Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Their Hands Were Full of Rings

 

"The truly savage and frenetic part of New York, the terrible, cold, cruel part, is Wall Street.  Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it.  There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present.  And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills this street believes that the world will always be the same, that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.

I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several billion dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea.  Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness.  I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings."

Federico Garcia Lorca, A Poet In New York, October 1929

“National Socialism was a revulsion by my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government—against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things, and never had."

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945

"Everyone knows that plagues have a way of recurring throughout history, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in the ones that crash down on us out of the sky. There have always been plagues and wars, yet they always take us by surprise. When war breaks out people say it's stupid and won't last long. Stupidity has a knack of getting in the way, which we would see if not wrapped up in ourselves. In this our townsfolk were like everybody else— they did not believe in plagues."

Albert Camus, The Plague


Just charts tonight.

I think they speak for themselves.

It is traditional among the kleptocrats for certain things to happen on an FOMC day.

And so they did.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Kingdoms of the Damned

 

"No kingdom can maintain itself by force alone.  Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does.  It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary.  On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary, and this revelation invests the victim with patience.

Furthermore, it is ultimately fatal to create too many victims.  The victor can do nothing with these victims, for they do not belong to him, but – to the victims.  They belong to the people he is fighting.  The people know this, and as inexorably as the roll call – the honor roll – of victims expands, so does their will become inexorable: they resolve that these dead, their brethren, shall not have died in vain.

When this point is reached, however long the battle may go on, the victor can never be the victor: on the contrary, all his energies, his entire life, are bound up in a terror he cannot articulate, a mystery he cannot read, a battle he cannot win – he has simply become the prisoner of the people he thought to cow, chain, or murder into submission."

James Baldwin, No Name in the Street, 1972

"Faustus had advanced beyond the level of a scarlet sinner — he was a conscious follower of the Prince of Darkness.  The fact he could publicly project an Antichrist image with pride, having no fear of reprisal, and his seeming diabolical art of escaping all punishment when others who were considered heretics had burned at the stake for less, would certainly signal that an unnatural individual walked in their midst. 

Hell for all eternity, for so little in exchange.  It is true in many respects he assumed the role of the charlatan, yet how apropos, considering his willingness to follow the Father of Lies and deception.”

E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World, 2008

"There was war in heaven. Michael and the angels fought against the dragon.  The dragon fought back, but he did not have the power, and so lost his place in heaven.   The great dragon was thrown down – that ancient snake called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray.   He fell to the earth, and his angels with him.  

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: ‘Now has come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God, and the authority of his Messiah. For the adversary of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down.

They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. Therefore rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them. 

But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has come down to you. And he is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.’"

Revelation 12:7-12

Gold and silver continued to rebound from their recent price manipulation tied to the Non-Farm Payrolls report and the holiday week in China that saw their own precious metals markets closed.

There will be an FOMC decision this Wednesday.

I doubt that they will do anything about rates.  There *might* be some verbiage adjustment.

The metals are getting short term overbought and so they may also be vulnerable to some kind of profit taking retrenchment.  

But the steady buying of physical metal in the overseas markets is going to be difficult to overcome in the short term.

Stocks were wobbly today again, but not exceptionally so.

The small movement in VIX suggests a decided lack of fear in the selling.

That could change on a dime, given the geopolitical event risks.

Let's see where the metals go.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Force and Fraud and Their Alternatives

 

"And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets.  I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night."

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1978

"At the root of America's economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America's political and economic elite. A society of markets, laws, and elections is not enough if the rich and powerful fail to behave with respect, honesty, and compassion toward the rest of society and toward the world."

Jeffrey Sachs, The Price of Civilization, October 2011

“When a man takes an oath, Meg, he's holding his own self in his own hands—  like water.   And if he opens his fingers then, he needn't hope to find himself again.  Some men aren't capable of this, but I would be loathe to think your father one of them.”

Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons, July 1960

"Of this Logos, the Word being eternal, men have proven to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it.  For although all things happen according to this Word, they are like the uneducated who first experience words and deeds.  And as for the rest, they are as unaware of what they do when they are awake, as they are when they are asleep."

Heraclitus, On Nature, ~500 BC

"The wealthy, not only by private fraud but also by common laws, do every day pluck and snatch away from the people some part of their daily living. I perceive nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men in procuring their own commodities under the name and authority of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all means and crafts, first how to keep safely without fear of losing that which they have unjustly gathered together, and next how to hire and abuse the work and labor of the people for as little money and effort as possible."

