Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Awful Faces From Beyond

 

“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious.  But it cannot survive treason from within.  An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.  But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men.  He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero, Orationum

“Capitalism is at risk of failing today not because we are running out of innovations, or because markets are failing to inspire private actions, but because we’ve lost sight of the operational failings of unfettered gluttony.  We are neglecting a torrent of market failures in infrastructure, finance, and the environment.  We are turning our backs on a grotesque worsening of income inequality and willfully continuing to slash social benefits.  We are destroying the Earth as if we are indeed the last generation.”

Jeffrey Sachs, Self-Interest, Without Morals, Leads to Self-Destruction, Financial Times, 18 January 2012

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

"The barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.  He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.  We sit by and watch the barbarian.  We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid.  We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes; we laugh.  But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

Hilaire Belloc, The Barbarians, 1912

As the trading year draws to a close, the paint to make the results (and bonuses) for the Wall Street wiseguys will be applied liberally to the tape.

The economic hitmen have come home to roost.

Stocks rallied to new highs.

The Dollar chopped sideways with a bit of a little loss.

VIX rose, even with stocks rallying.

Gold and silver did very little.

FOMC coming up on Wednesday.

Syria is overcome, and being carved up by the US, Turkey, and Israel.

That which is unsustainable will not be sustained.

And where they make a desert, they call it peace.

Have a pleasant evening.

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.