Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Unfaithful Creatures, Sliding Peacefully Into the Abyss

 

"What causes wars, and what causes fighting among you?  Is it not your passions that are at war in yourselves?   You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you attack and wage war.  You do not have, because you do not ask.   You ask and do not receive, because you ask without righteousness, to feed your passions.  Unfaithful creatures.  Do you not know that intimacy with the world is adversity with God?  Therefore whoever wishes to be a servant of the world makes himself an enemy of God."

James 4:1-4

"They live out their days in prosperity, and slide peacefully down into hell."

Job 21:13

"Some people are false apostles, deceitful workers, masquerading as apostles of Christ.  And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.   It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their ends will be what their actions deserve."

2 Corinthians 11:13-15

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to sift all of you like wheat.  But I have prayed that your own faith may not fail.  And once you have returned to faith, you must strengthen your brothers.”

Luke 22:31-32

"Take a stand for that which is right, and the world may misunderstand you and criticize you, but you never go alone.  And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you, but you'll go on anyhow.

But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow before the gods of evil."

Martin Luther King, But If Not, Ebenezer Baptist Church, November, 1967

 

Stocks tried to extend the rebound from late yesterday afternoon.

And for a time they succeeded qiute well, taking back most if not all of the losses from the prior big slide.

But alas, it did not last, and the major indices slid back down to where they opened this morning.

VIX has come down a bit from its lofty peak.

The Dollar gained back some ground.

Gold and silver took some selling.

On the artist X, formerly known as twitter, I suggested on Sunday evening that stocks would find a low, a place where they could gain a footing, and rally back latter in the day on Monday.

And they did.

Further, if one had an itch to re-establish some short positions, they ought to wait for the full recovery of the loss, and then dip back in at the appropriate time and level, slowly. 

If you look at the SP 500 futures chart, the key levels have been marked out quite clearly.

This will likely be an attractive but difficult market to trade, full of volatility and big moves with seemingly little fundamental causes behind them.

And at some point I expect the bottom to drop out in response to a terrible exogenous event as a result of the neo-cons' adventurous foreign policy errors.

Best for most investors to sit this one out and take some precautions.

And some seasoned traders are hearing the call of the wild.  

Let's see what happens.

Have a pleasant evening.

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.