Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Allure of the Beast

 

"Behold, I am sending you out as sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as serpents and as innocent as doves. Be on your guard, for they will hand you over to the courts, and be flogged in their temples. And you will be brought before governors and kings for my sakes, as witnesses to them and to the nations.

But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. You will be hated by everyone for my name. But the one who stands firm to the end will be saved."

Matthew 10:16-22

"Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not.  This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and 'weaponizing' the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents.  The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”

Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 2018

"Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength — but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it."

Léon Bloy

"Those who have faith had better keep in the state of grace, and those who have neither had better find out what they mean, for in the coming age there will be only one way to stop your trembling knees, and that will be to get down on them and pray.  The most important problem in the world today is your soul, for that is what the struggle is about."

Fulton J Sheen

Stocks rallied today, because they were smacked lower yesterday.

They did fall back quite a bit into the close.

VIX fell.  Complacency is the order of the day.

The Dollar continued to decline.

Gold and silver had a weak trade, with a little improvement into the close.

One exogenous event is going to tear this bloated, corrupt, and festering market apart.

The scandals and awful surprises keep coming, and people are not quite sure how to react to them.

Except perhaps to close their eyes, embrace the illusion, and yell loudly.

It's the American way.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Fire Will Rain

 

"Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.  We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity...  Few people have yet considered the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of cold war with its neighbors."

George Orwell, You and the Atomic Bomb, Tribune, October 19, 1945

"A credibility trap is a condition wherein the financial, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including themselves.

The status quo tolerates the corruption and the fraud because they have profited at least indirectly from it, and would like to continue to do so. Even the impulse to reform within the power structure is susceptible to various forms of soft blackmail and coercion by the system that maintains and rewards.

And so a failed policy and its support system become self-sustaining, long after it is seen by objective observers to have failed. In its failure it is counterproductive, and an impediment to recovery in the real economy. Admitting failure is not an option for the thought leaders who receive their power from that system.

The continuity of the structural hierarchy must therefore be maintained at all costs, even to the point of becoming a painfully obvious, organized hypocrisy.

Jesse, What Is a Credibility Trap, 18 September 2013

“There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.”

Ryszard Kapuściński, Writing About Suffering, Journal of the International Institute, Fall 1998

"What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer."

Francis Bacon, Of Truth, 1597

We had steep declines in the major stock indices today, taking back a small chunk of their recent outsized gains.

The Dollar gave up a similar piece of its recent gains from a fairly lofty valuation.

Gold and silver rallied sharply, breaking out of their recent price range.

But what was most remarkable about this day was the complete lack of a sense of risk involved in all this.

The VIX barely moved.

The broader index in the small cap Russell 2000 did not correct.

So let's just call this a rinse, following a thorough wash, following a benign CPI number.

PPI tomorrow.

Our political situation would be funny if it were happening somewhere else.

We get so caught up in it because if we step back and look at what we are doing it would be almost unbearable.

To paraphrase the American author James Baldwin, one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with the truth. 

And so we legislate absurdities, and fawn on those who prophesy illusions.

The fire next time.

Have a pleasant evening.

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.