Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Mad Delusions of Babylon

 

"In you, Lord, I take refuge;
      let me never be put to shame.
In your justice rescue and deliver me;
      listen to me and save me.
Be my rock of refuge,
      my stronghold to give me safety;
      for you are my rock and fortress.
My God, rescue me from the hand of the wicked,
      from the clutches of the evil and violent.
You are my hope, Lord;
      my trust, God, from my youth.
On you I have depended since birth;
      from my mother’s womb you are my strength;
      my hope in you never wavers.
I have become a warning to many,
      but you are my strong refuge.
My mouth will speak your praise,
      shall sing your glory every day.
Do not cast me aside in my old age;
      as my strength fails, do not forsake me."

Psalm 71:1-9

"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.  Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.  Don't imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of any régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency."

George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts

“Lawlessness has come out of Babylon, that is, from the elders who were to govern the people as judges.  They perverted their thinking; they would not allow their eyes to look to heaven, and did not keep in mind just judgments.  How you have grown evil with age.  Now have your past sins come to term, passing unjust sentences, condemning the innocent, and freeing the guilty."

Daniel 13:5,9,52-53

“We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.”

Francis of Assisi, Fioretti di San Francesco

Stocks finished an edgy session of light trade and choppiness ahead of the weekend.  The broader market was off a bit, and the SP 500 rose slightly to overhead resistance.

CPI and PPI next week.

Gold and silver were mostly unchanged.

The Dollar did its usual choppy thing.

The geopolitical situation is on a steady boil, helped along by the madcaps in the Biden administration.

But they have power, and like most people who are lacking in strategic intent, they tend to squander it foolishly, here and there, with old borrowed plans on which they hang the decisions of a day.

Well, change is coming.  Let's hope it brings something beneficial.

I am not hopeful that the political duopoly can deliver anything of the sort.   They are captives of long-standing fever dreams and delusions and dark money.

But they have power.    And power attracts the morally weak and corruptible.

None of this is new.  In fact it is remarkably old.   

"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

As old as Babylon, and evil as sin.

Have a pleasant weekend.

stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Controlled Demolitions - With a Purpose

 

"Around the world, authoritarian leaders are on the rise – from Russia and Hungary to the U.S. They're working from a common playbook: They use violent rhetoric. They attack the media. They see their political rivals as existential enemies to the nation.

Demagogues are willing to do or say anything to gain office or to consolidate their power. Unconstrained by ideology, they have no concern for the consequences of their actions. Anything that serves to make them more powerful is good enough for them — even if the political system that facilitated their rise should be destroyed in the process."

Daniel Ziblatt, Saving Democracy from Demagogues, 2022

"From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principle that restraint is at the heart of liberty. In 1789 the Federalists adopted Alien and Sedition Acts in a shabby political effort to isolate the Republic from the world and to punish political criticism as seditious libel.  The architects of fear have converted a wholesome law against conspiracy into an instrument for making association a crime.

We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power.  Pretending to fear government they have asked government to outlaw private protest. They glorify 'togetherness' when it is theirs, and call it conspiracy when it is that of others. Those who love the twilight speak as if public education must be training in conformity, and government support of science be public aid of caution.”

John F. Kennedy, October 1960

"I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that they may not wish to come out of hell, but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free."

C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 1940

“What they were doing was unconstitutional.  Sometimes I worry that people take the oath of office or the oath to the Constitution, and it’s just a set of words that mean nothing.  They really don’t feel in their heart the weight of those words.  They came out in this phalanx, running, and then they plowed into a bunch of protesters in the intersection of the street and knocked them over.  They are thugs and goons. I couldn’t recognize anything tactically that they were attempting to do that was even remotely related to crowd control. It looked to me like a gang of guys with sticks.  I’m not a redwood tree.  I’m an overweight 53-year-old man.”

Christopher David, Navy Veteran Beaten for No Reason by Trump's Federal Agents, Portland, Oregon, July 2020

"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people."

Theodor Adorno, Education After Auschwitz,

"Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all objective, logical considerations, we find the irrational element: The struggle against the demon, against the servants of the Antichrist. Everywhere and always demonic powers lurk in the dark, waiting for the moment when man is weak; when of his own volition he leaves his place in Creation, as founded for him by God in freedom; when he yields to the force of evil, he separates himself from the powers of a higher order; and after voluntarily taking the first step, he is driven on to the next and the next at a furiously accelerating rate."

The White Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich 1942


Stocks rose today, purportedly in response to a less bad than expected unemployment report.

And more impressively, they managed to go out near their highs.  No pop and flop today.

We won't be getting any significant economic data until the PPI and CPI next week.

Gold and silver rallied sharply, coming back to their rising trends.

The Dollar chopped sideways with a notable spike higher midday.

VIX continued to fall.

The world is waiting to see what comes next in the regional conflicts in eastern Europe and the Mideast.

Dancing on a volcano, in the service of money and power.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Dying of Their Hypocrisy

 

"They will be unloving and unforgiving; they will slander others and have no self-control. They will be cruel and hate what is good. They will betray their friends, be reckless, be puffed up with pride, and love pleasure rather than God. They will act religious, but they will refuse the grace that could make them righteous."

2 Timothy 3:3-5

"The same pride which makes a man treat those of less powerful standing arrogantly, makes him cringe servilely to those above him. It is the very nature of this vice, which is neither based on personal merit nor on virtue, but on riches, posts, influence, and useless knowledge, to render a man a snob to those who are below him as to faown upon those who are above."

Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, 1688

"All the nations which appear in history are necessarily a mixture, for us inextricable, of City of Good and City of Evil.  But what theology, history and common sense have also taught me is that the civilizations which allow the gap to widen between the ideal to which they claim and the realizations which they propose of it, these civilizations are dying of their hypocrisy.“

Henri-Irénée Marrou, France ma patrie,Le Monde, 5 avril 1956

“Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.”

Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1873

Children may not be deceived so easily, because they see what is there, through innocent eyes.

They have not yet learned to blind themselves, and to twist themselves into beasts.

It is hard to appraise the depths to which our high and mighty will descend, and contort themselves like madcaps for money. 

Such august personages of state, telling clumsy lies, and creatures of high office, bouncing up and down like 'useful idiots', in a heart-rending opera buffa of decline.

These are our times, and our generation, whose hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Stocks popped and flopped once again today.

At some point they are just going to collapse and hide from embarrassment.

Gold and silver were under a bit of pressure.

The Dollar rose slightly.

There won't be much economic data until we see the PPI and CPI inflation data next week.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

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.