Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Lords of Excess

 

"Wall Street in boom days is an aggregation of madmen. The Stock Exchange becomes Bedlam well dressed. In the end, of course, all violations of the fundamental laws of economic and financial common sense are paid for; but every bull thinks he will unload before the break. They really do not know when to stop winning, and so in the end they lose profit and principal.”

Edwin Lefevre

"The world needs a new generation of policymakers who don’t hobnob with billionaire speculators and who understand workers’ concerns. Unfortunately, the change will not come smoothly."

Andy Xie

"Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence. Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them.

John Kenneth Galbraith

"At the root of America's economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America's political and economic elite. A society of markets, laws, and elections is not enough if the rich and powerful fail to behave with respect, honesty, and compassion toward the rest of society and toward the world."

Jeffrey Sachs

"People criticize owning bullion because there’s no yield.  But there’s a reason everything else needs a yield, to compensate you for things like obsolescence risk, business-cycle risk and management risk, all of the things that gold does not have.  There’s a reason humanity has tended to use gold as an alternative to man-made currency – it’s the only virtually infinite-duration asset in the world."

Matthew McLennan, First Eagle Funds, 2015


I am posting the charts a bit early today, as I have an appointment to keep at 4 PM.

If stocks radically depart from their current levels I will update them later tonight.

But it seems like stocks are marking time now.

Having driven valuations to another extreme, the punters are waiting for an additional excuse to pump them even further.

Another vaporous big trade deal, another market friendly ruling, some imaginary reason to cast doubts aside and believe. 

In times of madness belief is a badge of belonging, of submerging frailty into the slogans and power of the herd, thereby escaping the burden of individuality.

We serve the Lords of Excess, or must navigate the unsteady winds of reality alone. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Beasts and Angels

 

"The world would be better off if people tried to become better, and people would be better if they stopped trying to become better off.  For when everyone tries to become better off, nobody is better off.  But when everyone tries to become better everyone is better off."

Peter Maurin, Easy Essays, The Catholic Worker, 1933

"I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things.  I wasn't aware of the extent of the crimes.  But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler.  And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out."

Traudl Junge, Im toten Winkel - Hitler's Sekretärin, 2002

“How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go.”

Sophie Scholl, Last Words Before Execution, February 22, 1943

"Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength— but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it."

Léon Bloy, The Pilgrim of the Absolute

"The demon's target is not the possessed; it is us the observers— everyone in this house. The point is to make us despair, to reject our humanity, to see ourselves as bestial, vile and putrescent, without dignity, ugly, unworthy."

William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist, May 1971

"If heaven is seeing and in turn being seen, transformed and made new by the beatific face of pure love in resplendent glory, then hell must be seeing, at last and forever after, their own dark and miserable soul as it really is, alone."

Jesse, Death By Overdose, 24 February 2015

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

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952


Stocks retreated a bit, from yesterday's transparently mechanical optimism.

The market rises.  The abuse of power is affirmed.  QED.

This is the market as god, the new morality of the bestial class.

Gold and silver bounced around a bit.

The Dollar chopped its way to unchanged.

VIX showed a little consciousness.

I am struggling to believe we are going to come back from this.  

We seem to have lost our sense of ideals, and of history, our humanity, in worshiping the idol of the markets. 

We see the rising lust to possess and ravage innocence. 

On the one hand the political elite offer us power, the tooth and claw of the beast.  

And on the other, performative humanity, with the tooth and claw of the beast.

We live in a garden of beasts. 

I would like to think we are seeing the worst, but doubts remain. 

It comes down to a matter of faith. 

It is always, at the heart of love, down to love. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Inhumanity and the Apparatus of Pride, Fear, and Greed

 

"Communism and fascism or nazism, although poles apart in their intellectual content, are similar in this, that both have emotional appeal to the type of personality that takes pleasure in being submerged in a mass movement and submitting to superior authority."

James Alexander Campbell Brown, Techniques of Persuasion, 1963

"The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.  Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State–a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values–interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.

The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State."

Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism, Vallecchi Editore, Firenze, 1935

"Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.  

American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off. 

Always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.  It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. 

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.  They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.  Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

Henry Wallace, The Danger of American Fascism, NY Times, 1944

"The helplessness one feels at a given moment, an impotence which must never be regarded as definitive, cannot dispense with remaining faithful to oneself, nor excuse surrender to the enemy, whatever mask he may assume.  

