Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Enter Through the Golden Gate of Mercy

 

"It is said that in a purely competitive capitalist system, all businesses are vectored to zero profit in a process of creative destruction. As a certain class of participants clearly recognizes this they take every opportunity to corrupt the system through fraud.  This is why markets must have regulators.  At times the fraud overcomes the regulation to such a degree that the normal market balances are rendered ineffective and the system passes into a crony capitalist system, if not an outright oligarchy.

It is hard to imagine a more inherently ineffective system of capital and resource allocation than crony capitalism.  It is a game in which is rigged to deliver most of the money in the system to a minority of insiders, thereby bankrupting all their customers. 

Greed compels the materially obsessed to obtain the greatest piles of chips, but in the long term renders their chips to be almost worthless because they are unable to stop their fraud and plundering, even when it is in their best interests.  They are not governed by rationality or conscience or even common sense.   

For periods of time oligarchies are able to survive in an uneasy equilibrium enforced by power, but ultimately these wickedly wealthy wither and die on their great piles of gains."

Jesse, Crony Capitalism: The Fed's Frankenstein, 17 December 2010

“There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world."

John Maynard Keynes, 1931

"Essentially, the Great Financial Crisis was result of widespread fraud on the part of sellers of ‘securitized assets’. Books of banks masked huge SPE exposure. ‘Opaque securities’ were sold as investible quality but nothing more than mathematical approximations at time of issue. Yes, it became far more profitable to sell complex MBS risk baskets than identifiable, securitized assets

Were there villains? Of course, there were. Place to look was Wall Street. It compensated much more for selling opaque securities. Well, there’s that reality, too. I’ve been told by more than one current and former banker that the banks tell the regulators what the rules should be.

And let’s keep in mind regulators let each bank devise its own, unique value at risk model, rendering stress tests highly unreliable. The Way governments ended doubts about solvency of opaque banks was with stress tests and pledge of taxpayer funds to maintain solvency.”

Harald Malmgren, April 19,2017

“Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.”

A. Gary Shilling, investment meeting,The Advertiser, Montgomery Alabama, 3 December 1986

"While some of the crowd were speaking about how the temple was adorned with costly stones and offerings, he said, 'All that you see here, the days will come when there will not be left a stone upon another stone that will not be thrown down.'"

Luke 21:5 

“The glory of the Lord entered the temple through the gate facing east.”

Ezekiel 43:4 

"Lift up, you gates, and be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may enter."

Psalm 24:7

All I want to add is: you'll see.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - On a Sea of Troubles

 

"People who know nothing of God and whose lives are centered on themselves, imagine that they can only find themselves by asserting their own desires and ambitions and appetites in a struggle with the rest of the world. They try to become real by imposing themselves on other people, by appropriating for themselves some share of the limited supply-created goods and thus emphasizing the difference between themselves and the other men who have less than they, or nothing at all.

The man who lives in division is living in death. He cannot find himself because he is lost; he has ceased to be a reality. The person he believes himself to be is a bad dream. And when he dies he will discover that he long ago ceased to exist because God, Who is infinite reality and in Whose sight is the being of everything that is, will say to him: 'I know you not.'"

Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, 1949

“We are slow to master the great truth that even now Christ is, as it were, walking among us, and by His hand, or eye, or voice, bidding us to follow Him.  We do not understand that His call is a thing that takes place now.  We think it took place in the Apostles' days, but we do not believe in it; we do not look for it in our own case.

God beholds you.  He calls you by name.  He sees you, and understands you, as He made you.  He knows what is in you, all your peculiar feelings and thoughts, your dispositions and likings, your strengths and your weaknesses.  He views you in your day of rejoicing and in your day of sorrow.  He sympathizes in your hopes and your temptations.  He interests Himself in all your anxieties and remembrances, all the risings and fallings of your spirit.

God has created me to do Him some definite service;  He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.  I have my mission — I may never know it in this life but I shall be told it in the next.   I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.  He has not created me for naught. 

Therefore I will trust Him.  Whatever I am, I can never be thrown away.  If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him.  If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.  He does nothing in vain.  He knows what He is about.   He may take away my friends.  He may throw me among strangers.  He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me -- still He knows what He is about.”

John Henry Newman


The PPI came in a little higher than expected this morning.

The markets took it hawkishly for Fed policy decisions on rates.

The Dollar moved up to just below the 107 handle.

Gold and silver were hammered from the beginning, down from their recent highs.

I suspect that some of the small specs were leaning into this one.

Stocks lost ground but managed to take back some of their losses into the close.

The forces of lawlessness seem to be winning the field for the day.

Tomorrow is another.

Have a pleasant evening.

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.