Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Hope and Change - The Discreet Charm of Elitism

 

"The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor.  As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel.  Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."

President Grover Cleveland, State of the Union, December 3, 1888

"I think Bill Clinton was the pivotal figure of our times. Before he came along, the market-based reforms of Reaganism were controversial; after Clinton, they were accepted consensus wisdom. Clinton was the leader of the group that promised to end the Democrats’ old-style Rooseveltian politics, that hoped to make the Democrats into a party of white-collar winners, and he actually pulled that revolution off. He completed the Reagan agenda in a way the Republicans could not have dreamed of doing—signing trade agreements, deregulating Wall Street, getting the balanced budget, the ’94 crime bill, welfare reform. He almost got Social Security partially privatized, too.  A near miss [Miss Lewinsky that is] on that one.

He remade our party of the left (such as it is) so that it was no longer really identified with the economic fortunes of working people. Instead it was about highly educated professional-class winners, people whose good fortunes the Clintonized Democratic Party now regarded as a reflection of their merit. Now it was possible for the Democratic Party to reach out to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, and so on. This was something relatively new for a left party in the industrialized world, and it was quickly adopted by other left parties in other countries, most notably 'New Labour' in the UK.  Unfortunately, this strategy has little to offer the people who used to be the Democratic Party’s main constituents except scolding.  It merely assumes that they have, as the ’90s saying went, nowhere else to go."

Seymour Hersh, A Conversation on US Politics with Thomas Frank, July 13, 2023

"The Press of the United States?  Its function is to serve the established by moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it.  I know nothing that I may say can influence you.  You have no souls to be influenced.  You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats.  There is no Republican Party.  There is no Democratic Party.   You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy.  You talk verbosely in antiquated terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while you wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1907

Hope and change.

Right...

Stocks slumped a bit today on a dose of reality out of the earnings reports.

It was just a little leak compared to the recent 'AI-fueled' bubble action, so the bulloney boys are undaunted.

In the spirit of trend reversals, the Dollar rallied, and gold and silver lost ground.

There will be a stock option expiration tomorrow.

FOMC next week.

They never see it coming.  Because they think that they and their friends are it, above it all, blessed with the discreet charm of an effete and anachronistic elitism, the old shibboleth of 'class.'

“Religion, opium for the people.  To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and serfdom, it promised a reward in an afterlife.  And now we are witnessing a transformation.  A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death–the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”  

Czeslaw Milosz

Lessons unlearned bring old and familiar consequences, familiar at least to those who study history, and don't choose to consider it to be beneath them.

In the end, it is never between you and them, but between you and God.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Living in the Dispensation of the Unspeakable

 

"The root of all sin is pride, superbia. I want to be my own law, I have a right to my self, my hatred and my desires, my life and my death.   The mind and flesh of man are set on fire by pride; for it is precisely in his wickedness that man wants to be as God."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"And they treat the wounds of my people falsely saying peace, peace, where there is no peace."

Jeremiah 8:11

"You shall not give any of your children as a sacrifice to Molech, nor shall you profane the name of your God by honoring idols."

Leviticus 18:21

"With full knowledge and understanding they [the Carthiginians] themselves offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan; but should she utter a single moan or let fall a single tear, she had to forfeit the money, and her child was sacrificed nevertheless; and the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums that the cries of their wailing should not reach the ears of the people."

Plutarch, De Superstitiones

"As everything in what used to be called creation becomes a commodity, human beings begin to look at one another, and at themselves, in a funny way, and they see price tags. The Market is not omnipotent—yet. But the process is under way and it is gaining momentum."

Harvey Cox, The Market as God: Living In the New Dispensation

"They began work at 5:30 and quit at 7 at night.  Children six years old going home to lie on a straw pallet until time to resume work the next morning.  I have seen the hair torn out of their heads by the machinery, their scalps torn off, and yet not a single tear was shed."

Mary Harris 'Mother' Jones,  reformer, "the most dangerous woman in America"

"The people who belong to this world worshiped the beast.  They are the ones whose names are not written in the Book of Life that belongs to the Lamb."

Revelation 13:8

Stocks were wobbling around again today, trying to rally but falling back to unchanged at the end.

Gold was slightly  lower, silver slightly higher.

The VIX was flattish.

The Dollar gain a little.

There will be a stock option expiration on Friday.

It is in healing the little ones that we heal ourselves.

And it is by choosing to oppress his innocents that we cause our Lord to weep, not for them, but for us.

"I will put a new heart and a new spirit within you; I will take your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.  I will put My spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My ways, and you will know My judgements and do them."

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Ship of Fools - Lingering at Another Minsky Moment

 

“The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Adam Smith

"I write to you from a disgraced profession. Economic theory, as widely taught since the 1980s, failed miserably to understand the forces behind the financial crisis.  Concepts including 'rational expectations,' 'market discipline,' and the 'efficient markets hypothesis' led economists to argue that speculation would stabilize prices, that sellers would act to protect their reputations, that caveat emptor could be relied on, and that widespread fraud therefore could not occur.  Not all economists believed this – but most did.

Thus the study of financial fraud received little attention.   Practically no research institutes exist; collaboration between economists and criminologists is rare; in the leading departments there are few specialists and very few students.  Economists have soft-pedaled the role of fraud in every crisis they examined, including the Savings & Loan debacle, the Russian transition, the Asian meltdown and the dot.com bubble.

They continue to do so now.  At a conference sponsored by the Levy Economics Institute in New York on April 17, the closest a former Under Secretary of the Treasury, Peter Fisher, got to this question was to use the word 'naughtiness.'  This was on the day that the SEC charged Goldman Sachs with fraud."

James K. Galbraith, Why the 'Experts' Failed to See How Financial Fraud Collapsed the Economy, May 16, 2010

"There is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman.

The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the 'last thing standing' between us and the end of the world.   It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability.   Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system.  Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue.

I think what we need in order to restore some kind of sense of fairness is not the final triumph of markets over the body and soul of humanity, but something that confronts markets, and that refuses to think of itself as a brand."

Thomas Frank, 2016

 

Stocks managed to shake off some early gloom and rallied in the afternoon.

The Dollar chopped sideways, finishing largely unchanged.

Gold and silver rallied sharply.

The VIX fell slightly.

Earnings continue rolling in, for what they are worth.

Did I mention that there will be a stock option expiration on Friday.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Banquet of Consequences

 

“It was not curiosity that killed the goose who laid the golden egg, but an insatiable greed that devoured common sense.  If there are damned souls in hell, it is because men blind themselves.”

E. A. Bucchianeri

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

"You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here. Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart.”

John Connolly, The Infernals

"Not Nero, but God, rules the world."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis

"Everyone knows that plagues have a way of recurring throughout history, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that crash down on us out of the sky. There have always been plagues and wars, yet they always take us by surprise. When war breaks out people say it's stupid and won't last long. Stupidity has a knack of getting in the way, which we would see if not wrapped up in ourselves. In this our townsfolk were like everybody else— they did not believe in plagues."

Albert Camus, The Plague

 

There will be a stock index option expiration on Friday.

Stocks were in rally mode today.

The Dollar was flat.

Gold and silver were largely unchanged.

We are entering earnings season in earnest.

I think the theme for the rest of this decade and the next will be 'consequences.'

Have a pleasant evening.