Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Power Elite: Handmaidens of Death

 

“In reading the History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do.  We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it.”

Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1841

"Greed compels the materially obsessed to obtain the greatest piles of chips, but in the long term renders their chips to be almost worthless because they are unable to stop their fraud and plundering, even when it is in their best interests.  They are not governed by rationality or conscience or even common sense.  For periods of time oligarchies are able to survive in an uneasy equilibrium enforced by power, but ultimately these wickedly wealthy wither and die on their great piles of gains."

Jesse, Crony Capitalism, 17 December 2010

"They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”

C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, 1956

“The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts.”

Robert W. Chambers, The King In Yellow, 1895

"Through our relationship with the Incarnation, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time are delivered from that perverse individualism which is the consequence of sin.  The incarnate Lord makes his followers the brothers of all mankind."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1937


Stocks were slumping early in the day, but managed to find a footing and end the day in the green.

It's a familiar story of late.   Plop and prop.

Gold and silver both gained after early losses.  

Today was an option expiration for the metal futures on Comex.  

This monthly contract is more significant for silver than for gold. 

The Dollar chopped around and finished a little higher. 

VIX followed stocks pop and flop.

I think this market is dancing on the rim of a volcano, for a number of reasons previously stated.

But that's just my judgement, and it could be wrong.  

But it influences my positions and play in the markets.

I also think that some of my largest concerns about the course of events in the world are slowly coming to fruition.   

Pride fosters a lust for power and money, lawlessness and greed, that ultimately kills.  

And both are on full display in the Western countries.   Murder and lies.  It's their generational signature.

"You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies."    John 8:44

The only force that can stand against this is love, empowered by faithfulness to the implications of the Incarnation.

Evil cannot comprehend, much less overcome, the powerful love of the cross, the symbol of humility and service.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Fury of the Possessed

 

"Early in 1928, the nature of the boom changed.  The mass escape into make-believe, so much a part of the true speculative orgy, started in earnest.  It was still necessary to reassure those who required some tie, however tenuous, to reality.  And, as will be seen presently, this process of reassurance eventually achieved the status of a profession.  However, the time had come, as in all periods of speculation, when men sought not to be persuaded of the reality of things but to find excuses for escaping into the new world of fantasy.

Even the most circumspect friend of the market would concede that the volume of brokers' loans—of loans collateraled by the securities purchased on margin—is a good index of the volume of speculation. Measured by this index, the amount of speculation was rising very fast in 1928. People were swarming to buy stocks on margin—in other words, to have the increase in price without the costs of ownership."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929, 1955

"If you wish to take the measure of a society, look to how its weakest members are protected from its strongest, and its predators skulking at the fringes.  If you wish a hell on earth, do nothing for the benefit of others, for the greater good, or to inhibit those who act solely out of greed, fear, and hate.  Soon enough you will have a society that is intensely self-interested, self-concerned, superficial, destructive and self-consuming.  A free and just society is not a prize to be won or a gift that can be bestowed; it is a recurring commitment, and an enduring obligation."

Jesse, Lessons from the Panic of 1907, 5 July 2008

"But what is more than curious — indeed, piquant to a degree — is that an ancient god of storm and frenzy, the long quiescent Wotan should awake, like an extinct volcano, to new activity, in a civilized country that had long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle Ages.

For the sake of better understanding and to avoid prejudice, we could of course dispense with the name 'Wotan' and speak instead of the furor teutonicus.  But we should only be saying the same thing and not as well, for the furor in this case is a mere psychologizing of Wotan and tells us no more than that the Germans are in a state of fury.

Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit — a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler– which has indeed actually happened — he is really the only explanation.

It is above all the Germans who have an opportunity, perhaps unique in history, to look into their own hearts and to learn what those perils of the soul were from which Christianity tried to rescue mankind.  Germany is a land of spiritual catastrophes, where nature never makes more than a pretence of peace with the world-ruling reason.

The impressive thing about the German phenomenon is that one man, who is obviously 'possessed,' has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards hell."

Carl Jung, Wotan, Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zurich), March, 1936 


I have seen a lot of ugly, immoral, and despicable things over the last 70 years or so.  But I have not seen more conscious, sadistic acts of cruelty and systemic war crimes as we are seeing today. 

Truly, we have gone mad.

Stocks gave up a bit of their rate cut frenzy from last Friday.

VIX however opened higher, but then dropped off as the day wore on.

The Dollar took back its rate cut sympathetic decline.

Gold and silver gave something back as well.

Tomorrow is an option expiration on the Comex for the September futures contracts. 

