Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Relentless Enemy of Understanding

 

“Wealth is not without its advantages... [but] wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 1958

"At first, the love of money, and then that of power began to prevail, and these became, as it were, the sources of every evil. For greed subverted honesty, integrity and other honorable principles and, in their place, encouraged pride, inhumanity, contempt of religion and general corruption."

Sallust, De coniuratione Catilinae, circa 40 BC

“In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows.  Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.”

Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, 2004


The Consumer Price Index (CPI), a common measure of inflation, came in as forecast this morning.

And so stocks rallied, morphing into what was clearly a relentless short squeeze, particularly in the heart of bubbledom.

The Dollar rose another 25 cents or so, managing to firmly plant its flag in 106 territory.

A lot of this is due to the utterly inept governance in Europe, moreso than any kind of US government competence.

VIX dropped back down to recent lows, marking the complacency of the exceptional.

I sense another episode of overreach coming for the self-proclaimed elite of the world.  

And with that, the inevitable blowback.

But let's see what happens.

Russia has warned its citizens about traveling to the US, and most of its European client states.

I am glad to see Biden and his crew of warmongering hypocrites going. But I just cannot obtain any real hope from the approach of leather apron and his entourage of hollow ghouls of greed.  

Horrors tend to come home to roost.  And so we must relearn what has been forgotten.

This has been a decent year of trading for me, and I certainly paid the bills, but nothing worthy of high fives and spotlights.  It's been a bit of a grind.

It's been a long time since the punting public has taken 'the big hit.'  

They may be in for a refresher course in the painful downsides of conmen and careless risk. 

I have reached the point where I can no longer bear to watch the financial television channels, even the ones who have nominally been professional and informative in the past.

Rough seas ahead, mateys.

I am looking for some 20 percent declines in prices, centered on the high profile bubble assets.  We'll probably see it next year, with a taste of it by March.

But let's see what happens.  We might be in for a pleasant surprise.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Sharp Operators and Shady Deals

 

"Satan has been in the Heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan.  Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament.

Certainly, he has no choice.  He has chosen to have no choice.  He has wished to ‘be himself’, and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted.  The Hell he carries with him is, in one sense, a Hell of infinite boredom.  To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."

C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942

"There is probably no greater threat to the faithful than that of the sanctifying of success by worldly measures."

Jesse, Sanctifying Greed, 6 June 2023

"Old moral and traditional barriers to status break down and Americans look for standards of excellence among the circles above them, in terms of which to model themselves and judge their self-esteem.   A society that is in its higher circles and on its middle levels widely believed to be a network of smart rackets does not produce men with an inner moral sense; a society that is merely expedient does not produce men of conscience.  A society that narrows the meaning of ‘success’ to the big money and in its terms condemns failure as the chief vice, raising money to the plane of absolute value, will produce the sharp operator and the shady deal."

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, April 1956

"The foolish ask nothing better than not to have to understand anything, and they even used to get together and try not to understand, because the last thing of which a person is capable is to be malicious and foolish all by themselves. Without understanding, they form spontaneously into herds, not according to any particular affinities but in obedience to the petty ideology, which swallowed up the whole of their small lives, allotted them by birth or chance. They would far rather kill than have to think."

George Bernanos, Under the Sun of Satan, 1926


Stocks were slumping again today.

VIX marked time.

The Dollar ticked up.

Gold rallied sharply higher up to key overhead resistance.

Silver moved sideways.

CPI data coming out tomorrow.

It may impinge on the Fed rate decision later this month.

Lies are becoming the norm, without consequence or shame.

What does it profit a man, to gain the whole world—  but for some beachfront real estate, a fleeting moment of fame, or insubstantial digits in an account?

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Violent Carelessness of Insatiable Greed

 

"Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful industries. These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, [mainstream media], and lobbying industry.

If allowed to continue, this process will turn the United States into a declining, unfair society with an impoverished, angry, uneducated population under the control of a small, ultrawealthy elite. Such a society would be not only immoral but also eventually unstable, dangerously ripe for religious and political extremism."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation, June 2012

“I think that the depth of Satan's pride is difficult for humans to understand, and therefore it is easy to fall into this error and partake of it, thinking, all the while, that we are instead doing something great and beautiful.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880

"During the intense pressures of Gethsemane and the cross, the disciples did things they never thought they would do. They had no idea how cruel and hateful the world around them would be to their Lord. But only Jesus knew the full extent of the temptation they would face. In the pressure of the moment the heart does surprising things.  Guard your heart. Listen now to the Lord’s gentle warning. You, too, are capable of forsaking Jesus, just as the first disciples did."

Henry Blackaby, The Unthinkable, 1998

Stocks slumped today, and failed to recover even into the close.

They were incredibly short term overextended.

Gold and silver rallied sharply after the Non-Farm Payrolls and Option Expiration smackdowns.

Wash - rinse -repeat.

Bitcoin backed off further from its attempted takedown of $100,000.

VIX ticked upward slightly but there was no real fear in the markets today.

The billionaires are attempting to terraform the American political landscape to make their oligarchy more comfortable.  

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Awful Silence of God

 

"The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority, they don't dare to assert themselves.”

Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

"Therefore they shall eat the bitter fruit of their ways, and be gutted by their own schemes.  For the foolish turn away from me—to death. For fools are destroyed by their pride and self-satisfaction.”

Proverbs 1:31-3

"Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."

R. J. Rummel, Death By Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, 1994

"Let us ever bear in mind this divine truth, — the more secret God's hand is, the more powerful — the more silent, the more awful."

John Henry Newman


Stocks rallied to new all time highs.

VIX fell to a near term low.

Gold and silver were hit with selling as befits a Non-Farm Payrolls event, although they managed to bounce back a bit.

I am struck by the stillness, the calm before the storm, the towering pride of evil, the silence before the awful will of God.

Have a pleasant weekend.