubbornly maintained to support the attempt to hand off positions in equities to those whom the wiseguys and insiders consider to be greater fools.

The procurers of mispriced risk are, in the closing days of the second quarter, increasingly audacious.

But what will it be like when the music stops?

Have a pleasant evening.