Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Madness Will Have Its Way

 

“It's impossible that there could be a plague, because everyone knows that they have vanished from the West. We should not act as though half the town were threatened with death, because then it would be.  Yes, everyone knew that, except for the dead."

Albert Camus, The Plague

"The financial asset bubbles since the turn of the 21st century have been enabled by four basic instruments of monetary policy error: Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, and Powell.  Whether we will have a third major collapse and crash to follow this latest asset bubble, as a consequence of misguided monetary policy, economic priorities, and bank regulation is not the issue.   The question is, shall we have a system that holds together long enough to have a fourth?"

Jesse, Malice Domestic and Endless Foreign Wars, 31 July 2018

"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 [and lucrative insider trading - Jesse]."

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

"Monetary and regulatory policy encourage asset bubbles to proliferate.  Hot money seeks out the conscious mispricing of risk. Capital, in the form of both money and personal talent, increasingly flows into malinvestment and the gaming of markets. The productive economy languishes, left wanting for the lack of creative resources and attention. The bubble rises to unsustainable valuations— and fails, and a nation's capital is consumed."

Jesse, The Men Who Sold the World, 5 August 2019

'What is truth?' Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

"Against such foolishness we are defenseless.   Reason falls on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the foolish person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental . In all this the foolish person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.  Never again will we try to persuade the foolish person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

“Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.”

Otto von Bismarck

"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.  Foolishness has a knack of getting its 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


Stocks continued to get pummeled globally over the weekend.

The precise trigger for this is less interesting than the conditions which set the markets up for this.

That could be seen coming.  And many did see it, and spoke up about it.

But there is no reasoning with people determined to be rich by extraordinary means.

Stocks managed to take back quite a bit of their losses by the end of the day, as expected.  

Gold held its support level in good fashion.  Silver has fallen off its ladder, but is hanging on.

We have only just begun.  Fear turns to greed, and then back again.

The next trigger for further selling will be the consequences to the provocations in central Europe and the Middle East.  

For whatever reason certain people have chosen to promote armed conflict.  And it looks like they are going to have their way. 

And a lot of innocent people are going to be hurt, badly.  They already are.  But it will get worse.

 And along with this there will be further erosion in a sick and broken financial and political system.

These are not acts of God or nature.  They are the consequences of human decisions driven by pride and greed, by malignant narcissism and psychopathy in high places.

They know what they are doing.  Their madness blinds them to its consequences.  Evil is viewed as a duty, as a necessity, as a commitment to ideology.

Be careful to whom you give your own hearts.  Lies and deceptions are the order of the day.

It is never too late for repentance, and forgiveness, even after one has made the greatest acts of foolishness.

Madness is unleashed.

Have a pleasant evening.

Choosing Blood and Tyranny and Illusions

 

"Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.  It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.  Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

George Orwell, 1984

"Although a vast majority of our public believes that there was a conspiracy, most people do not know this as a fact and are convinced that they can never know for sure what happened.

On both points the public is mistaken. The murder of the President is not a mystery. The nature of the conspiracy that took President Kennedy’s life was from the outset quite obvious to anyone who knew how to look and was willing to do so. The same holds true today. Any citizen who is willing to look can see clearly who killed President Kennedy and why.

The fact that 'no one knows this' is an example of a subtle process of Orwellian mind control which has enveloped our society and which our public has been more than willing to have foisted upon it.  The process has been orchestrated by the CIA in defense of itself and the 'powers that be,' but it has also been critically aided by the entire spectrum of our society’s intellectual and political establishments, right, center, and left.

It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.  And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth — as opposed to only believe the truth — is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility."

E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us: Orwellian Control, and the Murder of President Kennedy, 1996

"What is unrecognized about JFK's presidency, which then makes his assas­sination a false mystery, is that he was locked in a struggle with his national security state. That state had higher values than obedience to the orders of a president who wanted peace.

