Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Thy Will Be Done

 

"In all these instances the large multinational bankers were actively supporting both sides.  It is a shocking fact that both British and American banks continued to do business with the Nazis even after the War was well underway, even as Germany was invading Europe and bombing London."

BBC, Banking with Hitler, 1998

"One of the primary characteristics of narcissists is their exaggerated sense of entitlement.  In their heavily self-biased opinion, if they want something, by rights it should be theirs.  So, nothing if not opportunistic, they take from public and private coffers alike whatever they think they can get away with.  And given their grandiose sense of self, they're inclined to believe they can get away with most anything."

Leon F. Seltzer, Narcissism: Why It's So Rampant in Politics, December 21, 2011

“When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically.  They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission.”

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1941

“There are only two kinds of people in the end— those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'  All that are in Hell choose it.  Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 1945

"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell

"They say to their seers, 'Do not see!’ and to the prophets, 'Say nothing of what is right!  Tell us only things that please us.  Prophesy illusions."

Isaiah 30:9-10

"It is so important to understand that one of the primary means of immobilizing the American people politically today is to hold them in a state of confusion in which anything can be believed but nothing can be known, nothing of significance that is.  And the American people are more than willing to be held in this state because to know the truth — as opposed to only believe the truth — is to face an awful terror and to be no longer able to evade responsibility."

E. Martin Schotz, History Will Not Absolve Us, 1996

"Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery?  Or the Jim Crow South?  Or apartheid?  What would I do if my country was committing genocide?'  The answer is, you're doing it.  Right now."

Aaron Bushnell

"They live out their days in prosperity, and slide peacefully down into hell."

Job 21:13

In keeping with the endless wash and rinse most markets had a bit of a reversal today.

Gold and silver fell, although both came back quite a bit from their lows.

The Dollar bounced.

Stocks managed to rally a bit.

VIX fell even lower, into the territory that suggests a correction may be in the cards.

All in all, a snoratorium except for hard core day traders.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Truth to Powerful Illusions

 

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.  We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.  What pure power means you will understand presently.  We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing.  All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites.

The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.

We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.  Power is not a means; it is an end.  One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.  The object of persecution is persecution.  The object of torture is torture.  The object of power is power.”

George Orwell, 1984

"What happens to a society fed a diet of rushed, re-purposed, thinly reported content? Or branded content that is really merchandising — propaganda — posing as journalism? And what happens when PR turns a profit and the truth goes penniless?"

Bill Moyers, Journalism in the Pressure Cooker of Plutocracy, May 26, 2015

"Early on in the gospel traditions the power elite in Jesus’ society, who were colluding with the Roman Empire, recognized him as a threat and began to conspire to kill him.  Jesus became a reference point for much of the hostility and resistance to the power of the empire because he refused to accommodate it, and told another story of reality that the empire could not co-opt."

Jonathan Merritt, Walter Brueggemann On How to Speak Truth to Power, June 26, 2014 


Gold and silver were the big story today, as they both had a 'snapback rally' from the market manipulation of last week with their option expiration on the Comex.

There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report on this Friday the 6th.  Shenanigans are to be expected.

Some think that markets are 'efficient,' that is the assumption that prices are set by supply and demand, on a fairly even and steady course.

And this has proven to be discredited nonsense.  Prices in lightly regulated markets in the short term are set at the margins, as larger players with more knowledge and leverage and a bigger stack of chips can push the price of things around with relative ease.  

Longer term manipulation is possible with a great application of force and fraud.   

The efficient market hypothesis is a such an implausible canard that I doubt anyone who was not talking their book or plagued by commercial or ideologically induced naïveté could have said it.

“Some economists, when thinking about long memory, are concerned that it undercuts the Efficient Market Hypothesis that prices fully reflect all relevant information; that the random walk is the best metaphor to describe such markets; and that you cannot beat such an unpredictable market.  Well, the Efficient Market Hypothesis is no more than that, a hypothesis.  Many a grand theory has died under the onslaught of real data.”

