Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Madness Withering in Bunkers of Despair

 

"Friday, April 20, was Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday. The radio announced that Hitler had come out of his safe bomb-proof bunker to talk with the fourteen to sixteen year old boys who had 'volunteered' for the 'honor' to be accepted into the SS and to die for their Fuhrer in the defense of Berlin.  What a cruel lie!  These boys did not volunteer, but had no choice, because boys who were found hiding were hanged as traitors by the SS as a warning that, 'he who was not brave enough to fight had to die.'

When trees were not available, people were strung up on lamp posts.  They were hanging everywhere, military and civilian, men and women, ordinary citizens who had been executed by a small group of fanatics.   It appeared that the Nazis did not want the people to survive because a lost war, by their rationale, was obviously the fault of all of us.  We had not sacrificed enough and therefore, we had forfeited our right to live, as only the government was without guilt."

Dorothea von Schwanenfluegel, A Personal Journey Through Germany's World Wars and Postwar Years, 1999

"This is an almost perfect illustration of the credibility trap.  One cannot allow the illusion to falter, even a little, to the bitter end.  And as the fraud fades, the force intensifies, becoming almost rabid in its deflection of guilt.  Because that illusion has become the center of a hollowed people's being, their raison d'être, a mythological justification for their existence. 

If the ideology had been a lie, then they are not heroes and gods on earth, but monsters and criminals, and their life has been self-serving and meaningless, without significance and honor.  And that is the credibility trap.  It is the impulse for the leaders to keep doubling down in the hope of a win, until exhaustion and collapse. The madness serves none but itself."

Jesse, Empires of Illusion: First They Come For the Weak, 31 December 2012,

"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."

Friedrich Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933

Stocks did a grand 'pop and flop' today.

Sometimes known as a 'wash and rinse.'

US tariffs are scheduled to go into effect tomorrow.

Although extensions, like the one granted to Mexico, are always at hand.

Gold and silver rallied back a bit.

Tomorrow will be another Non-Farm Payrolls report.

Traudl Junge's memoir, Until the Final Hour, is often interpreted as a metaphor for how people can become disconnected from reality and rationalize their actions, even when those actions lead to catastrophic consequences.

I always found it strikingly odd that the backstabbing and jockeying for power amongst the Nazi elites continued, with increasing viciousness, even until the very end when they abandoned the Bunker and Berlin was burning.

And true believers went around like gangs of fanatical beasts, hanging their own people, with the enemy at their gates.

Greed and hate are bottomless pits, that feed on in furious misery, even as they die.

We are going to be seeing that same behaviour playing out, in more than one place, in the days to come.

First they come for the weak, the stranger, the other. 

Nations can truly fall into a kind of fatalistic madness, driven by a lust for possessions and power, pride and greed, myths and tainted dreams.

Whether you choose to believe it or not, you will bear witness to this with your own eyes, in one place or another. 

Even if you do not believe in plagues. 

What a man sows, so shall he reap. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Are You Not Entertained?

 

"Modern tyranny is terror management.  When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power.  For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission.  For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions.”

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 2017

“All make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”

Sophocles, Antigone

"Efforts to manage and manipulate asset prices are not new. But history provides little comfort that these practices work. Interfering with market prices occasionally buys time, but rarely do policy makers seize the window of opportunity to enact structural reform. Financial repression embeds the wrong incentives—obfuscation begets delay, and a robust recovery becomes unattainable."

Kevin Warsh, The Financial Repression Trap, 2011

"Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination."

Oscar Romero, Assassinated While Saying Mass, March 24, 1980

"Through a set of economic policies designed to bail out and subsidize failed and often tainted corporate enterprises, while actively promoting a false sense of confidence to support those policies, the public has become exposed, by those very people entrusted to protect them, to dangerously high levels of hidden counterparty risks.

The cautionary functions of the media, the political class, and the regulatory bodies have been routinely directed, distorted, and even silenced for the benefit of a highly compromised and increasingly self-serving elite. And this corruption has begun feeding on its own momentum, resulting in increasingly blatant examples of deception, distortion, and outright theft. This is crony capitalism, and its deadly credibility trap."

Jesse, Gold, Silver, and the May Jobs Report, June 2012

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977


The Fed did pretty much what everyone expected it to do, the Economic Sophisticate notwithstanding. 

The Dollar soared.

Gold and silver were hammered lower.

One interesting twist is that stock futures soared in the last 20 minutes of trading. 

I suspect it was just some dumb thing that Trump said, or some 'corporate surprise.'

These are the times we are in, and the type of governance that some have demanded, and the rest in their apathy tolerate.

This is plutocracy, the malady of the West. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - And Everywhere the Ceremony of Innocence Is Drowned

 

"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919

"With the tools of democracy, democracy was murdered and lawlessness made ‘legal.’  Raw power ruled, and its only real goal was to destroy all other powers besides itself.”

Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer, April 2010

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse Dune. March 1985

"You made this monster, and as long as things were going well you gave him whatever he wanted.  You turned Germany over to this arch-criminal, you swore allegiance to him by every incredible oath he chose to put before you— you, officers of the Crown, all of you."

Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair, 1947

"The whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen: ‘Blessed is the king, he who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, hosanna in the highest!’  Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, ‘Teacher, silence your disciples!’

And Jesus said, ‘If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.’"

Luke 19:36-40

Are you being duly respectful and obedient to the principalities and powers of darkness?  

A conspiracy of silence in the face of despicable lies and crimes against humanity prevails.

“The real damage is done by those who don’t want their lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves.  Those with no sides and no causes. Those who don’t like to make waves—or enemies.  Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only stories."   

Sophie Scholl

And at home, Congress, the universities, the professional class and the media sell themselves cheaply, and cover themselves with disgrace— the forswearing of oaths and obligations.

Empire, like slavery and plutocracy and sin, poisons the hearts and minds of those who pursue and embrace it. 

It's a familiar story. 

Stocks took around this morning from their lofty heights, and despite the encouraging words of the spokesmodels of the plutocracy, fell back a bit from setting another new high.

Gold and silver bounced a bit from their recent Comex option expiration smackdown.

There will be an FOMC rate decision tomorrow.

They are widely expected to hold rates.   But who knows what they might say or do.

The pressure on them by the Economic Sophisticate is as strident as it is thoughtless.

VIX bounced up a bit from its slumber.

The clock is ticking.

The unsustainable will not be sustained.

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Concert for the Ministers - Judgement Is Coming

 

"May the town be accursed and destroyed!
Disintegrate and wither, Rome!
Your degenerate people wish it so."

Wilhelm Richard Wagner, Rienzi, der letzte der Tribunen, (original libretto), 1842

"Successful totalitarian rule is precisely that because it allows little variation in its subjects’ intentions—and the Nazi regime was a totalitarian regime par excellence.  When Hitler spoke of the German ‘Volk’ he did not make a suggestion, but a demand: 'if a German, you are a Nazi or a traitor'.

It is crudely general to suggest collective responsibility for the German populace.  It is, however, fair to suggest that those who continued to defend the idea of Germanhood publicly as the war went on—when this had become synonymous with barbarity—were in fact renouncing their humanity for the sake of individual survival and peace of mind.

On April 11th 1945, as the Red Army fast-approached Berlin, the Berlin Philharmonic gave what might have been its last concert before the end of the war. Albert Speer, who had intervened to save members of the Orchestra from their senseless drafting into the Volksturm, organized a final concert, entitled Konzert für Minister Speer in the Berlin Beethoven Hall, still curiously standing amidst the city’s rubble.

According to Traudl Junge the Goebbels’ children sang for Hitler, who was very pleased to hear their song. This innocent choir of young voices was soon murdered by its very mother, in the bunker, just before the mother herself committed suicide.  There is no academic phrasing suitable enough to describe the incomprehensibility of how mankind can achieve this nonsense, especially at this high level of leadership."

Panayiotis Demopoulos, Götterdämmerung: Suicide Music and the National Self

"It isn't by chance that I have the Party Rallies open with the overture to Rienzi.  It's not just a musical question.  At the age of twenty-four this man, an innkeeper's son, persuaded the Roman people to drive out the corrupt Senate by reminding them of the magnificent past of the Roman Empire.  Listening to this blessed music as a young man in the theater at Linz, I had the vision that I too must someday succeed in uniting the German Empire and making it great once more."

Adolph Hitler, from Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, Trans. 1976

"The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the catacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?”

Maximilian Kolbe


It is not likely that there will be a new war crimes trial, a new judgement at Nürnberg, conducted by mindful victors anytime soon. 

They would certainly need a bigger courtroom.

But, and this I believe as much as I can believe anything, there will be a judgement, a final judgement. 

And nothing will be held back, nothing covered by the darkness of lies and dissembling. 

The truth will penetrate to the core of those standing before the judge of nations.

And the sentences will be lawful, just, and quite likely, severe.

“If any one should cause these innocent ones who believe in me to go astray, it would be better for them to have a great millstone hung around their neck, and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." 

Matthew 18:6

Judgement is coming. 

And hell is coming with it. 

They know who they are.  They do not believe in judgement.  They do not believe in hell.

Nevertheless, judgement and hell await.

Stocks fell back a little from their lofty valuations today.

Even mania needs to take a break, every now and them. 

The Dollar rallied sharply today on the EU's capitulation to Trump, in the craven deal agreed to by Ursula von der Leyen, the Neville Chamberlain of our generation.

Today was an option expiration for precious metals on the Comex, for the big August contracts.

There will be an FOMC decision on Wednesday, and Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday. 

You have to laugh at the quick turnaround by Trump and crew on l'affaire Epstein, and the contortions of his true believers in excusing and deflection yet another betrayal, and justice denied.

There are so many dishonorable and faithless acts by those in government these days.  

But they are almost made insignificant in the shadow of wars of aggression, theft, rape, murder on a grand scale, and unacknowledged crimes against humanity.

The people are easily manipulated and distracted and  misdirected.

But there is one who is not. 

Judgement is coming.

Have a pleasant evening.