Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Conviction that Power Can Do Anything, and Justice Nothing

 

“When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false.

His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit, Princeton University, January 30, 2005

"It is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification.  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

"I worry about the future of a nation that would refuse to acknowledge the true causes of the crisis.  A historic opportunity was lost.  America instead chose its poison as its cure, and the second 'Greatest Generation' would never be born.

Today I expect the U.S. government to attempt continuing an easy money policy into the next presidential term—past the meat of the foreclosure crisis, and past the corporate and public financing humps that are upcoming. Junk bonds, incredibly, again are at all-time highs.  Quantitative easing seems to be working for now.  But this is an invalid validation of what America is doing, a Pyrrhic gamble.  As we continue to debase our currency, Bernanke says he is not printing money.  Yet I receive an email every day from the Fed saying we just bought another $7 billion or $8 billion in treasuries, monetizing the debt.  The scope and breadth of quantitative easing raise severe questions about the Treasury’s needs.

Government borrowing of money for the purpose of injecting cash into society, bailing out banks, brokers and consumers, is an easy decision for a population that has not yet learned that short-sighted easy strategies are the route to long-term ruin.  We never quite achieved the catharsis necessary to stoke a deep reevaluation of our wants, needs and fears.

Importantly, the toxic twins—fiat currency and an activist Fed—remain even more firmly entrenched with the financial reforms of last year.  The Federal Reserve, having acquired new powers of regulation, has insisted that nothing in the field of economics or finance was of any help in predicting the crisis—period, no more comments.  It’s a worthless conclusion that guarantees we’ll make the same mistake again and again.

We need better leaders, but frankly this isn’t going to happen.  A problem cannot be solved if it is never acknowledged.  Taxes need to be raised, spending needs to be cut, and loopholes need to be shut if we are to have any hope of returning to a stable base.  Home ownership should not be a policy of the U.S. government.  The banking system needs substantial reform and bank breakups.  Glass–Steagall needs a second run in a strong form. The list of things that won’t happen—but should happen—goes on and on."

Michael Burry, Missteps to Mayhem, Vanderbilt Magazine, September 1, 2011

“During the Eisenhower administration, the Dulles brothers would finally be given full license to exercise their power in the global arena. In the name of defending the free world from Communist tyranny, they would impose an American reign on the world enforced by nuclear terror and cloak-and-dagger brutality.”

David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: the Rise of America's Secret Government, 2015

"This is the legacy of Greenspan and his chairmanship at the Federal Reserve.  Yes, the borrowers are also at fault, and 'no one made them borrow' as the Wall Streeters and their sock puppets like to say at bubble-bust times like these.  But let's not allow the spin to muddy the waters.

It was fraud.  Fraud on a massive and premeditated scale.  Not unprecedented unfortunately.  It was aided and abetted by a host of enablers in the media and the universities.  And at the heart of it all was the Wall Street Banks.

There is madness in crowds, but the genesis of the madness is in those who assemble the crowds, give them weapons, and walk among them whispering—  madness.

Let there be no doubt.  The housing bubble was a financially engineered Ponzi scheme with the Wall Street Banks at the center.  And its not over yet.  They will not, and probably cannot, stop on their own. The banks must be restrained."

Jesse, Housing Madness, 15 April 2008

"Why can you not understand me? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you live to serve your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and did not stand in the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies he speaks from his heart, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

John 8:43-44


 I have lived through some interesting times, as have many of you, and our parents and grandparents. 

I remember the cold war, vividly. 

'We Will Bury You' posters of Khrushchev banging the UN podium with his shoe were familiar.

And with this the Red Scare, and the McCarthy era, and the assault on freedom of privacy and speech in the name of patriotism.

In particular I remember the fight against segregation and for equal rights.  

And the protests against the war in Vietnam.  And the 'troubles' in the UK.

And how lonely and wearing a struggle they all were.  

Freedom of speech is under a terrible assault, again.

The great irony is that this time freedom of speech is being undermined with the reasons of the 'woke' culture of the left, who want to control speech for safety and comfort.  

And it is being taken up by the hands of those with power, and the goal of suppressing ideas and movements that they do not like. 

When you sacrifice principles to expediency and comfort, those things eventually turn against you. 

Now we are facing the reality of an oligarchy, that has the money and the power and control of the media and the organizations of thought.

But it all seems like the same old thing.

There are those who are called to stand up, hold their ground, and resist.

And there are those who might support them, or just endure while retaining their humanity.

Even in small and simple ways, seemingly unnoticed, walk with the angels, for His sake and for your own.  And in time, stand with the brightest lights, his heroes, his knights and saints.

But never let your own light go out. For what does it profit a man, to gain the whole world, but lose their soul?  

Stocks did their usual wash and rinse today, after an initial plunge based off a hotter than expected inflation number.

Given these tariffs going into place, we haven't seen anything yet.

Gold did its usual bob and weave, but silver managed to rally and hold it.  

VIX has fallen below its moving averages, once again.

