Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A More Repulsive Picture Can Hardly Be Imagined

 

Metropolis, The Whore of Babylon

"Everywhere Rome was failing in her duties as mistress of the civilised world. Her own internal degeneracy was faithfully reflected in the abnegation of her imperial duties.  When in any country the small-farmer class is being squeezed off the land; when its labourers are slaves or serfs; when huge tracts are kept waste to minister to pleasure; when the shibboleth of art is on every man's lips, but ideas of true beauty in very few men's souls.

When the business-sharper is the greatest man in the city, and lords it even in the law courts; when class-magistrates, bidding for high office, deal out justice according to the rank of the criminal; when exchanges are turned into great gambling-houses, and senators and men of title are the chief gamblers; when, in short, 'corruption is universal, when there is increasing audacity, increasing greed, increasing fraud, increasing impurity, and these are fed by increasing indulgence and ostentation.

When a considerable number of trials in the courts of law bring out the fact that the country in general is now regarded as a prey, upon which any number of vultures, scenting it from afar, may safely light and securely gorge themselves; when the foul tribe is amply replenished by its congeners at home, and foreign invaders find any number of men, bearing good names, ready to assist them in robberies far more cruel and sweeping than those of the footpad or burglar' — when such is the tone of society, and such the idols before which it bends, a nation must be fast going down hill.

A more repulsive picture can hardly be imagined.  A mob, a moneyed class, and an aristocracy almost equally worthless, hating each other, and hated by the rest of the world; Italians bitterly jealous of Romans, and only in better plight than the provinces beyond the sea; more miserable than either, swarms of slaves beginning to brood over revenge as a solace to their sufferings; the land going out of cultivation; native industry swamped by slave-grown imports; the population decreasing; the army degenerating; wars waged as a speculation, but only against the weak; provinces subjected to organized pillage; in the metropolis childish superstition, wholesale luxury, and monstrous vice."

A. H. Beesley, The Gracchi Marius and Sulla, 1921

Despite almost daily weak openings, stocks are hanging on to their lofty levels.

There is not a lot of doubt in my mind that some assistance is coming from the President's Exchange Stabilization Fund.

Gold and silver rocketed higher today, from their recent and cynically calculated drubbing which they took last week.

The Dollar slipped to the bottom of the 100 handle.

As I said on 'X' at the bottom of the gold rout last week Friday, time to 'stack up and sack up.'

It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

I don't see anything good coming out of this clown show, except more lies and flashy bright things as distractions.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Beware the Temptations of Darkness

 

"Truth and the hatred of truth have come into our world together. As soon as truth appears, it is regarded as an enemy.”

Tertullian, Apology, Carthage 197

"In a dark and pathological times, when the better parts of the human spirit are on the wane and love grows cold, everyone wants to have power.  Power becomes the standard of value, the coin of the realm in a deeply fallen world.  And in such a perverse world the only virtue is greed.  

Those who serve the world want to be seen as tough guys, unafraid, quick and intemperate on the attack, harsh. Yes that is the mark of power, the formidable wielders of weapons not for a higher purpose, but for their own ends and pleasures. As if there can be any just weapon that we may take up on our own, that is not given to us by the Lord. 

Those who seek power desire to take up the sword like an avenging angel, and smite their enemies, who are all too often those who merely annoy and offend them.  This is because their idea of what it is to be a human being has been subtly poisoned by the times; in their brokenness they exalt themselves. 

Too often that feeling of being offended becomes a blind hatred of  'the other.'  The other may merely be the different, and often the weak. The will to power despises weakness.  Those who take up the sword for their own purposes, even in God's name, will die by it in a death without redemption.

This desire to be among the avenging angels is not service, or greatness. This is a willfulness and a destruction of the self that comes from sin, but that in its own insidious way may encompass many of the trappings of a religion: the ornaments of ritual, and symbols, the language and initiation into the mysteries, the noise and pomp of human office — but remarkably devoid of God's love.

Worldly power in excess is a perversion of heavenly power in that it expresses itself in the ability not to create and fulfill life, but to diminish and destroy it.  And it exults in what it thinks is its power over life, which is death.

How much money, how much power is enough?  The will to power is a pathological sickness, that becomes insatiable and all consuming.  And thereby it anoints its own angels of death.  Be on your guard, and do not be among those simple ones who will be taken in during the dark times, when the love of many grows cold.  

Stand humbly, but firmly, to the end.  And you will have your greatness."

Jesse, Preserving Sanctity in Times of Darkness, 6 July 2017


Stocks came in on the sell side this morning, with a fairly significant gap down.

The downgrade of US sovereign debt by Moody's was the cause.

But miracle of miracles, stocks managed to finish the day in the green, affirming the big, beautiful economy that we enjoy.

Gold came in hot over night, but was fairly firmly capped in NY trading hours.

Silver did not do much, being even more tightly capped.

The Dollar lost the 101 handle but managed to retain a firm hold on 100.

VIX came in high but then fell back below the 200 DMA. 

See, all is well.

These attempts to erect a Potemkin economy result in a great deal of misallocation of risk, and are ultimately very damaging to those not in on the scheme. 

