Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - In a Hall of Mirrors

 

"Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period, and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate and systematical plan of reducing us to slavery."

Thomas Jefferson, 1774

"To some degree this is a battle between the politicians and the markets.  But I am firmly resolved — and I think all of my colleagues are too — to win this battle.  The fact that hedge funds are not regulated is a scandal. Britain has blocked previous efforts to do this.  First the banks failed, forcing states to carry out rescue operations.  They plunged the global economy over the precipice and we had to launch recovery packages, which increased our debts, and now they are speculating against these debts.  That is very treacherous.  Governments must regain supremacy. It is a fight against the markets and I am determined to win this fight."

Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, Berlin, 6 May 2010

"The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true.  It really happened. These suspicions are valid.   Incentives are baked into the system to take advantage of it for short-term profit.  The incentives are to cheat, and cheating is profitable because there are no consequences.

It’s implicit in so much of the regulatory structure that if you don’t make too many waves there will be a job for you elsewhere.  So we have to limit those job opportunities and develop a more professional path for regulators as a career.  So much of what’s wrong with Dodd-Frank is it trusts the regulators to be completely immune to the corrupting influences of the banks. That’s so unrealistic. Congress has to take a meat cleaver to these banks and not trust regulators to do the job with a scalpel.”

Gretchen Morgensen, Neil Barofsky: Into the Bailout Buzzsaw, NY Times, July 21, 2012

"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 avarice subverted honesty, integrity and other honorable principles and, in their stead, inculcated pride, inhumanity, contempt of religion and general venality. These vices first advanced but slowly, and were sometimes restrained by correction; but afterward, when their infection had spread like a pestilence, the state was entirely changed, and the government, from being the most equitable and praiseworthy, became the most rapacious and insupportable."

Sallust, Conspiracy of Cataline

"Dallas Fed President, Robert Kaplan, wasn’t just trading like an aggressive hedge fund kingpin in 2020, he’s been doing the same thing for five years at the Dallas Fed while simultaneously having access to non-public, market moving information from the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate setting FOMC meetings and other confidential communications.

In addition to speculating in stock index futures, Kaplan has also made tens of millions of dollars in purchases and sales of a litany of individual stocks over the last five years, including Big Tech and fossil fuel companies, rather than adhering to the customary ethical standard by Fed officials of employing a buy and hold position in diversified mutual funds. In 2020, the vast majority of Kaplan’s individual stock trades were also for 'over $1 million.'

The role of the brokerage firm that executed these trades is a very serious matter and every American should be demanding that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell release this information immediately.  In this case, knowing your customer should have meant frantically calling your compliance department when an officer of the U.S. central bank, who sits on some of the most sensitive, non-public market intelligence in the world, instructs you to make 'over $1 million' trades, multiple times, in S&P 500 futures contracts. The S&P 500 futures trade request by Kaplan should have convened an immediate, all-hands-on-deck meeting of the entire compliance department of the brokerage firm.

Instead, the trading has gone on unimpeded for more than five years, according to Kaplan’s financial disclosures. Clients whose jobs involve having access to confidential market information, like an investment banker or a central banker, would have their trades closely monitored in a properly functioning compliance department. This compliance department was clearly not functioning and the American public deserves to know why.”

Martens, Trading Like a Hedge Fund Kingpin for Five Years, Wall Street On Parade, September 27, 2021

"The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustainable recovery."

Jesse, May 2009


The Dollar rallied this morning early, and managed to hold on to the 109 handle.

VIX wallowed near its moving averages.

Stocks slumped badly, but did not set a lower low, recovering quite a bit into the close.

Gold and silver rallied.  Gold has run up to the key resistance.

US markets will be closed tomorrow in observance of the funeral of Jimmy Carter.

The rest of the world will have to try and carry on without Wall Street.

As you know I try to suspend judgement on a new administration for the first 100 days.

I am doing the same thing again.

Well, let's see how this all unfolds.

I suspect that 2025 is going to be a year of historic, shocking changes.

See you on Friday.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Dark Myths of Messianic Empires

 

"Day by day the money-masters of America become more aware of their danger, they draw together, they grow more class-conscious, more aggressive. The war has taught them the possibilities of propaganda ; it has accustomed them to the idea of enormous campaigns which sway the minds of millions and make them pliable to any purpose.

American political corruption was the buying up of legislatures and assemblies to keep them from doing the people's will and protecting the people's interests; it was the exploiter entrenching himself in power, it was financial autocracy undermining and destroying political democracy."

Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check, 1919.

"Congressmen Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Brian Mast (R-Fla.) introduced H.R. 23, the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act, which would 'impose sanctions with respect to the International Criminal Court engaged in any effort to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute any protected person of the United States and its allies.'  