And, no matter what name it may take—fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat—the principal enemy remains the administrative, police, and military apparatus; not the enemy across the border, who is our enemy only to the extent that they are our brothers and sisters’ enemy, but the one who claims to be our defender while making us its slaves.

In any circumstance, the worst betrayal possible always consists in agreeing to subordinate oneself to this apparatus and trample underfoot, in order to serve it, all human values in oneself and others."

Simone Weil, Reflections On War, (trans Chris Fleming), La Critique Sociale, November 1933

"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

"Anxiety leads to a narrowing of the field of attention, the so-called tunnel vision, and when people are anxious they are unable to attend to the total situation as is necessary to enable them to act rationally, but impulsively do the first thing that comes into their heads which is usually determined by what others are doing at the same time."

James Alexander Campbell Brown, Techniques of Persuasion, 1963


I was fairly confident that unless 'something happened' over the weekend we would see a broad market rally that would take us back up to the point where stocks had sold off because of the 'rigged jobs number.'

Petty yes, malignant yes, but surprisingly consistent.

The economy is still entering a recession now, if we are not already there.

The tariffs may provide us with that rare economic phenomenon of stagflation.

It's always something.

Gold and silver rallied back a bit.

They are not Trump friendly.   They are only fit to decorate his lavatories.

American history suggests that fidelity and faithfulness are resilient, despite intimidating threats.

It seems like there is always a minority of sociopathic impulses, but they tend to gather and become more pronounced every 60 years.   Is this a generational memory thing? 

All things must pass.  Especially unsustainable aberrations.

Try not to go down with them.  

Some will.  Perhaps some nations.  

The descent into madness is an intoxicating escape for those who are plagued with anxieties, real and imagined.  

Pride, fear, and greed.  These are the familiar routines from the devil's playbook. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Unalterable Fiduciary Value Par Excellence

 

"'We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,' says Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis.  'They were totally opposed to it,' Born says.  'That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?'"

PBS Frontine, The Warning, October 2009

"Successful crime is dignified with the name of virtue; the good become the slaves of the wicked; might makes right; fear silences the power of the law."

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Hercules Furens. CCLI.

"Gold has worked down from Alexander's time.  When something holds good for two thousand years I do not believe it can be so because of prejudice or mistaken theory."

Bernard M. Baruch

"Gold is unique among assets, in that it is not issued by any government or central bank, which means that its value is not influenced by political decisions or the solvency of one institution or another."

Salvatore Rossi, Central Bank of Italy, 30 Sept 2013

"We looked into the abyss if the gold price rose further. A further rise would have taken down one or several trading houses, which might have taken down all the rest in their wake. Therefore at any price, at any cost, the central banks had to quell the gold price, manage it. It was very difficult to get the gold price under control but we have now succeeded. The US Fed was very active in getting the gold price down. So was the U.K."

Eddie George, Governor Bank of England, Reg Howe v. BIS, JPM et al. September 1999

“Gold is money. Everything else is credit.”

J. P. Morgan, Testimony to the US Congress, 1912

"You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability and intelligence of the members of the government.  And with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold."

George Bernard Shaw, playwright

"Synthetic gold, sourced in pyramids of credit extended to bullion bankers by central banks with little or no claim on physical substance, have provided a more efficient, better-camouflaged form of intervention. The volumes traded are huge, and bear little resemblance to actual flows of physical metal. Demand for physical gold has exceeded new mine supply for several years running."

John Hathaway, Tocqueville Newsletter, 2Q 2015

“Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history.  But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood.  For these few gold has been the asset of last resort.”

Antony C. Sutton, historian

"There can be no other criterion, no other standard than gold. Yes, gold which never changes, which can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality and which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par excellence."

Charles De Gaulle, Press conference, February 4, 1965

"Before the end of the week."

Jesse, X, Sunday, July 27 AM

Donnie's tariffs went into effect on Liberation Day 2.0.

Stocks dumped hard on the worse than expected Jobs Report, and some earning clinkers from the Stocks of Olympus. 

It was just a matter of time with a market this overbought and so badly mispriced to value and risk.

The Dollar fell a buck.

Gold and silver rallied, with gold going out at the high. 

VIX woke up and rallied up sharply. 

There is plenty of room to the downside.

And many potential trigger events out there to help it along.

But, with a market as bent as this, it's not so easy to tell what the next move will be.

Have a pleasant weekend.