Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Requiem for the Exceptional

 

“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.”

Gretchen Morgenson, Neil Barofsky: Into the Bailout Buzzsaw, July 21, 2012

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

George Orwell, 1984

"I was told point blank by Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, 'Neil, you're a smart guy. You're a young guy. You're a talented guy. You got your whole future in front of you. You've got a young family that's starting out.  But you're doing yourself real harm.'  And he told me that if I wanted to get a job out on the Street afterwards, it was going to really be hard for me.

And I explained to him that I wasn't really interested in that. And he said, 'Well, maybe a judgeship. Maybe an appointment from the Obama administration for a federal judgeship.  If all you do is soften your tone, be a little bit more upbeat, all this stuff can happen for you.'

When I had my incident with the assistant secretary that my deputy, another former federal prosecutor, who did narcotics work, said to me, 'Neil, you were just offered the bullet or the bribe, the gold or the lead.'  And what he was referring to was a society just like that, which was Colombia, back in the day when Pablo Escobar and the drug kingpins really controlled society. 

And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not. And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of — and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent — to the detriment of everyone else."

Neil Barofsky, Moyers & Company, 2012

"Indeed, one can be deceived in many ways; one can be deceived in believing what is untrue, but on the other hand, one is also deceived in not believing what is true."

Søren Kierkegaard, Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, SKS vol.9, 1847

"Over the past 30 years the plutocrats have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding.   This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet.   Millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable.   Once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs.  Democracy only works when we claim it as our own."

Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, 30 April 2010


There will be a Comex futures contract option expiration for the precious metals tomorrow. 

Gold is being stopped dead at the overhead resistance.  

If it does break through that move might contain some energy.

Silver is weighed down a  bit by the big decline in the NDX.

Speaking of the NDX, it set a lower low today, and went out there, which is not constructive for those of the bullish persuasion.

The SP 500 managed to hold up.  I have marked the key support in green on the chart.  It if breaks that then run, bully, run!

Bitcoin had a bit of a problem getting out of its own way today, despite the big new buy from the true believers favorite strategy stock.

The mainstream media is starting to take note of the big international flows of gold bullion, and its recent price increase.  

Perhaps something significant is happening, or rather has been happening, and it is only now being noticed.

The US seems to think it does not need anyone else these days.  That is fine when you are riding high.  But if you stumble, there will be plenty of people all too glad to kick you on the way down.

How are the mighty fallen, and their weapons of war have perished.

I have spent the last couple of hours watching a guy in upstate NY on Youtube doing work on a cabin in the Adirondacks, and pretty gnarly repairs on an old skidsteer.   These are some of my favorite videos.  I may be an old dog, but I still like to watch the hunt, even from the porch.

It's the little things that make life worth living.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Ghouls of Wall Street

 

"Now we remember that it was Bill Clinton's administration that deregulated derivatives, deregulated telecom, and put our country's only strong banking laws in the grave. He's the one who rammed the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through congress.  Mass incarceration and the repeal of welfare, two of Clinton's other major achievements, are the pillars of the disciplinary state that has made life so miserable for Americans in the lower reaches of society.  He would have put a huge dent in Social Security too, had the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal not stopped him.  If we take inequality as our measure, the Clinton administration looks not heroic but odious."

Thomas Frank, Rendezvous With Oblivion, 1 September 2006

"In 1999, on signing Gramm-Leach-Bliley into law, Clinton said, 'This is a day we can celebrate as an American day' and that 'the Glass-Steagall law is no longer appropriate for the economy in which we live' and 'today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down these antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority' and 'This is a very good day for the United States.'"

Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Clinton on Deregulation

"I think Bill Clinton was the pivotal figure of our times. Before he came along, the market-based reforms of Reaganism were controversial; after Clinton, they were accepted consensus wisdom. Clinton was the leader of the group that promised to end the Democrats’ old-style Rooseveltian politics, that hoped to make the Democrats into a party of white-collar winners, and he actually pulled that revolution off. He completed the Reagan agenda in a way the Republicans could not have dreamed of doing—signing trade agreements, deregulating Wall Street, getting the balanced budget, the ’94 crime bill, welfare reform. He almost got Social Security partially privatized, too. A near miss [Miss Lewinsky that is] on that one.

He remade our party of the left (such as it is) so that it was no longer really identified with the economic fortunes of working people. Instead it was about highly educated professional-class winners, people whose good fortunes the Clintonized Democratic Party now regarded as a reflection of their merit. Now it was possible for the Democratic Party to reach out to Wall Street, to Silicon Valley, and so on. This was something relatively new for a left party in the industrialized world, and it was quickly adopted by other left parties in other countries, most notably 'New Labour' in the UK. Unfortunately, this strategy has little to offer the people who used to be the Democratic Party’s main constituents except scolding. It merely assumes that they have, as the ’90s saying went, nowhere else to go."

Seymour Hersh, Ordinary People By the Millions, July 13, 2023

"There is no Republican Party.   There is no Democratic Party.  You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1907

"What is the Democratic Party’s former constituency of labor and progressive reformers to do? Are they to stand by and let the party be captured in Hillary’s wake by Robert Rubin’s Goldman Sachs-Citigroup gang that backed her and Obama?   The 2016 election sounded the death knell for the identity politics. This strategy to distract voters from economic policies has obviously failed.

This election showed that voters have a sense of when they’re being lied to. After eight years of Obama’s demagogy, pretending to support the people but delivering his constituency to his financial backers on Wall Street. 'Identity politics' has given way to the stronger force of economic distress. Mobilizing identity politics behind a Wall Street program will no longer work."

