Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Grinding On Towards a Grim Conclusion

 

"They worshiped the beast and asked, 'Who is like the beast? Who can stand against it?'”

Revelation 13:3

"America is caught in a confidence or credibility trap, in which the changes, investigations, and reforms necessary to restore trust to an economy or market are rendered unlikely because doing so would expose a pervasive corruption that the principals fear would destroy the careers of politicians and business people who may have permitted and even appeared to facilitate the control fraud that caused the financial crisis in the first place.  Personal risk trumps public stewardship.

The fraudulent activity is covered up and therefore continues or at the very least appears to continue, crowding out most productive business investment and activity which cannot possibly hope to compete with the highly profitable fraudulent activity ad asset bubbles under such opaque and uncertain circumstances.  Informed market participants are unwilling to invest their liquid assets in a system which they suspect is riddled with accounting fraud, insider trading, and regulatory weaknesses, except of course in a few situations and somewhat ironically in some existing frauds, such as a bubble in equity valuations for example, which they think they understand.

The American government is indeed acting as if it is involved in a massive coverup of a control fraud and corruption that could perhaps be the worst in its history.  I think many people who are looking at this know in their hearts that all is not well, that there is something not quite right in the current situation.  How else can we explain such massive and widespread financial fraud, with so few meaningful indictments, or even ongoing investigations with credible disclosures?   And the worst perpetrators appear to be dictating the remedies and reforms to the system for this government sponsored recovery."

Jesse, America Trapped in a Massive Coverup of Control Fraud and Corruption, 22 January 2011

"The ultimate purpose of crime is to establish an endless empire.  It seeks a state of complete insecurity and anarchy, founded upon the tainted ideals of a world thought doomed to annihilation.   When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven mad by fear and horror, and when chaos has become the supreme law, then the time for the empire of lawlessness will have come."

Fritz Lang, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933


Stocks exploded higher on the news of a 'deal' between China and the US on tariffs over the weekend.

Gold was hammered lower, as the Dollar rose sharply.

Silver actually gained a bit with equities.

VIX is now at a level where we would start looking more seriously for a retracement of all this exuberance.

There will be a stock option expiration of a sort on Friday.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Have a pleasant evening. 

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.