Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Blood on Ringed Hands

 

"Their heart is false.
      Now they will pay for their guilt.
God will bring down their altars
      and break their sacred monuments.
For they say,
      'We have no king,
Since we do not fear the Lord,
      the king — what could he do for us?'

Thorns and thistles will grow on their altars.
      Then they will say to the mountains, 'Cover us!'
      and to the hills, 'Fall on us!'”

Hosea 10:1-3, 7-8

"We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed;  perplexed, but not driven to despair;  persecuted, but not forsaken;  struck down, but not destroyed;  always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of the Lord may also be manifested in us.  For while we live we are always being given up to death for his sake, so that the life of the Lord may be manifested in our mortal flesh.  And so we do not lose heart."

2 Corinthians 4:8-16

“Anyone who wishes to follow me must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it. What does it profit a man, to gain the whole world, and forfeit his life? Or what can he give in regain his life?

The Son of Man will come with his angels, in the glory of his Father.  And he will repay everyone according to what they have done."

Matthew 16:24-27

"No doubt it is more comfortable to deliberately wear blinkers that prevent one from seeing the evil done in the discharge of their responsibility— to be unwilling to see that one is defending murder and robbery."

Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Executed, Berlin, 23 January 1945

Powell's reassuring words to the Congress helped to propel the mispricing of risk in the equity markets to new highs.

Tell us what we want to hear.  Prophesy illusions.

Gold and silver initially rallied but then were sat on and held to minor gains.

VIX wallows.

CPI data tomorrow, PPI on Friday.

Our election choices this fall have been dictated by the oligarchs as between dementia and demented.  

Endless fraud, and endless war. 

After the bell:

"Archegos Capital Management founder Sung Kook "Bill" Hwang was convicted of fraud and other charges by a jury in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday at a criminal trial in which prosecutors accused him of market manipulation ahead of the 2021 collapse of his $36 billion private investment firm.  The jury found Hwang guilty on 10 of 11 criminal counts and Patrick Halligan, his Archegos deputy and co-defendant, guilty on all three counts he faced."

and,

"U.S. bank regulators fined Citigroup $136 million for failing to make adequate progress fixing data management issues the agencies identified in 2020, the Federal Reserve announced on Wednesday.  The joint enforcement action from the Fed and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) relates to 'insufficient progress' Citi has made fixing data management problems and implementing controls to manage that ongoing risk."

Pride and plunder, fraud and the mispricing of risk, are the prevailing themes of the masters of the universe.  

"The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well.  Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them.  Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich.  Plunder, rape, and murder they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

And our leaders praise the servants servants of Moloch, applauding wildly, with innocent blood on ringed hands.

Until the mountains fall on them.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Keep Off the Moors

 

“I am persuaded that big changes are coming to long standing global currency arrangements.  Gold is flowing from weaker hands to stronger hands, from speculators to central banks and wealthy investors, the multitudes in China and India, and in general from West to East."

Jesse, Monetary Rapture: The Incredible Disappearing Gold Inventories, 23 May 2013

"To put it crudely, the US wants to inflate the rest of the world, while the latter is trying to deflate the US. The US must win, since it has infinite ammunition: there is no limit to the dollars the Federal Reserve can create. What needs to be discussed is the terms of the world’s surrender: the needed changes in nominal exchange rates and domestic policies around the world."

Martin Wolf, Financial Times, 12 Oct 2010

"When the rich wage war, it is the poor who die."

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Devil and the Good Lord, 1951

"Never before has so much debt been imposed on so many people by so few financial operatives — operatives who work from Wall Street, the largest casino in history, and a handful of its junior counterparts around the world, especially Europe.  After transferring trillions of dollars of bad debt or toxic assets from the books of financial speculators to those of governments, global financial moguls, their representatives in the State apparatus and corporate media are now blaming social spending (in effect, the people) as responsible for debt and deficit

A most outrageous aspect of the debt burden that is placed on the taxpayers' shoulders since 2008 is that most of the underlying debt claims are fictitious and illegitimate: they are largely due to manipulated asset price bubbles, dubious or illegal financial speculations, and scandalous conversion of financial gamblers' losses into public liability."