The bill, which was fast-tracked by the 119th House rules package, was initially approved last June by the Republican-controlled lower chamber with the support of 42 Democratic lawmakers.  In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri."

Brett Wilkins, Groups Urge Congress, Trump to Reconsider Sanctions on ICC, Common Dreams, January 6, 2025

“The mainstream media must be considered part of the deep state.  Its assumptions, biases, priorities, and defaults are very much a function of the interests of a tiny elite of corporate wealth whose interests the media necessarily serves regardless of this or that outlet’s position along the ever-narrowing spectrum of allowable political perspective."

Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, June 2022

"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects."

R. J. Rummel, Death by Government: A History of Mass Murder and Genocide Since 1900

"A poor man is ever at a disadvantage in matters of public concern. When he rises to speak, or writes a letter to his superiors, they ask: Who is this fellow that offers advice?  And when it is known that he is without coin they spit their hands at him, and use his letters in the cooks' fires.  But if it be a man of wealth who would speak, or write, or denounce, even though he have the brain of a yearling dromedary, or a spine as crooked and unseemly, the whole city listens to his words and declares them wise."

Li Hongzhang, as quoted in The Cry for Justice edited by Upton Sinclair, 1915

"People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves. The idea of the elite as composed of men and women having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite.”

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

"The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, and justice nothing."

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture for Literature, 1970


Stocks sold off today for the same 'technical' reasons that they rallied yesterday. 

People feel the need to look for 'reasons' why the market do something on a given day.

Sometimes there is a reason, some key piece of data or an exogenous event.

Often enough the manner that stocks react does not seem to be customary to a particular piece of data.

I don't think I can stress enough that while markets tend to be more (relatively speaking) rational in the long run, in the short run they are a gamblers' game, a game of liar's poker.

If you bear that in mind, and understand the games these jokers play, you might do a little better.  

And keep in mind that the big players who are buying 'order flow' know in the aggregate where the specs and mid-tier guys are leaning and to what extent. 

Its a game of timing and information.

And the smaller players watch what the big guys are doing, in the pits and on the squawk boxes.

You don't have to believe it.  But that's how it is, and even moreso today than it was when I started out when some manner of regulation prevailed.  Now its more like the 1920s.

Gold and silver rallied, as did the Dollar.

Gold is coiling in a triangle within the larger triangle.  At some point it is going to run. 

It was a little surprising that silver decoupled from tech stocks, but that speaks to the nature of today's action.

Bitcoin did follow its NDX correlation and gave up the 100K handle and then some.

VIX popped up off its moving averages.  See what I mean?

As a reminder US markets will be closed on January 9 for the observance of Jimmy Carter's funeral.

Carter did not get along at all with the 'deep state.'  And they played him hard and dirty for it. 

The masks of the respected ujnspeakable seem to have dropped off a little in the last ten years or so.

And the Non-Farm Payroll report drops first thing on /Friday morning.

Stack your decks carefully then on Wednesday afternoon.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Heedless Suicide of the Gerasene Swine

 

"It is a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent."

Martin Luther King, A Dark Day In Our Nation, Riverside Church, 30 April 1967

"A nation can be one or the other, a democracy or an imperialist, but it can't be both. If it sticks to imperialism, it will, like the old Roman Republic, on which so much of our system was modeled, lose its democracy to a domestic dictatorship."

Chalmers Johnson, Interview on Democracy Now, February 27, 2007

"Many analysts, myself included, would conclude that Wolin has made a close to airtight case that the American republic’s days are numbered, but Wolin himself does not agree.  Toward the end of his study he produces a wish list of things that should be done to ward off the disaster of inverted totalitarianism: 'rolling back the empire, rolling back the practices of managed democracy; returning to the idea and practices of international cooperation rather than the dogmas of globalization and preemptive strikes; restoring and strengthening environmental protections; reinvigorating populist politics; undoing the damage to our system of individual rights; restoring the institutions of an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and checks and balances; reinstating the integrity of the independent regulatory agencies and of scientific advisory processes; reviving representative systems responsive to popular needs for health care, education, guaranteed pensions, and an honorable minimum wage; restoring governmental regulatory authority over the economy; and rolling back the distortions of a tax code that toadies to the wealthy and corporate power.'

Unfortunately, this is more a guide to what has gone wrong than a statement of how to fix it, particularly since Wolin believes that our political system is 'shot through with corruption and awash in contributions primarily from wealthy and corporate donors.'  It is extremely unlikely that our party apparatus will work to bring the military-industrial complex and the 16 secret intelligence agencies under democratic control. Nonetheless, once the United States has followed the classical totalitarianisms into the dustbin of history, Wolin’s analysis will stand as one of the best discourses on where we went wrong."

Chalmers Johnson, Our Managed Democracy, CounterPunch, May 16, 2008

“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.  It is time to realize, however, that the real dangers to America today come not from the newly rich people of East Asia but from our own ideological rigidity, our deep-seated belief in our own propaganda.”

Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, 2002

Stocks enjoyed a bit of a risk-on rally today, for no particular reason.

Gold and the Dollar were under pressure, as risk safe havens.

Bitcoin and silver rallied higher with the stock bubble.

VIX fell again to its longer moving average.

Deception is abounding.

It is hard to be optimistic about the future, given our leadership and their reckless, selfish policies, and utter willingness to use force and fraud to accomplish their schemes.

But as always, we are in God's hands.

The swine are certainly stampeding headlong in a frenzy of hubris and greed towards the cliff.

Perhaps we may learn something as we watch them pitching into their demise.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Market of Fraud and Speculative Delusion

 

"In 1929, millions thought they could easily become rich, and some did. The parallel moment in modern history came in the late 1990s, in the information-technology boom under President Clinton, which dissolved at the turn of the decade.

In the early 2000s the Bush administration sent clear signals that regulations on mortgages would not be enforced.  There followed every manner of scheme to fleece the unsuspecting—liars' loans, no-doc loans,  and neutron loans were terms of art in the business—bundled together, rated and securitized, then spread through the world and left to fester until rising interest rates and crashing prices wrecked the system.

This was fraud, perpetrated in the first instance by the government on the population, and by the rich on the poor.  The borrowers were, of course, complicit in some cases, taking out mortgages they never had a hope of paying down.  In many more, they were simply naive, gullible, open to pressure, credulous, and hopeful—something might turn up.  They took the assurances of lenders that housing prices always rise, that bad loans can always be refinanced.  They were attractive to lenders for all of these reasons, and because they had nothing to lose.  A borrower with nothing to lose will sign papers that another will not.  A government that permits this to happen is complicit in a vast crime.

As in 1929, the architects of disaster will form a rich rogues gallery to go shooting in.  The Old Objectivist, Alan Greenspan, was intermittently aware of impending disaster and resolutely unwilling to stop it.  The Liberal's Banker, Robert Rubin, had a reputation for fiscal probity eclipsed by catastrophic complacency at Citigroup, where he was paid SI 15 million and maintained silence, so far as we know.  There will be Phil Gramm, of whom in April 2008 the Washington Post wrote that he was 'the sorcerers apprentice of financial instability and disaster.'  There will be Lawrence Summers, impassioned advocate of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, bounced from Harvard's presidency to Obama's White House—a man whose reputation remains to be rebuilt or buried by events.  And Bernard Madoff."

James K. Galbraith, Foreword to the 2009 edition of The Great Crash of 1929, May 18, 2009

“The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”

George Orwell, 1984

"By the end of the summer of 1929, the conviction that the market had become the personal instrument of mysterious but omnipotent men was never stronger.  And, indeed, this was a period of exceedingly active pool and syndicate operations — in short, of manipulation.  During 1929 more than a hundred issues on the New York Stock Exchange were subject to manipulative operations, in which members of the Exchange or their partners had participated.  

The nature of these operations varied somewhat but, in a typical operation, a number of traders pooled their resources to boom a particular stock. This buying would increase prices and attract the interest of people watching the tape across the country.  The interest of the latter would then be further stimulated by active selling and buying, all of which gave the impression that something big was afloat.  Tipsheets and market commentators would tell of exciting developments in the offing. If all went well, the public would come in to buy, and prices would rise on their own. The pool manager would then sell out, pay himself a percentage of the profits, and divide the rest with his investors

While it lasted, there was never a more agreeable way of making money.  The public at large sensed the attractiveness of these operations, and as the summer passed it came to be supposed that Wall Street was concerned with little else. This was an exaggeration, but it did not discourage public activity in the market. People did not believe they were being shorn.  Nor were they.  Both they and the pool operators were making money with the difference, only, that the latter were making more.  In any case, the public reaction to inside operations was to hope that it might get some inside information on these operations and so get a cut in the profits that the great men like Cutten, Livermore, Raskob, and the rest were making."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929, 1954

“Religion used to be the opium of the people.   To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life.   But now, we are witnessing a transformation: a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz, The Discreet Charm of Nihilism

Trading for the new year starts next week in earnest. 

This week was for the junior traders who for the most part just following orders.

The commentary on the mainstream media, including financial television, is other-worldly.

It will be interesting to see how January goes this year.

I have been struggling with something that I now think is the norovirus.   I had not even known about it until a few days ago.  

Considering all the company we had for Christmas, including all the little ones, it is not surprising.

The symptoms of the norovirus are like a flu on steroids, but no coughing or congestion.  Just a runny nose, epic gastrointestinal distress, and the worst body aches I can remember.   I could barely walk.

I share this in case you too are experiencing mystery symptoms.

I am finally starting to feel better but am very fatigued.

Have a pleasant weekend.