Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Des Petits de Dieu

 

"Wonderful providence indeed which is so silent, yet so efficacious, so constant, so unerring.  This is what baffles the power of Satan.   He cannot discern the Hand of God in what goes on; and though he would fain meet it and encounter it, in his mad and blasphemous rebellion against heaven, he cannot find it.

Crafty and penetrating as he is, yet his thousand eyes and his many instruments avail him nothing against the majestic serene silence, the holy imperturbable calm which reigns through the providences of God.  He makes a guess here, or does a bold act there, but all in the dark. 

If even devils, sagacious as they are, spirits by nature and experienced in evil, cannot detect His hand while He works, how can we hope to see it except by that way which the devils cannot take, by loving faith."

John Henry Newman

"The Lord did not come to make a display. He came to heal and to teach suffering humanity. For one who wanted to make a display the thing would have been to appear and dazzle the beholders.

But for Him Who came to heal and to teach, the way was not just to appear here, but to place Himself in the service of those who needed Him, and to be made known to them as they could accept it, not diminishing the value of His Divine presence by overwhelming their capacity to receive it."

Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, 335 AD

“There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed.  All that takes place within us, around us, or through us, contains and conceals His divine action.  All souls must admire and respect one another, walking along our path to the same goal, united in purpose and with the help of God's plan which, in its great variety, is in us all.

To escape the pain caused by regret for the past or fear about the future, this is the rule to follow: leave the past to the infinite mercy of God, the future to His good Providence, and give the present wholly to His love by being faithful to His grace.”

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, L'Abandon a la Providence Divine

“Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist— and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have life.”

Léon Bloy

After the shockingly high ADP Jobs Report the official BLS Non-Farm Payrolls report came in shockingly low.

How much of a surprise was this?   Let me subpoena a few VIP trading books please and I will tell you.

Yeah buddy.

The Dollar fell sharply.

Gold and silver staged a small rally higher.

Stocks bounced back from yesterday's lows.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Have a pleasant weekend. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Dirty Jobs Done Cheap - ADP Report Comes in Hot

 

“Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.”

Henri Barbusse, Le Feu: journal d'une escouade, 1916

"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell

"Wars do not usually result from just causes but from pretexts.   There probably never was a just cause why men should slaughter each other by wholesale, but there are such things as ambition, selfishness, folly, madness, in communities as in individuals, which become blind and bloodthirsty, not to be appeased save by havoc, and generally by the killing of somebody else than themselves.

You don’t know the horrible aspects of war.   I’ve been through two wars and I know.  I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies.  Some of you young men think that war is all glamour and glory, but let me tell you, boys, it is all Hell."

William Tecumseh Sherman, address to the Michigan Military Academy, 19 June 1879

"One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them."

Thomas Sowell

This morning the ADP Jobs report came in smoking hot, prompting the markets to start fretting about the Non-Farm Payrolls report tomorrow morning, and its effect on the decisions of the Fed.

This is beyond doubt a Fed-centric bubble market.

The Dollar and the metals fell.

Stocks fell.

VIX moved a bit higher.

Hi ho.

Let's see how the numbers come in tomorrow morning.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Oaths of Shepherds

 

"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


"What is a proper disposition towards life?  It is to accept God as a loving father, who is full of tenderness and forgiveness for us, despite our willful blunders and hardened hearts. He yearns for us, as a father and mother yearn for the return of their most beloved child.

It is to accept that we are not lost, we are not abandoned. We are wandering like a wayward child, full of our own headstrong delusions. And our father waits expectantly, calling out for us through the darkness. He sends the spirit out to find us, a light to find our way home to him out of the gloom of the night."

Jesse, Acceptance and Forgiveness, 2 January 2018

 

Stocks were trading weakly for the start of the second half.

The Dollar finished slightly higher.

Gold and silver were under pressure after an early rally attempt.

There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday.

To take a solemn oath to uphold justice, and protect the innocent under the law, and then to break that oath, especially for personal preference or gain of money or power, is a terrible offense against the spirit. 

It spawns a legion of lies and self-deceptions.

Unresolved and unrepentant, it is a sickness unto death, a form of slow spiritual suicide.

And in our exceptional land it is gradually becoming a pandemic of malfeasance and misery.

Have a pleasant evening.

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.