Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Gauntlet - CPI and FOMC and Stock Option Expiration

 

"You might think that parking your money in a big bank like JP Morgan Chase would insulate you from fraud. It’s just the opposite.  The big banks are the biggest perpetrators of financial fraud – fraud that affects millions of us, either directly or indirectly, on an ongoing basis.  While they are wrist slaps when properly scaled, you can see the list of 'settlements' made between the government and the big banks here.  These 'settlements,' the aftermath of Wall Street's near production of a second Great Depression, entailed not a single criminal indictment.   The top two repositories of banksters, based on the number of settlements, are Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase.

The banks engage in fraud for two reasons.   First, they profit from swindling the public.  Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique.  They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions."

Laurence Kotlikoff, When Banksters Buy Regulators and Prosecutors, Forbes, October 21, 2014

"Let us create a society in which it is easier for people to be good."

Peter Maurin

"The London Gold Pool was the pooling of gold reserves by a group of eight central banks in the United States and seven European countries that agreed on 1 November 1961 to cooperate in maintaining the Bretton Woods System of fixed-rate convertible currencies and defending a gold price of US$35 per troy ounce by interventions in the London gold market.

The central banks coordinated concerted methods of gold sales to balance spikes in the market price of gold as determined by the London morning gold fixing while buying gold on price weaknesses.  The United States provided 50% of the required gold supply for sale.  The price controls were successful for six years until the system became no longer workable.  The pegged price of gold was too low and runs on gold, the British pound, and the US dollar occurred and France decided to withdraw from the pool.  The London Gold Pool collapsed in March 1968.

The London Gold Pool controls were followed with an effort to suppress the gold price with a two-tier system of official exchange and open market transactions, but this gold window collapsed in 1971 with the Nixon Shock, and resulted in the onset of the gold bull market which saw the price of gold appreciate rapidly to US$850 in 1980."

Wikipedia, The London Gold Pool

“God meant things to be much easier than we have made them.”

Dorothy Day


Stocks managed to extend their gains.

Gold and silver lost a little more ground.

VIX is docile.

The Dollar was nominally unchanged.

This is a big week for events.

Tomorrow we will see the latest CPI data. 

On Wednesday there will be an FOMC rate decision.  

Expectations are for no action but maybe some notable words.

And on Friday we will have the big quad witch December stock option expiration.

Let's see what happens.

Oh yeah, and there are some brutal wars ongoing in the real world.

Banks 'r Us.  Policy errors to infinity.

Our oligarchy is audacious.

Have a pleasant evening.

The Lesser of Two Evils Is Still Evil

At the extreme the methods of both the left and the right become increasingly similar, even though their nominal objectives may differ greatly. 

Through varying degrees of force and fraud, invoking necessity and 'the lesser of two evils', dissent is repressed, and discussion is silenced.  They no longer serve the public, or principles, or higher ideals. .

They are enthralled to power and money, and serve themselves, above all else. 

"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty. 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. As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers, with approving smiles."

Simone Weil

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - When Truth Is an Enemy of the State - 'Pivot Party'

 

“Bizarrely, it’s precisely the jobs that shift money around – creating next to nothing of tangible value – that net the best salaries.  The Machiavellis are one step ahead.  They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition.  They’re shameless.”

Rutger Bregman, De Meeste Mensen Deugen, September 2019

"The light has come into the world, and people love the darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil."

John 3:19

"The great banks and insurance houses where surplus wealth is kept among us.  That surplus wealth, produced by the cheap labor of 'peasants', must now be protected from the peasants by law and by military force.  We labor and labor and labor for stuff that never satisfies us.  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, our humanness."

Walter Brueggemann, Truth To Power, 2013

"America is caught in a confidence or credibility trap, in which the changes, investigations, and reforms necessary to restore trust to an economy or market are rendered unlikely because doing so would expose a pervasive corruption that the principals fear would destroy any remaining trust. It could also endanger the careers of politicians and business people who may have permitted and even appeared to facilitate the control fraud that caused the financial crisis in the first place. Personal risk trumps public stewardship. The fraudulent activity is covered up and therefore continues, crowding out most productive business investment and activity which cannot possibly hope to compete with the highly profitable fraudulent activity and asset bubbles under such opaque and uncertain circumstances."

Jesse, America Is Caught in a Credibility Trap, 22 January 2011

"The ultimate purpose of crime is to establish an endless empire. It seeks a state of complete insecurity and anarchy, founded upon the tainted ideals of a world thought doomed to annihilation. When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven mad by fear and horror, and when chaos has become the supreme law, then the time for the empire of lawlessness will have come."