Dr. Ismael Hossein-zadeh, Class War: The Vicious Circle of Debt and Depression, June 7, 2010

“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”

Émile Zola, as quoted in Dreyfus: His Life and Letters, 1937

Stocks managed to turn in another fluctuating day that ended up mostly unchanged.

Gold and silver held a little bounce.

The Dollar bounced back a little as well.

VIX is comatose.

We are deeply into a currency war.  

Things are progressing pretty much as expected.

Gold and silver are flowing from West to East.

The Anglo-American currency hegemony is being sustained by force and fraud, with the reliance on force increasing steadily. 

And so there is tomorrow.  And what God wills.

Have  a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - On the Road from Jerusalem to Jericho - A Light in the Darkness

 

"Today in Markowa, Poland, the martyrs Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma, and their seven children, were beatified: an entire family was exterminated by the Nazis on 24 March 1944 for having given shelter to a family of persecuted Jews.  They opposed the hatred and violence that characterized that time with evangelical love.  May this Polish family, which represented a ray of light in the darkness of the Second World War, be for all of us a model to imitate in the zeal for goodness and service to those in need.”

Francis I, Beatification of the Ulma Family, Martyrs for Love of Neighbor, 10 September 2023

"Poles faced the death penalty for helping Jews. This family must have realized that even though they lived at some distance from the village, they put themselves in great danger from the Germans by sheltering several [8] people in the attic of their house.   Clearly, there were also infamous attitudes and deeds.  However, these cannot overshadow the heroism of those thousands who risked their lives to help others."

Stanisław Gądecki, Archbishop of Poznań, 10 September 2023

"Jozef and Wiktoria lived a holiness that was not only marital but was fully embedded in their entire family.  The Ulma family home became an inn where the despised, outcast, and death-stricken were welcomed and cared for.  They were murdered because they had practiced the corporal work of mercy of sheltering the homeless."

Marcello Semeraro, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, 10 September 2023

"We live in a world where love itself is condemned. People call it weakness, something to grow out of. Some are saying: 'Love is of no importance, we should rather develop our strength; let each one become as strong as he can, and let the weak perish.'"

Titus Brandsma, Dutch priest, executed at Dachau, 26 July 1942

"Overcoming fear is a key element in the process of setting man free.   Fear springs from threats.   We fear suffering; we fear the loss of some goods, the loss of freedom, health or a job.  This fear makes us act against our conscience, and it is by means of our conscience that we take the measure of Truth.   We overcome fear the moment we agree to lose something for the sake of a higher value.  Any nation is bound to perish if deprived of bravery, if it pretends that everything is good when it is not, and if it is satisfied with half-truths. Every day we must be aware that when we are demanding truth from others we must live in truth ourselves, demanding justice we must be just, demanding bravery we must be brave."

Jerzy Popiełuszko, chaplain of Solidarity, Martyr for the Truth, Oct. 19, 1984

"We ought to speak, shout out against injustices, with confidence and without fear.  We proclaim the principles of the Church, the reign of love, without forgetting that it is also a reign of justice.  Viva Cristo Rey!"

Miguel Agustin Pro, Mexican Priest, Martyr, November 23, 1927

"There was a scholar of the law who had come to test him and said, 'Rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' and Jesus asked him, 'What is written in the law?  How do you understand it?'  The scholar replied, 'You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.'  Jesus replied, 'You have answered correctly.  Do this and you will live.'

But because he wished to justify himself,  he asked Jesus,  'And who then is my neighbor?'  Jesus replied, 'A man fell victim to robbers, as he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho...'"

Luke 10:25-30

"Peter understood that neither Nero, nor all his legions, could overcome the living truth — that they could not overwhelm it with tears or blood, and that now its victory was beginning. He understood with equal force why the Lord had turned him back on the road.  That city of pride, of crime, of wickedness, and of a lust for power, was beginning to be His city."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero, 1898

 

Not the day that they were murdered, or the day they were beatified, but the anniversary of their wedding, July 7 is the feast day of the Ulma family: Jozef and Wiktoria, and their seven children.  They died as martyrs for love of the other, of their neighbor.  They are a light for us, down the long dark halls of history.  

'In the end, the only real tragedy is not to have been a saint.'