One must give the CIA (and the assassination sponsors that were even further in the shadows) their due for having devised and executed a brilliant setup.  They had played out a scenario to Kennedy’s death in Dallas that pressured other government authorities to choose among three major options: a war of vengeance against Cuba and the Soviet Union based on the CIA’s false Mexico City documentation of a Communist assassination plot; a domestic political war based on the same documents seen truly, but a war the CIA would fight with every covert weapon at its command; or a complete cover-up of any conspiracy evidence and a silent coup d’état that would reverse Kennedy’s efforts to end the Cold War.

It’s unbelievable — or we’re supposed to think it is — that a president was murdered by our own government agencies because he was seeking a more stable peace than relying on nuclear weapons.  It’s unspeakable.  For the sake of a nation that must always be preparing for war, that story must not be told.  If it were, we might learn that peace is possible without making war."

James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, 2008

"After more than twenty years of my own study, I share the belief – based on substantiated evidence and research by a host of dedicated researchers and historians – that President Kennedy was ambushed by elements of his own National Security apparatus in what amounted to a coup d'état. It is clear that a highly compartmentalized, elite segment of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S. Military, the U.S. Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as certain well-known organized crime figures, and finally Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, all colluded to overthrow the elected government of the United States.

The forces behind President Kennedy’s assassination not only had the means and power to conduct such an operation, but the extraordinary mobility and reach to launch a second conspiracy of monumental proportions – a cover-up of enormous magnitude that included a secret autopsy to alter the forensic evidence of President Kennedy’s wounds, while staging the illusion of an “official” autopsy that amounted to a well-planned fraud – all of which has now been fully documented.1 No domestic or foreign entity, other than America’s own National Security apparatus, had the leverage, flexibility, mobility, and authority to orchestrate such a massive enterprise, which included the manipulation of all major media outlets. Today, the CIA continues its efforts to cover up its role in the Kennedy assassination.

A ‘shadow government,’ what Cold War intelligence historian L. Fletcher Prouty once called 'The Secret Team,'  (and what Winston Churchill once referred to as the 'High Cabal' that ruled the United States has eviscerated America’s fledgling experiment in democracy.  'On top of this,' wrote Prouty in 1992, 'we have now begun to realize that one of the greatest causalities of the Cold War has been the truth.  At no time in the history of mankind has the general public been so misled and so betrayed as it has been by the work of the propaganda merchants of this century and their ‘historians.’”

Peter Janney, Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, 2012

"John F. Kennedy had formally decided to withdraw from Vietnam, whether we were winning or not.  Robert McNamara, who did not believe we were winning, supported this decision.  The first stage of withdrawal had been ordered.  The final date, two years later, had been specified. [NSAM 263 - 11 Oct 1963]  These decisions were taken, and even placed, in an oblique and carefully limited way, before the public."

James K. Galbraith, Exit Strategy: JFK's 1963 Order to Withdraw from Vietnam

"Since the earliest stages of human history, of course, there have been bazaars, rialtos, and trading posts—all markets. But The Market was never God, because there were other centers of value and meaning, other 'gods.' The Market operated within a plethora of other institutions that restrained it. As Karl Polanyi has demonstrated in his classic work The Great Transformation, only in the past two centuries has The Market risen above these demigods and chthonic spirits to become today's First Cause."

Harvey Cox, The Market As God: Living In the New Dispensation, The Atlantic, March 1999

“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

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Reign of the Moneyed Interests and Malignant Narcissists

 

"This cartoon by Joseph Keppler, who was both the editor and main cartoonist for Puck, which became one of, a very popular satirical weeklies in the post-Civil War period, expresses a general public discontent and concern about the growing impact and power of large businesses in the United States in the Gilded Age, particularly as this indicates, by businesses that have become monopolies in one way or another, and their control over the political process.

This is the period of time when the Senate is beginning to be conceived of as a millionaire’s club. It’s not quite called that yet, but it’s getting there, and certainly the sort of power and influence of business has become palpable.

And this is a wonderful snapshot, if you will, of the relationship between the two, with the bloated figures, having squeezed their way through the door saying, 'Entrance for Monopolists,' and surrounding the Senate with the Lilliputian figures of the different senators, all of whom would be recognized by viewers because their faces are quite realistic.   And the influence is quite clear between the monopolists and their impact on the legislators who are either going to be manipulated by or intimidated by these figures.

