Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Raising a Light in the Darkness

 

“The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.”

Harry S. Truman

“I know there is a God— I see the storm coming and I see His hand in it— If He has a place then I am ready.”

John F. Kennedy, scrawled on a prayer breakfast program, from Kennedy's Presidential Doodles to Tour 23 Cities, NYT, May 15, 1964

"We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean."

Lyndon B. Johnson

“In view of the general animal instinct of self-preservation so evident in everyone else, his [Maximilian Kolbe] desire to sacrifice himself for others surprised and intrigued me.”

Rudolf Diem, inmate-physician at Auschwitz

“We became aware someone among us in this spiritual dark night of the soul was raising the standard of love on high.  Someone unknown, like everyone else, tortured and bereft of name and social standing, went to a horrible death for the sake of someone not even related to him.  Therefore it is not true, we cried, that humanity is cast down and trampled in the mud, overcome by oppressors, and overwhelmed by hopelessness.  Thousands of prisoners were convinced the true world continued to exist and that our torturers would not be able to destroy it.  To say that Father Kolbe died for one of us or for that person’s family is too great a simplification. His death was the salvation of thousands.  That’s how we felt about it. That was a shock full of optimism, regenerating and giving strength; we were stunned by his act, which became a mighty explosion of light in the dark camp.”

Jerzy Bielecki, prisoner at Auschwitz, as quoted in A Man for Others, 1982

“The most deadly poison of our times is indifference. The Cross is the school of love.”

Maximilian Kolbe, executed at Auschwitz, August 14, 1941

The markets drifted around today, looking for another impulse from some direction to continue higher, or to give back some of the enthusiasm for a pause and reversal in Federal Reserve interest rate policy.

Gold and silver moved higher, but backed off from their daily high.

Both are poised for breakouts.

VIX drifted a little higher.

Tomorrow is a minor monthly stock option expiration.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Harvest of Consequences

 

"A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The symptoms of fascist thinking can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.

American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.  They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.   They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.  In their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, they do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion."

Henry Wallace, The Danger of Fascism, 1944

"And Abraham said, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not change and repent, even if someone were to rise from the dead.’”

Luke 16:30-31

"It is the time of the harvest, and the reaper cuts into the ripe grain with wide strokes.   Mourning takes up her abode in the country cottages, and there is no one to dry the tears of the mothers.  Whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war.  Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element: the struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist.  Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak. Man is free, to be sure, but without the true God he is defenseless against the principle of evil." 

The White Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich, 1942

"Because of your hard and unrepentant hearts you store up wrath for the Day of the righteous judgment of God, who will render then to each according to what they have done."

Romans 2:5-6

"You murder the prophets, and abuse those whom God has sent to you as messengers.   How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings.  But you would not let me.  As you have willed it, so your house is now yours to command— but is made desolate.’”

Matthew 23:37-38
 

Stocks were digesting their outsized gains from the CPI rally yesterday, finishing up either unchanged or slightly lower.

Gold gave up some of its rally gains as well.

Silver, that bucking bronco, moved higher yet again.

The VIX fell as one might expect.

The Dollar caught a little bounce after its big decline from yesterday.

All of this is as one might expect.

There will be a stock option expiration on Friday.

The exogenous events of the world are seemingly pushed aside.

This insular insouciance may not last.

In the end, there will be a harvest of consequences.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Changing Lanes

 

"This elite-generated social control maintains the status quo because the status quo benefits and validates those who created and sit atop it. People rise to prominence when they parrot the orthodoxy rather than critically analyze it. Intellectual regurgitation is prized over independent thought. Voices of the dispossessed, different, and un(formally)educated are neglected regardless of their morality, import, and validity.

Real change in politics or society cannot occur under the orthodoxy because if it did, it would threaten the legitimacy of the professional class and all of the systems that helped them achieve their status...

Even Alan Greenspan admits that neoclassical economics has flaws in theory and practice, yet it continues to be the dominant model at universities and in society. The faulty belief in the uber-rational, self-interested homo economicus probably persists mainly because it is a projection of the people who inhabit the privileged class.

Corporate externalization of costs are absorbed by society and forgotten when heralding the successes of industrialists and capitalists. Resource extraction and environmental degradation, which are part and parcel of production, consumption, and consequently, economic growth, are downplayed or ignored."

Kristine Mattis, The Cult of the Professional Class


"I don’t think there’s any doubt that quantitative easing enabled the rich and the quick. It was a massive gift… I hope that we do indeed succeed in being able to say in the end the wealth effect was more evenly distributed. I doubt it.”

Richard Fisher, former Dallas Fed President, Apr 7, 2014


"A glance at the situation today only too clearly indicates that equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists. We are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already."

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Commonwealth Club Address, September 1932

The Consumer price information came in a little light this morning.

Stocks soared and went out near the highs.

The Dollar tanked.

VIX dropped back down again.

Gold and silver rallied sharply and held on to most of it.

No trend breakouts in the metals yet.

Blue skies.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Witch of November

 

“These people honor me with their lips, and offer worship with their words, but their hearts are far from me. Their religion is nothing but the rituals and traditions of men, which they memorize. I will awaken them with one shocking blow after another. Their wisdom will be shown as foolish, and all their cleverness will be made worthless. Woe to those who go to great depths to hide their plans from the Lord, who do their work in darkness and think, 'No one can see us, so who will know?’"

Isaiah 29:13-15

"The mystery of Providence is a grace that gives those who accept it a power that is incomprehensible to the calculating mind of this world, that knows only what it can see and measure according to its own pride and willfulness.  And it confounds the ever-fading powers of the restless servants of wickedness in high places. 

His call occurs, and for our part we must rise and follow.  His yoke, though gentle, both constrains our natures, and at times leads us through the desert, those inevitable periods of dryness and self-denial.  But as we may need them, unexpectedly, there are consolations, His gentle kindness and tender mercies.  

This is no complacency, no retreat from the world, no quiet acceptance of evil, but rather a call to action.  We are directed not to linger, to watch and wait for ever more signs and wonders, gifts and consolations, not an endless menu of comforts so that we may be carried effortlessly to heaven, but to bear up with what we have been given, and to do His work, with love.   We are called to a love which is transformative when it is living for others, but a vain preoccupation and a kind of twilight of lingering misery and despair when it is not.

We will contemplate the face of God in the next world, but in this, we are called to action and His work in His creation and among His creatures.   This is the implication of the Incarnation."

Jesse, Providence Is the Hidden Hand of God, 13 December 2015

"Then Jesus said to his followers: ‘The things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to the one through whom they come. It would be better for them to be thrown in the sea with a millstone around their neck, than to lead one of these little ones to sin.'"

Luke 17:1-2

"This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men."

John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman

"We are a generation made drunk with power and a perverse individualism that has been foretold for increasingly dark times.  May God have mercy on any who provide provocation and false teachings to others, and scandalous examples to their brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren, especially because of their willful selfishness, stubborn greed, and foolish pride. And you know who you are, if you are not already completely dead to the life of the Spirit."

Jesse, To a Power Drunk Generation, the Vista of Eternity, 19 January 2015

There was a lot of edgy positioning today in the markets, ahead of the consumer inflation data tomorrow morning.

The charts that show today's action are below.

Tomorrow morning's data may set the tone for the week.

Have a pleasant evening.