People in the US are cheering the likelihood that foreign policy will change and the proxy in the Ukraine will be coming to an end, at least for them.

But the situation in the Mideast is reaching a rolling boil again.  And murder en masse is in the air.

One thing I can tell you is that it is never really any different.  The names and faces change, but the struggle remains the same.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Dimensions of Shame

 

“There is no force on earth that can stand up effectively, year after year, against the thousands of individuals and hundreds of millions of dollars in the Washington swamp aimed at influencing the legislative and electoral process.  The central issue is we’re developing into a plutocracy. We’ve got an enormous number of enormously rich people that have convinced themselves that they’re rich because they’re smart and constructive."

Paul Volcker, Keeping At It, October 2018

"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was well executed."

Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot, 1835

”Nothing is so unworthy of a nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible of crimes— crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure— reach the light of day?”

Die Weiße Rose, First Leaflet, Munich 1942

"Decades after Depression-era reforms, Wall Street fought successfully to deregulate the financial system, paving the way for the 2008 financial crash that caused millions to lose their homes and livelihoods. And the ultra-rich and big corporations have also managed to dominate our campaign finance system, making it easier for them to buy off politicians who commit to rigging the rules against the poor and the environment, and to suppress voting rights, making it harder for the poor to fight back.

Key to these rollbacks: controlling the narrative about who is poor in America and the world. It is in the interest of the greedy and the powerful to perpetuate myths of deservedness—that they deserve their wealth and power because they are smarter and work harder, while the poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy and intellectually inferior.  It’s also in their interest to perpetuate the myth that the poverty problem has largely been solved and so we needn’t worry about the rich getting richer—even while our real social safety net is full of gaping holes."

William Barber II, The Real Epidemic is Poverty, March 30, 2020

“The mob believes everything it is told, provided only that it be repeated over and over.  Provided too that its passions, hatreds, fears are catered to.  The grosser, the bigger, the cruder the lie, the more readily is it believed and followed.  The mob has no memory; needless to pretend to any truth: the mob is radically incapable of perceiving it: the mob can never comprehend that its own interests are what is at stake.”

Alexandre Koyré, Réflexions sur le Mensonge, March 1943


A bit of an odd day in the US markets.  

Gold and silver were down a bit.

The Dollar was down.

Stocks were largely unchanged.

The VIX held steady at a recently lower level.

The US has given its foreign policy over to bribing and naked bullying.

Wars, tariffs, erosion of liberty, the lack of integrity in the financial system, and threats to the law from the impulsiveness of narcissists and a lawless few.

It's almost as if the markets are waiting to see what happens next.

Well, more information about all this is clearly on its way.

It looks to be a rough time ahead, and optimism is difficult to maintain.

And that is where hope and faith in providence comes in.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Power, Madness, and Murder

 

"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 civilised and innocent people. The silence under the terror was only its consequence. The coldness of the societal mindset, the isolated competitor, was the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others, for the fact that only very few people reacted. The torturers know this, and they put it to test ever anew.

One must come to know the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds, must reveal these mechanisms to them, and strive, by awakening a general awareness of those mechanisms, to prevent people from becoming so again.

It is not the victims who are guilty, not even in the sophistic and caricatured sense in which still today many like to construe it.  Only those who unreflectingly vented their hate and aggression upon them are guilty.  One must labor against this lack of reflection, must dissuade people from striking outward without reflecting upon themselves.  The only education that has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection."

Theodor Adorno, Education After Auschwitz, 18 April 1966

"Foolishness is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.  One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force.  Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own downfall in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease.

Against such foolishness we are defenseless.  Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the foolish person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.  In all this the foolish person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

For that reason, greater caution is called for dealing with a foolish person than with a malicious one.  Never again will we try to persuade the foolish person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous.  If we want to know how to get the better of foolishness, we must seek to understand its nature.  This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one.  There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet foolish, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but foolish. 

Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humanity with foolishness.  It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law.  The power of the one needs the foolishness of the other.

The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him.  He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome foolishness.  Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it.  Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the foolish person. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome foolishness.

But these thoughts about foolishness also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be foolish in every circumstance.  It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s foolishness than from their inner independence and wisdom."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, executed on April 9, 1945

“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”

C. S. Lewis


They don't wish to hear it. 

Of course they don't! 

No one caught up in the madness of evil ever wants to hear it.

All that can be said is— hell awaits.

And they will not believe it, and never see it coming. 

Winning....

Stocks managed to rally back today after the Non-Farm Payrolls decline of Friday.

Smells like a wash and rinse, but the timing is not yet clear.

Gold broke out sharply, fueled by signs and rumors of a short squeeze in London.

Silver advanced but was pressed back into the close for only a modest gain.

VIX declined.  

Mispricing risk and lying about it is one of the great talents of our politicians and financiers.

The lying is becoming so fashionable that nearly all of the servants to power, the demimonde of humanity, are doing it.

When the fruits of their actions start falling to earth it is going to be an avalanche of consequences.

But we don't believe it!

Of course you don't.   