The quote from the Gettysburg Address referred to the democracy, 'the government by the people and for the people' as opposed to, in this case, the corruption of it, which is, 'by the monopolists and for the monopolists.'"

Josh Brown, The Bosses of the Senate, November 20, 2022

“Against such foolishness we are defenseless. Reason falls on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the foolish person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.   In all this the foolish person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

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


Stocks continued their downward spiral, following a much weaker than expected Non-Farm Payrolls report and a rise in the unemployment rate.

So far this is just a correction.   Today the SP 500 tagged the 50% Fibonacci retracement for this current bubble up rally.

Gold and silver held their ground reasonably well.

The Dollar was knocked down 1.23.

VIX rose higher.

Gold and silver seem to be retaining their 'safe harbor' status.  Although we must be reminded that in a thankfully rare general liquidation panic everything is sold.   

Including the souls of many recognizable figures, who seem to have no hesitation prophesying lies and bending their knee to a donor class of malignant narcissists.

This increasingly reminds me of 1913.

And because of the increase in wickedness, the love of most will grow cold.  

Need little, want less, love more.  For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - This World Is a Ship, Not Your Home

 

“One day an aged beggar, covered with ulcers and almost naked, stretched out his hand, and Martin, seeing the Divine in him, took him to his own bed, ignoring that he was not clean.  One of the brothers, considering he had gone too far in his charity, reproved him.

And Martin replied: ‘Compassion, my dear Brother, is preferable to cleanliness.  Consider that with a little soap I can easily clean my bed sheets, but with even a torrent of tears I could never wash the stain from my soul that harshness toward the unfortunate would bring.’ ”

Arthur M. Granger, Vie du Bienheureux Martin de Porrès, 1941

"This world is a ship, not your home."

Thérèse de Lisieux

"Prayer is not calling God in to bless our activities.  Rather, prayer takes us into God’s presence, shows us His will, and prepares us to obey Him.   God will use your prayer times to soften your heart and change your focus.  As you pray for others, the Holy Spirit will work in your heart so that you have the same compassion for them that God does.

If you do not love people as you should, pray for them.  If you are not as active in God’s service as you know He wants you to be, begin praying.  You cannot be intimately exposed to God’s heart and remain complacent.  The time spent with God will change you."

Henry Blackaby, Prayer Changes You

"Some people come into your life as blessings. Some come into your life as lessons."

Teresa of Calcutta

"When we see how God gives Himself to us, all that is common becomes wonderful; and it is because of this that nothing seems to be common, because this way it is, in itself, extraordinary.  Consequently it is unnecessary to make life full of strange and unsuitable marvels and miracles.  It is, in itself, a miracle, a revelation, a constant joy even with the prevalence of annoyances and shortcomings."

Jean-Pierre de Caussade, L'Abandon a la Providence divine

"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, 1898


Although I mentioned it to a few friends I never seem to have noted here that the young man was married last month in Hangzhou, China, the beautiful jewel on the Westlake.  The changes that have occurred in China since I was last there for business in 1998 are profound.

There is a wonderful little Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception there, which was founded by missionaries in 1661.  My joy is almost complete, in many ways.  I wish the queen had been here to see this.  And like most parents, I look forward to seeing our grandchildren.  

It's the little things that gives us hope, and remind us of who we are, and thereby make life worth living.

And so we had the wash and rinse that I had expected.  

Stocks gave up most if not all of the gains they enjoyed yesterday.

Gold wobbled a little, but silver was smacked lower by the wiseguys in sympathy with equities.

VIX rose sharply.

Is the market really this flighty, if not bipolar?   Or have we just handed the reins of our country over to the plundering class, and their servants?

Non-Farm Payrolls report tomorrow.

"Isn't it a riddle and awe-inspiring that things can be so beautiful, despite the horror?  I've seen something wondrous peering through my joy in the beautiful, a sense of its creator.  Only people can be truly ugly, because they have free will to separate themselves from this song of praise.  It often seems they will drown out this hymn with cannon thunder, curses, and blasphemy.  But I have realized they will not succeed.  And so I want to throw myself on the side of the victor.”

Sophie Scholl, Munich, 1941

Have a pleasant evening.