Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Whores, Gamblers, and Blood Money

 

"The whore and gambler, by the state
    Licensed, build that nation’s fate.
The harlot’s cry from street to street
    Shall weave old England’s winding-sheet.
The winner’s shout, the loser’s curse,
    Dance before dead England’s hearse."

William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, 1863

“In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.”

Rüdiger Dornbusch, Macroeconomics

"A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.  The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party."

Henry Wallace, The Danger of American Fascism, 1944

"Indeed, I think the reissue of the dollar, with a few zeros gone, is inevitable.  It is the timing of that event that is problematic.  It could be one year, or it could be fifty years.  There is a big difference there for your investment strategy.  But one day you will go the ATM and the dollars will be Blue, not Green— and you will get less than you expected.”

Jesse, Deflation, Hyperinflation, Stagflation, 16 April 2011

"He's mad, that trusts in the tameness of a wolf,
a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath."

William Shakespeare, King Lear 1943-1945


Today was a strange kind of day.   The markets show a little activity early on, and then became listless, almost semi-comatose.

I figure something big is going to be happening soon and the insiders are not sure how to bet it.

But maybe its just spring fever.  

Maybe people on Wall Street are starting to believe Donnie's tariff breakthrough baloney.

Down most of the day, as usual equities managed to level up to finish about unchanged.

Gold and silver bounced after the almost senseless, brutal takedown around the FOMC non-event. 

VIX is low enough to where a correction soon seems likely.

The Dollar managed to hold on to the 100 handle.

The DXY index is somewhat misleading because it is so heavily weighed to the euro, and not much else.

Gold is a better indicator of the dollar and of any other currency.

Which is why the stooges and their paymasters hate it. 

I have been surprised over the years how little sound arguments heavily based on facts will move people on a particular subject. 

But an obvious dollop of fanciful propaganda will stand fast in their minds with the strength of the Himalayas.

People will ignore things until they cannot help it, usually when reality smashes into their face.

I think it has a lot to do with neurotically enhanced priorities.  Yes, I want to be rich, but even more than that, I want to have more and be better than those others.   

And, in the end, they will tear them down to do it.

Why do people seem to almost enjoy stealing from, abusing and even killing the weak and the poor?  

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has some things to say about this, his own experience speaking with the German public, as they slid enthusiastically into the abyss.

There is only one who is good, and true, and in the end you do it for that.  Oaths are meant to be kept, without the incentive of worldly rewards.

Have a pleasant weekend.

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.