The storm gathers. 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Harshness and Hostility to Angels

 

"When unequal justice prevails, the party that does not need to follow the law has a distinct competitive advantage. A corporation that knowingly breaks the law will find ways to profit through illegal means that are not available to competitors. As a consequence, the competitive playing field is biased toward the company that does not need to follow the rules.

The net result of unequal justice is likely to be the destruction of the overall wealth of our society. I don’t mean the wealth of individuals; I mean the total wealth of goods and services that are the benefits of healthy competition. To the extent that unequal justice prevails, entities that are exempt from the laws will, in all likelihood, be more profitable than law abiding competitors. Then they use their profits to further weaken competitors by using their illegal profits to further build their businesses at the expense of competitors.

All of this business building activity is based on a foundation of sand, and ultimately the entire industry — or even the larger economy — becomes distorted. The 'rogue' company gains power, changes markets, and destroys direct and indirect competitors because it is playing by different rules."

Bruce Judson, For Capitalism to Survive, Crime Must Not Pay, April 12, 2012

“I will punish the world for its evil and the wicked for their sin. I will crush the arrogance of the proud and humble the pride of the mighty."

Isaiah 13:11

"The message of the gospel is simple, clear, and straightforward.  We are not things meant for the use and pleasure of another.  We are all the children of God, made for joy, with all the life and fulfillment that it brings.  So we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, in harmony with the love of God, whom we love above all in all.

But the words of life that have been planted in our hearts are too often suffocated by the worries of the world or seduced by wealth, and twisted into barrenness with pride.  So we make the gospel disputatious and complex, because the evil in us loves to hide the light with complexity.  It is a way to blind our eyes and harden our hearts against the two great commandments.  A hollow, lifeless pride in the superiority of our form of worship and a love of ritual observance more than the spirit that it represents and calls forth is the leaven of the Pharisees."

Jesse, Pride and Death, 4 April 2023

"Let your love for each other grow. And do not fail to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have unknowingly shown kindness to angels."

Hebrews 13:1-2

"Hate what is evil, and hold on to what is good.  Love one another with with the love of a family.   Be an example in showing respect to others.  Do not be neglectful in your service, but enthusiastic in spirit, as a servant of the Lord.  Rejoice in hope; be patient in suffering, and faithful in prayer.   Contribute to the needs of the holy ones, and provide hospitality to strangers.

Bless those who provoke you.  Pray for them, and do not curse them.   Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.  Live in harmony with one another.  Do not be arrogant, but associate with the humble.   Do not claim to be wiser than you are.   Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but have a regard for what is good in the sight of all.  If it is possible, as best as you can, live peaceably with all.  Friends, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the judgement of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is mine, and I will do justice, says the Lord.'”

Romans 12:9-19

 

The Non-Farm Payrolls report came in on the light side but was otherwise balanced overall.

And after an initial rally, stocks fell and then continued on well into the red.

Gold and silver rallied but were pushed back. 

Silver was punched in the face with heavy selling around the 33 level and below.

As you may have heard London is having difficulty fulfilling customers orders for physical gold bullion.  They are delaying delivery times by four to eight weeks.  Borrow rates to get bullion from other sources like the custodians of ETFs have tripled overnight.

It is not a literal default.  But is shows signs of smoke, worth watching in any market where a dwindling supply is backing a 100x larger basket of potential short term demand.

That could be the monetary boom heard around the world.

VIX ticked up a  bit.

The Dollar took back the 108 handle.

What are we to make of this?

I am not sure where we are going with all this.  But I do think that the risk levels are elevated and badly mispriced.

Donny is doing some good things, and some fairly pointless, if not badly unproductive, things.  

It's funny to see his most ardent supporters twisting themselves into knots trying to redeem some of his less productive ideas. 

But I remind myself of how Obama's supporters did the same thing in his first term, when it became completely obvious that he was no reformer in the manner of Roosevelt, but a pawn of the moneyed interests of the Clinton cartel.  

This is why I don't like politics and ideology in general.  They tend to make people say and do dumb things.

Even those who support what may be a legitimately very good cause can distort themselves, make themselves much worse, by supporting a candidate who favors that issue, but is a ragged monstrosity on every other issue.

Well, its a difficult time to be human.  I think it is mostly that way.

We are advised to be hospitable to strangers, because in doing so we may be offering kindness to angels. 

But these days people tend to offer harshness and hostility to strangers, but consider themselves to be the paragons of the Christian spirit.  What do we make of that?

Need little, want less, love more.  For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

The Superbowl is this coming Sunday I hear.  The young man is going to join some friends in this American rite, and I doubt Daisy and I will be watching.  

But there are some interesting things on sale in the supermarkets that may provide some consolation.

Remember to feed God's creatures, the least of these, especially in these months of bad weather.  

It is in healing his little ones that we heal ourselves.   

But who says that the angels and the Spirit need to appear to us only as people? 

I know of several dogs and cats who, in their own way, seem to be sweet little angels — and imps!

Have a pleasant weekend.