Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Tragic Snare of Exceptionalism

 

"I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.  Why should we not form a secret society with but one object — for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire."

Cecil John Rhodes, Confession of Faith, 1877

“Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is.  The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence.  Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.”

Charles Darwin, Letter to William Graham, July 3, 1881

"The essential characteristic of a good and healthy ruling elite is that it views itself not as a function of the monarchy or the commonwealth, but as its very meaning and highest justification, and that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be suppressed and reduced to imperfect slaves and instruments. Its fundamental belief must be precisely that society is not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a foundation and scaffolding by which a select class of beings may be able to elevate themselves to their higher duties, and in general to a higher existence."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

"American preeminence is based on the fact that it is the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict in whatever part of the world it chooses to involve itself.   If America wants stability, it will have to create it.  We are in for abnormal times.  Our best hope for safety in such times, as in difficult times past, is in American strength and will — the strength and will to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them."

Charles Krauthammer, The Unipolar Moment, Foreign Affairs, 1990

"Advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool. This is merely a glimpse of the possibilities inherent in the process of transformation, not a precise prediction. Whatever the shape and direction of this revolution in military affairs, the implications for continued American military preeminence will be profound.The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."

The Project For a New American Century, Rebuilding America's Defenses, 1997

"Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.  And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice."

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978)


Stocks gave back a significant portion of the snap back relief rally that Trump triggered with his well-timed announcement on his twitter platform, Truth Social.

Rallies in bear markets and stiff declines tend to be violent, especially when they represent the concerted effort by a number of powerful insiders and their official enablers to 'strafe the lifeboats' of those trying to hedge their portfolios, and additionally those who are speculating to the short side.

But this is nothing new.  But it seems new to a whole new crop of punters, who don't have the experience or the knowledge of history of how these things go.

Wall Street feeds on them like sharks, while cajoling them with diversions, and false praise.

Gold and silver rallied again, as the Dollar plummeted.

It is said that it was the weakness in the bond market that caused Trump to blink.

I suspect it was the collective leaning on his neck by his gaggle of billionaire backers, who saw they kingdom starting to shudder.

VIX of course rose.

This type of violent, whipsaw action is fairly typical of bear markets.  It is.  I have traded through a number of them now.   There is nothing new in this, except perhaps that the rules and regulations have been significantly eroded by the moneyed interests over the past thirty years. 

My best advice for most 'investors' is to take some solid long term positions in safe havens with reasonable returns, and stay away from the locus of the conflagration.

And for those who are professionals, who are fewer than they think, you don't need any advice from me, except to place at risk only 'cool money' and don't let greed draw you into leveraged one way positions.

But, no one listens really.  I talked myself blue in the face in the tech bubble crash of 2001-2002 trying to inform people.  And there is no warning a people determined to be rich, especially if they think they are exceptional in any way.

Just like politics.  When any people think they are special, select, elite, of a purer blood or divine grant than the rest of humanity from whom they set themselves apart, it always ends in tragedy, ruin, and murder.

I will never forget when in 2013 President Obama urged the nation to rise to the occasion to go to war once again in Syria because we are exceptional,' Russia's Putin gave this response:

“It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation.  We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”

He may have been 'talking his book.'  He may have just been speaking falsely.  Hillary Clinton saw him as the great evil in the world.

The White House dismissed this as 'irrelevant.'  Senators and Representatives from both parties poured out their diverting emptiness and lack of moral depth while fattening themselves on the fruits of their corruption.

Wisdom comes from many places, but cannot pierce the dark of hardened hearts.

The madness serves none but itself.  

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Keeping America Safe For Plutocracy

 

"O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter.    If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king.    But if not, even if he does not preserve us, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the images of gold you have set up and commanded us to worship."

Daniel 3:16-18

"Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works."

John Mills, Credit Cycles and the Origin of Commercial Panics, December 11th, 1867

"In the twelve hapless years of the present millennium, we have looked on as three great bubbles of consensus vanity have inflated and burst, each with consequences more dire than the last.  But what rankles now is our failure to come to terms with how we were played.

The real mistake was my own.   I believed that our public intelligentsia had succumbed to an amazing series of cognitive failures; that time after time they had gotten the facts wrong, ignored the clanging bullshit detector, made the sort of mistakes that would disqualify them from publishing in The Baffler, let alone the Washington Post.

What I didn't understand was that these weren't cognitive failures at all; they were moral failures, mistakes that were hard-wired into the belief systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in question.  As such they were mistakes that-- from the point of view of those organizations or professions or classes-- shed no discredit on the individual chowderheads who made them.

Holding them accountable was out of the question, and it remains off the table today.  These people ignored every flashing red signal, refused to listen to the whistleblowers, blew off the obvious screaming indicators that something was going wrong in the boardrooms of the nation, even talked us into an unnecessary war, and the bailout apparatus still stands ready should they fuck things up again.

If economists— and journalists, and bankers, and bond analysts, and accountants— don’t pay some price for egregious and repeated misrepresentations of reality, then markets aren’t efficient after all. Either the gentlemen of the consensus must go, or their cherished hypothesis must be abandoned. The world isn’t gullible enough to believe both of them any longer."

Thomas Frank, Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly, The Baffler, March 26, 2012

"I know nothing that I may say can influence you. You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There is no Republican Party. There is no Democratic Party. You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy. You talk verbosely in antiquated terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while you wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel.”

Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1907


Looting, lying, and lawlessness will continue, until America is great again.  

The West is becoming more and more like The Planet of the Apes.   The gorillas have all the horses and weapons, and ride around enslaving and shooting human beings.

Donald blinked in a big way today on his wonderful tariffs, announcing on his Truth Social that he was placing a 90 day moratorium for the most part, except for a general 10% tariff, and a whopping 125% tariff on China.

This ignited a firestorm of the buying of risk on the tape.   Toss out those hedges and full speed ahead.

Who says money can't buy friends in high places.   

The White House, through its spokesmodel Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed the media for this change, saying that they just do not understand The Art of the Deal.

Gold and silver rocketed higher.

The VIX plummeted.

Bitcoin rallied back.

And the band played on.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metal Charts - Sliding Peacefully Into the Abyss

 

“The humility of the righteous will guide them, but the deceitfulness of the proud will destroy them."

Proverbs 11:3

"The German people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals; they give them the opportunity to carry on their destruction; and of course they do so.  Is this a sign that the Germans are brutalized in their simplest human feelings, that no chord within them cries out at the sight of such deeds, that they have sunk into a fatal consciencelessness from which they will never, never awake?"

Sophie Scholl, The White Rose, Second Leaflet, Munich 1942

"All the ruling elite have to offer to us is hate and fear— both of which obscure reason, that instrument of scrutiny which their self-serving actions and policies cannot bear."

Jesse, The Greatest Showman on Earth, 2 January 2019

"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph."

Haile Selassie, Addis Ababa, 1963

“The last moments before damnation are not often so dramatic.  Often the man knows with perfect clarity that some still possible action of his own will could yet save him.  But he cannot make this knowledge real to himself.   Some tiny habitual sensuality, some resentment, the indulgence of some fatal lethargy, seems to him at that moment more important than the choice between total joy and total destruction. 

With eyes wide open, seeing that the endless terror is just about to begin and yet, for the moment, unable to feel terrified, he watches passively, not moving a finger for his own rescue, while the last links with joy and reason are severed, and drowsily sees the trap close upon his soul.”

C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945

"It would be no sin if statesmen learned enough of history to realize that no system which implies control of society by privilege seekers has ever ended in any other way than collapse."

William Dodd, historian and US Ambassador to Germany, 1933


Do not ask about the coming of the beast.   

His servants are here, aggressively doing his will for hopes of money and power.

And they are offering seats at a banquet of suffering and death.

Stocks had a 'relief rally', a technical term for a short squeeze generally backed by the banks and the Treasury Dept.

But alas, it was a phantom, like the hope for greatness through petty meanness and petulant lawlessness.

Gold and silver had the usual rough time after the initial rally.

Not only isn't the current administration pursuing a meaningful audit of the US gold reserves, they are engaging in the same sort of Wall Street enriching tactics they ran against in their competitors.

VIX rose.

The Dollar dropped.

It is said that forces are massing to attack Iran, at the urging of the same people and governments who lusted for the blood of Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and Syria.  

"They live out their days in prosperity, sliding peacefully down into the abyss."

Job 21:13

Money can't buy freedom, but it can purchase a hell on earth.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Treacherous Servants of Mammon

 

“You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity.   But we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason."

Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, 1963

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse Dune, March 1985

"The oligarchs are flush with victory, and feel that they are firmly in control, able to subvert and direct any popular movement to the support of their own fascist ends and unslakable will to power. But my model says that the oligarchs will continue to press their advantages, being flushed with victory, until they provoke a strong reaction that frightens everyone, like a wake up call, and the tide then turns to genuine reform."

Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup, August 2010

"God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man."

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, November 1880

""It is not possible to found a lasting power upon injustice, lies, and treachery. These may, perhaps, succeed at first, and limp along on hope for awhile with a flourishing appearance. But time betrays their weakness, and they eventually fall into ruin of their own designs."

Demosthenes, Philippics


Today looked like the powers that be took a look at the overnight futures, which were decidedly bloody, and decided that this was a good time to exert a 'calming effect' to stabilize the markets.

I mean, they do have an official organization that is well-funded to do just that.

So the Dollar was boosted and the metals were slammed on the New York open.

Stocks found a footing after a wildly fluctuating open, and finally managed to close off the lows with a modest gain from the Friday close.

VIX fell substantially from a sky high opening around 60.  Panic was in the air.

Bitcoin even managed to come back from the worst of its weekend shellacking, but still closed well shy of the 80 handle.

We have some inflation data coming out later this week.

I made some money today, but does that really matter all that much?  A good trader can make money in almost any market.  And if they are not after instant riches, they can make a living of it.

There are plenty of bull market geniuses and unprincipled cheats, but fairly few seasoned traders.  It's not an easy thing to do consistently, and requires self-awareness and discipline.  

And even then, it's not an easy thing.   Honestly in matters of money and power is a rarity.

In the short term activist rulers can exert quite a bit of power over prices.  And people.

“Economic insecurity and deprivation are key components of a hierarchical society.  If they are eliminated, and if literacy and education are widespread, the elites [née oligarchy or establishment] have to deal with a population that is not as easily mesmerized by power and not compelled by necessity to submit to subjugation and exploitation in exchange for material security.”

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

All is well.   Until it isn't. 

As old as Babylon, and evil as sin.

Have a pleasant evening.