Friedrich Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933

 

There was an interesting divergence, almost schizoid in its magnitude, in the markets today.

The Non-Farm Payrolls report came in much more strongly than expected.

And because of this interest rates rose, the Dollar strengthened, and the precious metals were hit hard.

But at the same time risk assets like stocks rallied, after an initial plunge, and the VIX fell.

The trope being parroted among the spokesmodels was a 'pivot party.'   This is the expectations that the Fed will start cutting rates again sooner rather than later.

And those who would think themselves wise nod their heads knowingly.   The public obviously does not share in their gnosis, their financial enlightenment, as inferior beings.

Wealth is not created at the top, flowing down to the public.  Rather, the prosperity of the real economy is lured to the top, to be devoured.

These are not wealth creators.  They are deceivers and destroyers, wielding enormous influence and power.

The madness advances, slowly, but with a purpose.

The US chose to use its veto power at the Security Council today to block the call by the UN for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.

The wash is nearly done. 

Nemesis awaits. 

But things are so confusing.  You say this, but look at that, and that, and what this one says.  

What is truth?

And so of course I send these things to my friends and children, just so they can be informed.  

You know exactly what to do, explicitly.  But you choose as you will.  And you close your ears and willfully harden your hearts, and refuse to serve.

"The Lord requires you to act justly, and to love kindness and mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."

Micah 6:8

If you make this your guiding light, your measure of what is good, you will not fall away.

But if you choose to serve what you love the most, the darkness in yourself, then you will find that you may be free, and that your house is now yours, but is made desolate.  And in misery you wallow among swine.

Time to come home.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - They Shall Eat the Bitter Fruit

 

"Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues.  The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries.  It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, 'the greatest'."

Sydney J. Harris, Pieces of Eight, September 1982

“Exceptionalism— the view that the United States has a right to impose its will because it knows more, sees farther, and lives on a higher moral plane than other nations— was to them not a platitude, but the organizing principle of daily life and global politics... With a glance, a nod, and a few words, without consulting anyone other than the President, the brothers could mobilize the full power of the United States anywhere in the world."

Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, October 2013

"Having fallen from the eternal, the evil one's desires are endless, insatiable. Having fallen from pure Being, he is driven by the desire to possess, to fill his emptiness. But the problem is insoluble, always. He is compelled to have and to hold, to possess and consume, and nothing else. All he takes, he destroys. Certainly he rules the material, as he is called the Prince of this World in the gospels."

Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World,

"Exceptionalism is no virtue, no mark of the chosen, but merely the sin of pride, wearing the silks of rationalization and self-delusion. And this is at the root of every fallen angel, every lost soul, and every failing nation."

Jesse, The Will to Power in the Exceptional, March 2015

"In international conventions and the general literature, genocide has been defined as intentional killing by government of people because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or other indelible group membership.  Power will achieve its murderous potential.  It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."

R. J. Rummel, Death By Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, 1994

"One of the primary characteristics of narcissists is their exaggerated sense of entitlement. In their heavily self-biased opinion, if they want something, by rights it should be theirs.  So, nothing if not opportunistic, they take from public and private coffers alike whatever they think they can get away with.  And given their grandiose sense of self, they're inclined to believe they can get away with most anything.  In their minds their very ability to attain something must certainly mean it was merited."

Leon F. Seltzer, Narcissism: Why It's So Rampant in Politics, 2011

"Therefore they shall eat the bitter fruit of their ways, and be gutted by their own schemes.   For the foolish turn away from me—to death.  For fools are destroyed by their pride and self-satisfaction.  But all who listen to me will live in peace, untroubled by fear of harm.”

Proverbs 1:31-33


The risk markets were in rally mode today, with the major stock indices finishing higher.

The Dollar fell, and gold bounced back a little.

Silver continued to decline.

VIX is waffling around.

Non-Farm Payrolls may move the markets tomorrow.

"We are going to lead once again by being the best. We're gonna lead economically. We're gonna lead technologically. We're gonna go back to the Moon, we're gonna do whatever we're gonna do. We are going to lead by engaging in American exceptionalism and this is going to inspire others to come along with us. We're not shrinking away from anybody. We are reengaging. That's what Trump is."

Rush Limbaugh

Exceptional, but not in the way that they thought.   

Are you not entertained?

Madness serves none but itself.

Have a pleasant evening.