Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - An Illness of the Mind and of the Spirit

 

“Do not weep for me — weep instead for yourselves and your children.”

Luke 23:28

"The present war crisis is something we have made entirely for and by ourselves.  There is in reality not the slightest logical reason for war, and yet the whole world is plunging headlong into frightful destruction.  This is a true war-madness, an illness of the mind and the spirit that is spreading with a furious and subtle contagion all over the world."

Thomas Merton, The Root of War, The Catholic Worker, October 1961

"Right now the US is on the path to a devaluation and a selective default on its debt and currency.  No one can say 'how and when' with certainty.  But surely it seems probable that there is a stop and a stumble in the growth of this mother of credit bubbles somewhere ahead.

Some suggest that devaluation of a sovereign currency no longer has any significance and meaning. Why? Because what would one devalue such a currency against, as it is tied to no external standard?  And so they say that the Dollar is its own standard as the reserve currency of the world.

It is always a mistake to assume that there are no external standards, no dissenting views, that things are merely what we say they are and should be, for everyone. 

The dollar standard is in fact the 'full faith and credit of the United States.'  And if that confidence is broken, the reversion to fundamental 'external' values may be impressive.   Unthinkable?  Every fiat currency that has ever existed has eventually been destroyed, or undergone an significant transformation.  Even the US dollar has undergone evolution and reincarnation in its brief history, and will continue to do so.

The world may choose to create a one world currency, under the control of the Fed and the Central Banks, which is a prelude to One World Government.   This would be one way to extend the existence of a fiat regime.  Kill off all the alternatives, by force.  A regime of the will to last a thousand years, forged in blood, betrayal, and deception."

Jesse, Thinking the Unthinkable, 11 November 2008

“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952

"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 were their usual wobbly selves in the early trading.

However, around 1:30 there was a longer dated Treasury auction that was not received well by the market.

And so down risk assets went.

Interestingly enough the Dollar bottomed around that time, and then gained back a little of its losses.

Intervention or a 'flight to safety?'   No way to know for sure.

But gold and silver rocketed back to go out near the highs of the day.

VIX ticked up slightly.

The US markets are a mispriced accident waiting to happen.

The talking heads are reassuring.  As they often are, when talking about other people's money.

I sold some of the miners I bought last Friday at fire sale prices.

My allocation to equities was the highest it has been in a very long time.  

And was highly concentrated.

So now it has been reduced to something a little more comfortable, and amenable to hedging.

This afternoon I watched this interview 'Deadly Betrayal' with Jeffrey Sachs and US Air Force Chief Dennis Fritz about the endless wars and American exceptionalism.  

There is some interesting information disclosed which you might find to be illuminating about things that happened then and are happening now, that you won't hear on the mainstream media.

It seemed to fill in some of the blanks I still had from my own intensive reading into these things. 

We have surely have been misled by those gripped with an illness of the mind and of the Spirit.

And the band played on.

Have a pleasant evening.

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.