Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Cruel Consequences of Idolatry

 

"Late at night on the June 5, 1961, plane flight back to Washington from his Vienna meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, a weary President Kennedy wrote down on a slip of paper, as he was about to fall asleep, a favorite saying of his from Abraham Lincoln – really a prayer.  Presidential secretary Evelyn Lincoln discovered the slip of paper on the floor.  On it she read the words:

'I know there is a God – and I see a storm coming.  If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.'”

James Douglass, JFK's Rendezvous with Death, Dallas Coalition On Political Assassinations, November 2009

“In actual fact it would seem that during the Cold War, if not during World War II, this country has become frankly a warfare state built on affluence, a power structure in which the interests of big business, the obsessions of the military, and the phobias of political extremists both dominate and dictate our national policy.  It also seems that the people of the country are by and large reduced to passivity, confusion, resentment, frustration, thoughtlessness and ignorance, so that they blindly follow any line that is unraveled for them by the mass media.

Our weapons dictate what we are to do.  They force us into awful corners.  They give us our living, they sustain our economy, they bolster up our politicians, they sell our mass media, in short we live by them.  But if they continue to rule us we will also most surely die by them.”

Thomas Merton, Cold War Letters, 1968

"It should be understood that when pro-US figures use the term, 'rules-based international order,' they are not referring to anything analogous to the rule of law. Quite the opposite, they are using Orwellian language to describe a system in which essentially no rules can be established and/or observed, given that the dominant state has the prerogative to violate and/or rewrite 'rules' at its whim."

Aaron Good, American Exception, 2022

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

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture for Literature, 1970

“Certainly our basic need is for truth, and not for ‘images’ and slogans that ‘engineer consent.’  We are living in a dream world.  We do not know ourselves or our adversaries.  We are myths to ourselves and they are myths to us.  And we are secretly persuaded that we can shoot it out like the sheriffs on TV.  This is not reality."

James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, 2008

Stocks managed to rally today, broadly ignoring geopolitical and economic risks.   

Gold and silver were hammered, in the usual post-Fed boogie woogie.

The Dollar rallied back to the top of the 100 handle.

VIX is now at the level where we will start looking for a correction.

Bitcoin rallied back over 100k and posted a big gain.

As you know I have a bias in general against most modern politicians.  

American domestic politics are a disaster for the people.

What is discouraging is that so much of the West is following this trend towards the worship of money and power.

It is sickening.

Have a pleasant evening.

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.