Thomas More, Utopia, 1516

"Take a stand for that which is right, and the world may misunderstand you, and criticize you, but you never go alone.  Walk with him this morning, and believe in Him, and do what is right, and he'll be with you even until the consummation of the ages.  And the world will look at you, and they won't understand you, but you'll go on anyhow.

I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow, before the gods of evil."

Martin Luther King, But If Not, 5 November 1967


Stocks were wobbly today, and lacked the kind of support they have enjoyed the last few weeks that helped pump some new life into the tariff-plagued bubble.

VIX is wallowing around on the low side.  There was no panic in the tape today.

Gold and silver rocketed back higher today, as they are often wont to do after a Non-Farm Payrolls smackdown.

These guys have no shame and even less accountability.

I think the US is heading towards a disaster, and there is a pronounced lack of adult supervision.   

So it may get quite messy.

But it is what it is.   

China is back from its May holiday.  Their buying will be felt in the markets tomorrow, but I suspect some of their fellows came back a bit early to take some tasty positions in the metals.

This flight to quality may continue to gain momentum, as nations recoil from what they perceive as unpredictable madness.

My goal is to navigate the markets with some success, and that requires me to see things as they are, and not as I might wish them to be.

Have a pleasant evening.

The Great Calling to the Faithful and the Fallen - Lazarus, come forth!

 

"They do not see the image of Almighty God before them, and ask themselves what He wishes.  And, for the same reason that they do not please Him, they succeed in pleasing themselves.  Hence, they become both self-satisfied and self-sufficient – they think they know just what they ought to do, and that they do it all; and in consequence they are very well content with themselves, and rate their merit very high, and have no fear at all of any future scrutiny into their conduct."

John Henry Newman, The Religion of the Pharisees, 1835

“Grace without price; grace without cost!  The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.  Since the cost was infinite, the possibilities of using and spending it are infinite. What would grace be if it were not cheap?

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.  Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.  It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life.  It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner.   Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son.  When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

This great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts.  For evil to appear disguised as light, compassion, historical necessity or even social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on traditional concepts.  The Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man.

In the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God.   Thereafter, any attack, even on the least of men, is an attack on Christ, who took on the form of man, and in his own Person restored the image of God in all.  Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin, and recover our solidarity with all mankind."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1937

"The ultimate test of discipleship is our willingness to abandon our egos and be carried by a power greater than ourselves."

Robert Barron, 17 May 2024

"But I know in my heart who I love, and that I want to be a part of that love forever, forsaking all else, all material stature and advantage which I now see as a falsehood and thin veneer over a slow demise.  I have chosen, and struggle on to that outcome, one day at a time.  And this is how it is and how it will be for all who have chosen the way.  Love is our destination, but while we are here on earth it can only be a journey, a way of life, as we struggle on, to a holy rest and peace at the last."

Jesse, Obedience Without Love: The Leaven of the Pharisees, 5 April 2017

"A new commandment I give you: that you love one another, as I have loved you.  By this all will know that you are mine — if you love one another.”

John 13:34 John 13:34
"Babylon’s days are numbered. Its time of destruction is coming."

Isaiah 13:22

"And Jesus said, 'Did I not say that if you have faith you will see the glory of God?'  And so they removed the stone.  Then Jesus raised his eyes and said, 'Father, I thank you for hearing me.  I know that you always hear me, but I say this for the sake of the people, so that they may believe that it was you who sent me.'

When he had said this, he cried out in a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come forth.'"

John 11:40=43

"Today’s builders of Babel tell us that there is no room for losers, and that those who fall along the way are losers. Theirs is the construction site of Hell. God’s economy, on the other hand, does not kill, discard or crush. It is lowly, faithful to the earth. Your way, Jesus, is the way of the Beatitudes. It does not crush, but cultivates, repairs and protects."

Jorge Mario Bergoglio Francis I, Way of the Cross: Jesus Falls, 18 April 2025

We who are intimate with the world and comfortable in our bondage to it are not His.  We are a His adversaries.

We are called to love Jesus, to love Him and His creation with all our hearts.

The things that steal the love of our neighbor from our hearts make them hard, and dead to His grace. 

All the zeal for the Law and anger for the things that afflict our sensibilities inflamed by pride are not His, but the work of the Adversary.  It is the leaven of the Pharisees.

We are His when we do as He has asked us, out of love in all humility, because He has asked us, so that we may have life with Him.