Lord, pierce our hardened hearts, enlighten our minds, heal our blindness, and break the self-made chains of our pride and self-deception, so that we may choose repentance, forgiveness, and life. 

Stocks wobbled but managed to extend their gains and new highs.

The market has narrowed significantly, and is fairly overextended — and complacent.

We are overdue for a correction.  And given a sufficient exogenous trigger a decline of 10 to 20 percent is certainly not out of the question.  There are warnings in the air.

But market participants are set up to 'lose their shit' as the saying goes.  Complacency, fueled by pride, goes before a fall.  Even presidents and kings are prone to this human failing.

They never see it, or want to see it, coming.

Gold and silver were pinned back.  Gold has so far confirmed a short term double bottom W formation that if it is activated will take it up to the $2490 region.  But we are not there yet.

Gold is under pressure because the Banks with their Banker-auntie at the Fed are playing some dangerous games with asset liabilities and leverage.   I know that is hard to believe — even after they have failed at this in spectacular fashion, two or three times in the last 20 years.

It's what they do.  They are sociopaths, and will likely never learn to act any differently. And along with them in this ongoing control fraud are the professional elite, the plutocrats, and their politicians.  And why should they not push on, when they are winning.  

It's an old, familiar story.

The same goes for national leaders and some countries, who seem to be swirling with reckless abandon towards their own rendezvous with destiny.

Madness.  A tragic spectacle of delusion.

But here we are, like so many others before us, on the rode from Jerusalem to Jericho.  

Who then is your neighbor, and what is it that you have been instructed to do?

This is the whole of the law.  And of a righteous life.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Poisoned Chalice of Empire

 

"Readers of this column know that President Joe Biden’s drift into blankness has been ongoing for months, as he and his foreign policy aides have been urging a ceasefire that will not happen in Gaza while continuing to supply the weapons that make a ceasefire less likely. There’s a similar paradox in Ukraine, where Biden has been financing a war that cannot be won and refusing to participate in negotiations that could end the slaughter.

The reality behind all of this, as I’ve been told for months, is that the president is simply no longer there, in terms of understanding the contradictions of the policies he and his foreign policy advisers have been carrying out. America should not have a president who does not know what he has signed off on. People in power have to be responsible for what they do, and last night showed America and the world that we have a president who clearly is not in that position today...

Whatever happens, we have a president—now fully unveiled—who just may not be responsible for what he does in the coming campaign, not to mention his actions in the Middle East and Ukraine."

Seymour Hersh, Who Is Running the Country?, June 28.2024

“The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost selves?”

Maximilian Kolbe

"No warning will suffice to powerful fools who, driven mad by hubris and lust for power, weave the hangman's ropes of their own destruction.  They preach the necessity of hardness, and practice the circumvention of the law for themselves and their associates in injustice.  But when the reckoning comes for them, as it eventually does, they always seem astonished, but unfortunately never to the point of speechlessness.  They will harangue fortune, and all those imaginary enemies who conspired to their downfall, to the bitter end.  The Western elite are in denial, and a bubble of delusion, so profound that I am concerned that when reality intrudes their reaction will be mishandled, provocative, and likely to hasten a generational change that is already occurring and being fiercely resisted, slowly."

Jesse, Complicity of the Advantaged in the Nakedness of Kings, 19 February 2015

"Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers.

That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents."

Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism, The Nation, May 1, 2003

"And what does the Lord require of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?"

Micah 6:8

"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.  There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House.  You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the plutocracy.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel


Stocks rallied higher to new record highs, based on a seemingly benign Non-Farm Payrolls report.

Economist Danielle DiMartino Booth reminds us that recessions tend to be marked from the first Fed rate cut.

The Dollar fell.

Gold and silver rocketed higher.

Daisy and I abide, counting our blessings.

The pundit class and  their spokemodels are misrepresenting what is happening geopolitically, and the risks which are involved.

Madness.

"For these are a rebellious people, deceitful children, unwilling to listen to the commandments of the Lord. They say to their seers,‘Do not see!’, and to the prophets,‘Say nothing of what is right. Tell us only the things that please us — prophesy illusions.'"

Isaiah 30:8-10

Their pride blinds them.  They close their eyes and ears to truth. They never see it coming. 

I remember you all in my prayers.

Have a pleasant weekend.