Benoît B. Mandelbrot, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets, 1997

Stocks managed to creep up today. 

VIX continued to fall.

Uncle Buck took it on the chin a bit, back down to the 98 handle. 

I suspect that things are not going to be going well in general over the next few month, despite what the media of our free nations will be saying and the burning need that some cultist sorts may feel to believe in false idols, until their bitter end.   

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Virtue of the Simple, and the Wisdom of the Just

 

"Joan was a being so uplifted from the ordinary run of mankind that she finds no equal in a thousand years. She embodied the natural goodness and valour of the human race in unexampled perfection. Unconquerable courage, infinite compassion, the virtue of the simple, the wisdom of the just, shone forth in her. She glorifies as she freed the soil from which she sprang."

Winston Churchill, The Birth of Britain, 1956

“She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things.

She was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both—she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries, and beastialities. Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it.”

Mark Twain, Joan of Arc, 1896

"I know this now.  Every man gives his life to what he believes.  Every woman gives her life for what she believes.  Sometimes people believe in little or nothing, and so they give their lives to little or nothing.  If I am not in the state of grace, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.  I would that every one could hear the Voice as I hear it.

You say that you are my judge. I do not know if you are.  But I tell you that you must take good care not to judge me wrongly, because you will put yourself in great danger.  I warn you, so that if God punishes you for it, I have done my duty by telling you."

Jeanne d'Arc, Trial records, 15 March 1431

"God have mercy upon us, we have burned a saint."

A Witness at the Execution, 30 May 1431


There was quite a bit more of end of month jockeying of stock prices that one might have expected for a non-end of quarter close.

Stocks ended up mostly unchanged after a wide-ranging day.

Gold and silver were shoved around, and the miners with them.

Silver and gold came back a bit but still finished lower.

The Dollar was largely unchanged from the close yesterday.

VIX is wallowing.

We have to sit back and watch to see how the geopolitical situation continues to unfold this weekend.  

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

We were born for this.

Have a pleasant weekend. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Congregation of Liars

 

"This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. And I was one of them."

John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, 2004

“In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.”

Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, 2004

"Power will achieve its murderous potential.  It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."

R. J. Rummel, Death By Government, 1994

"There is a certain madness in crowds. But the genesis of the madness is in those who assemble the crowds, give them weapons, and walk among them whispering&madness; madness."

Jesse, Housing Madness, 15 April 2008

"Go now, write it on a tablet for them, inscribe it on a scroll, so that in the days to come it may be a witness to them, for ever and ever.  For these are a rebellious people, deceitful children,  unwilling to listen to the instructions of the Lord.

They say to their seers, ‘Do not see!’ and to the prophets, ‘Say nothing of what is right! Tell us only things that please us, prophesy illusions.'"

Isaiah 30:8-10

"Why do you not understand what I am saying?  It is because you cannot bear to hear my words.  You are from your father, the devil, and you choose to carry out your father’s desires.  He was a murderer from the beginning, and he does not abide by the truth, for there is no truth in him.  

When he lies, he speaks in accord with his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.  But because I speak the truth, you refuse to believe me."

John 8:43-45 

 

There are some who love money and power, and serve their gods with lies, theft, and murder. 

They are desolate in the eyes of the Lord.

Their lawlessness will not stand.

Stocks were soaring overnight, as a judge struck down the legitimacy of the Trump tariffs declared 'in a state of emergency.'

Gold and silver were smashed.

But like so many things these days, none of this was real.  

Don't blame them, they say.  Hate the game, not the players.  Who run the game. 

Stocks finished unchanged to lower.

Gold and silver came back from fairly impressive losses overnight to finish in the green. 

Another opportunity to gather more for themselves.

But the VIX is still mispricing the risks of a recession, which now almost looks to be inevitable.

Who could have seen it coming? 

Do not be taken by their harvest of sorrows, and the wine press of God's wrath.

Have a pleasant evening.