But at the end of the day, there is only one scheme, one great deception that really matters.

Do not allow the hatred, the anger, the forces of darkness gain a hold in your hearts, even for the best of reasons, and your 'righteous anger.'

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Powers of Darkness

 

“There are two ways to be fooled.  One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Kjerlighedens Gjerninger (Works of Love), 1847

"Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of The Unspeakable.  This is what too few are willing to see."

Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable, 1966

"I fooled myself.  I had to.  Everybody has to.  If the good had been twice as good and the bad only half as bad, I still ought to have seen it.  But I didn't want to see it, because I would have then had to think about the consequences of seeing it, what followed from seeing it, what I must do to be decent.  I wanted my home and family, my job, my career, a place in the community. Hitlerism was a mass flight to dogma, to the barbaric dogma of the tribe, the dogma that gave every man importance only in so far as the tribe was important and he was a member of the tribe.

The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you.  The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy.  The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.  The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.  But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed.

Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.  Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: Germany 1933-1945

"It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an independent position toward the emerging circumstances."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 1945

"Slowly but surely, something is happening.  But isn't that the antithesis of what we have been led to believe, that really nothing unexpected could happen because the very best among us, our elite are 'in control?' 

And if the unexpected does occur, it must always and everywhere because of some unavoidable act of God, or even worse an outside interference from someone who is our enemy and hates us.  Markets crash and towers fall, and no one knows why, in a culture devoted to deception and distractions."

Jesse, Against the Dying of the Light, 7 June 2017

As a general rule for navigating these troubled times, listen to what they say, but more importantly, watch what they do.

Stocks managed to extend their remarkable rally into the weekend.

VIX is now supine, and signalling a diminished regard for risk

Gold ans silver and the associated miners were under pressure most of the day for this option expiration of stocks.

And they rebounded into the close, as least by the bellwethers that I watch most closely.

The Dollar is hanging on to the 101 handle.

The Donald is making friends in the Middle East.  Not a bad thing in itself.  But it is all transactional, and part of a fairly cynical deal.  Let's see where the wars and peace initiatives go.

There are always some good things happening, even though so many other things might be alarming and discouraging.

Rep. Anna Luna (FL)  is chairing a very interesting committee into the Declassification of Federal Secrets.

Here is an account and discussion video from one of the first people to provide testimony, on the declassification of documents associated with the assassination of JFK in 1963. 

So speaking of long running coverups and deceptions, what's up with gold and silver?

I think there was plenty of warning that there would be the usual bear raids on the metals and the miners ahead of the monthly stock option expiration.

Particularly now that there is an active campaign from the powers that be to promote a very optimistic embrace of risk assets.   

These things always have a bright life at first, but then almost inevitably crumble into cynicism and regret.

But I think even after all that we have seen in the past thirty years, a new crop of true believers has risen up that required to learn lessons from the past that have been forgotten.

Need little, want less, love more.  For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Moral Hazard: the Tyranny of the Oligarchs

 

"Moral hazard is the probability that a party insulated from risk will behave differently from the way they would behave if fully exposed to the risk.  Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act with increasing recklessness, literally 'without reckoning.'  It also encourages the rise to power of sociopaths in society as a whole.

It is difficult to explain moral hazard to tenured professors or the pampered princes of bureaucracy, who beat the drum with their silver spoons in support of shifting the risk of loss to the public every time that Wall Street falls into one of its own schemes and blows itself up.

It is a lesson that the average person learns by the age of twelve and relearns, sometimes spectacularly, at least once in young adulthood.  If you do something wrong there can be bad outcomes, and you will pay the price and penalty.  Unfortunately there is a small but powerful oligarchy of privilege that is trying to project themselves onto the global stage while believing that they are immune to ordinary consequence, and have become addicted to the notion that 'others must pay' for their failures.

Moral hazard comes from rewarding bad behaviour in markets with wristslaps and bailouts. It is a danger to the economy and to the public.

Now we might expect even more brazen attempts to game the system. This inevitably leads to wild gyrations in stocks and bonds and commodities.  History suggests ever more brazen price manipulation so disconnected from reality that actual physical shortages result because of the corruption of the market pricing mechanism.

Can't happen? Enron made it happen in the energy markets, and almost brought California, a state the size of most countries, to its knees.

The wristslaps and bailouts will continue until these modern maestros kill themselves or someone else, and create damage too great to be bought off in the backrooms of the county courthouse.

At least their descent from the heights will be impressive, if you can avoid the impact crater."

Jesse, Moral Hazard, 22 March 2008

 

Stocks had a mixed, wide ranging day.

Gold and silver rebounded sharply and went out near the highs.

It must be the day before a stock option expiration.

VIX continued to fall, expressing the general 'what me worry' stance amongst those who manage other people's money.

The Dollar fell back a bit.

Trump gave a speech to the Arab world repudiating the whole 'make the world safe for democracy by nation-building' stance of US foreign policy.

In other words, he is signalling a reordering of US interests in place since Bill Clinton, although actions will speak much louder than words.

After all, he's a salesman, and he's talking his book to make deals for the moment. 

There is a lot of power and vested interests stacked against any change.

This might be an interesting weekend.

Have a pleasant evening.