Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Mindless Tools, Foolish Hearts, Diabolical Madness

 

"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilised and innocent people. The silence under the terror was only its consequence. The coldness of the societal mindset, the isolated competitor, was the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others, for the fact that only very few people reacted."

Theodor Adorno, Education After Auschwitz, 18 April 1966

"They defended him, verbally and physically, every time he committed one of his criminal acts. They went blithely on past the suffering of all the bombing victims, the prisoners in the concentration camps, and the religious persecutors, because a different regime would have meant the end of their power."

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

"Against such foolishness we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the foolish person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.

In all this the foolish person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being.

Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.

The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome foolishness."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, executed on April 9, 1945

"If there are damned souls in Hell, it is because men blind themselves.”

E.A. Bucchianeri, Faust: My Soul Be Damned for the World, 2010


The lust for money and power is indifferent to whom it sickens and kills.

It knows and serves only itself.

But the Devil sees and desires you, to ravage, possess, and consume you.

And there are those who are attracted to such ardent devotion, and yearn to give their hearts over to darkness. 

They hold out their hand, and he entwines his fingers with theirs tightly, and they are his.

It's the fashion of the day.  All the finest people are doing it. 

Stocks did a fairly impressive pop and flop today, but managed to come back to unchanged in the last hour.

It's doesn't matter if the market is sound, what matters is that it looks good.   

Gold and silver rallied, with gold going out on a recent closing high.

The Dollar took a dive in that same last hour of trading.

What new knowledge penetrated the mind of the market in the late afternoon. 

We mere mortals can only wonder.

Let's see what happens tomorrow, in the markets and the world.  Perhaps goodness will finally prevail..

But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow, before the gods of evil.  

Even if we are only a few, a happy few, who will remain standing. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

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.