Michael Hudson, Break Up the Democratic Party, November 2016


Gold and silver meandered around, and were pressed down below upper resistance for small losses.

The Dollar chopped sideways.

VIX climbed quite a bit from its recent complacency.

Stocks were hammered.   And they went out near the lows.

And so it was for today's stock option expiration.

The Banks will struggle, and the political class will try to muddle through.

One of the things that comforts me in my old age is that I never voted for either of the Clintons.  Obama once.  I was fooled along with many that he was a reformer, a belief of which he quickly relieved us with his economic and financial actions and appointments.

I have never voted for Trump.  And not for Biden either, for what I hope are obvious reasons.  You could say that my votes are 'wasted.'  Unlike the world, nothing is wasted in God's economy.

But I am very glad that Trump is seeking an end to that insane conflict in the Ukraine.  It has deep roots in American politics, and it will not go away quietly.   Like so many of our recent wars, its was a source of enrichment for some, and of sorrow for many.

My geopolitical concerns in the Middle East as high.  I think it represents a serious threat to many things that we cherish.

But this is how the world works, from one debacle to another.  I've seen worse.

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

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Vulgar Exceptionalism of the Plutocracy

 

"The big reactionaries of the business world and their allies and instruments among politicians and newspaper editors took advantage of this division of opinion, and especially of the fact that most of their opponents were on the wrong path; and fought to keep matters absolutely unchanged. These men demanded for themselves an immunity from governmental control which, if granted, would have been as wicked and as foolish as immunity to the barons of the twelfth century. 

Many of them were evil men.  Many others were just as good men as were some of these same barons; but they were as utterly unable as any medieval castle-owner to understand what the public interest really was.  There have been aristocracies which have played a great and beneficent part at stages in the growth of mankind; but we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy."

Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography, 1913

“Though you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the face of the earth like the mice underground; and your posterity, your history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen slag, burnt down together with the terrestrial globe.  

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.  You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty.  So I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth.  I don’t want to understand you."

 Anton Chekhov, The Bet, January 14, 1889

"What is truth?  You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.  To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.  If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.  If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.  The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.   Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing.   At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.

Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing.  Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference.  It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.

Do not obey in advance.  Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.  In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.  A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important.  It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges.  Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.  Modern tyranny is terror management.  When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power.  The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book.  Do not fall for it.

No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood.”

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, February 2017

Gold and silver rallied sharply, but the prices were steadily pushed lower into the close.

Stocks struggled with a large decline, but gained back some ground in the afternoon.

See a trend here?   

VIX wallows.

The Dollar gave up on chopping and declined steadily.

The inventory of physical gold bullion in Hong Kong has fallen to a low that I cannot remember seeing in all the years I have been following this.

It is running a fine line on a failure to deliver.   It appears that the customers are willing to work with them on their limitations to supply demand at these prices, for now.

Stock option expiration on Friday.

Comex expiration next week.

Will Wall Street be hoisted on its own pétard?

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Anguish of the Fallen

 

"The goal has been the 'Third Worldization' of the United States:

• an increasingly underemployed, lower-wage work-force;
• a small but growing moneyed class that pays almost no taxes;
• the privatization or elimination of human services;
• the elimination of public education for low-income people;
• the easing of restrictions against child labor;
• the exporting of industries and jobs to low-wage, free-trade countries;
• the breaking of labor unions;
• and the elimination of occupational safety and environmental controls and regulations."

Michael Parenti, Land of Idols, 1994

“Son of man, they have set up idols in their hearts. They cling to the errors that will make them fall into sin. Why should I allow myself to hear them?"

Ezekiel 14:3

"Surface idols are things like money, spouse, children, through which our deep idols seek fulfillment.  For example, money can be a surface idol that serves to satisfy more foundational influences.  Surface idols are things through which our deep idols seek fulfillment.  Some people want lots of money as a way to control their world and life, and such people usually don’t spend much money and they live very modestly. They keep it all safely saved and invested so that they can feel completely save in the world. Others want money for access to social circles and to make themselves beautiful and attractive. These people do spend their money on themselves in lavish ways.

Other people want money because it gives them so much power over others.  In every case, money functions as an idol, and yet because of various deep idols it results in very different patterns of behavior. The person using money to serve a deep idol of control will often feel superior to others and use money to obtain power or social approval. In every case however, money idolatry slaves and distorts lives.

An idol is something we cannot live without.  We must have it.  Therefore it drives us to break rules we once honored, to harm others, even ourselves, in order to get it.  Idols give us a sense of being in control.   Idols control us since we feel like we must have them or life is meaningless.”

Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods, 2009

“Every idol, however exalted, turns out, in the long run, to be a Moloch, hungry for human sacrifice.”

Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudon, 1952

"Then the kings of the earth, the rulers, the generals, the wealthy, the powerful, and every slave and freedman hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains. And they cried to the mountains and the rocks, 'Fall on us, and hide us from the face of the one who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of their judgement has come, and who is able to survive?'”

Revelation 6:15-17

As a reminder, there will be a stock option expiration this Friday.

 

Stocks did their usual boogie woogie, with unsurprising mixed results.

 

The rally is narrowing again.   The SP 500 is working on what could be a triple top.

 

VIX was lower, and is starting to sound a bit of a complacency alarm.

 

The Dollar chopped sideways.

 

The battle over the physical supply of precious metals continues, pitting the banking dreadnoughts of the American financial system against most of the rest of the world.

 

Things are likely to get more and more interesting, and enlightening.

 

Have a pleasant evening.