It is not a big contract month for gold, but moreso for silver.

Still, its a good time for the wiseguys to run stops and engage in their usual shenanigans. 

Bitcoin got smacked back down to 110,000 again.  It looks like some large holders are 'diversifying' out of it.   Its a market that is easily moved, as it is founded in momentum.

If it breaks 100,000 and holds it, look out below.

Doesn't it seem like there is a touch of madness in the air.   That people have lost their grounding in principles and ideals, and are doing whatever power permits.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity." 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - False Flags and Tipping Points

 

"If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum Address, 27 January 1838

"There is no calamity greater than lavish desires, there is no greater guilt than discontentment, and there is no greater disaster than greed. He who is contented with contentment is always contented."

Lao tzu, Tao Te Ching, 1,46 trans by Wing Tsit Chan, 1963

"Why did we, scholars and writers in America, in this time, we who had been warned of our danger not only by explicit threats but by explicit action, why did we not fight this danger while the weapons we used best - the weapons of ideas and words - could still be used against it?"

Archibald Macleish, The Irresponsibles, 1940

"Greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold.  Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain.  Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned."

Emile Durkheim, Suicide, 1897

"An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence.  It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future.  It is hypnotized by itself and therefore cannot be argued with.  It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead."

Carl Jung, Collected Works V 12, Swiss Edition, 1943

"History is a vast early warning system."

Norman Cousins, Saturday Review Magazine p 12, 28 August 1973

"Wars do not usually result from just causes but from pretexts. There probably never was a just cause why men should slaughter each other by wholesale, but there are such things as ambition, selfishness, folly, madness, in communities as in individuals, which become blind and bloodthirsty, not to be appeased save by havoc, and generally by the killing of somebody else than themselves."

William Tecumseh Sherman, address to the Michigan Military Academy, 19 June 1879


Joltin' Jay Powell made some dovish sounds from Jackson Hole this morning, as he appeared to have hitched a ride on the Cheeto Express.

So stocks and all the rate cut sensitive assets rallied strongly.

Gold and silver rocketed higher as the Dollar plunged.

 Bitcoin rallied.

VIX plunged.

The seeds of disaster are being sown, in an almost fatalistic, mechanical manner.

I hate to sound cynical, but the public, led by the media, is really out there in the k-hole now.

We don't believe in painful wars and plagues.  Or false flags and tipping points. 

Have a pleasant weekend. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Incoming, All Over Again

 

"The singular feature of the great crash of 1929 was that the worst continued to worsen.  What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning.

Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few as possible escaped the common misfortune.  The fortunate speculator who had funds to answer the first margin call presently got another and equally urgent one, and if he met that there would still be another. In the end all the money he had was extracted from him and lost.

The man with the smart money, who was safely out of the market when the first crash came, naturally went back in to pick up bargains.  (Not only were a recorded 12,894,650 shares sold on 24 October; precisely the same number were bought.)  The bargains then suffered a ruinous fall.

Even the man who waited out all of October and all of November, who saw the volume of trading return to normal and saw Wall Street become as placid as a produce market, and who then bought common stocks would see their value drop to a third or a fourth of the purchase price in the next twenty-four months.

The Coolidge bull market was a remarkable phenomenon.  The ruthlessness of its liquidation was, in its own way, equally remarkable."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929, 1955

"In the months leading up to the Black Thursday of the Crash of 1929, the markets experienced a series of terrific ups and downs that 'left everyone feeling exhausted.'

Now there is a significant amount of uncertainty with a strong undercurrent of fear. How bad will it be? Which banks are insolvent? Why aren't the normal indicators working? Why does reality feel different from what the government numbers are reporting?

At the same time, stocks are divorced from fundamentals so they are 'trading like commodities.'  The big players watch the short and long interest, and run raids against the smaller players and funds.  There is a cynical ruthlessness prevailing in the US markets that is the result of extreme lapses in regulatory oversight mixed with a surfeit of hot money with no particularly productive places to go.  So it roams the exchanges in search of a quick buck.

We're setting up for a rough time fraught with uncertainty.  This implies widening spreads and wild swings.

Asking the market to tell us what is coming now in the real economy is going to be tough, because the market doesn't know whether eat soup or jump out the window."

Jesse, Incoming, 6 September 2008


Stocks continued to wobble again, extending their declines ahead of the speech by Jay Powell tomorrow at Jackson Hole.

Bitcoin continued its decline from its recent all time high.

VIX popped up to its 50 DMA.

The Dollar rallied.

Gold was off a bit.  Silver was hanging in despite stocks and the Dollar.

Economist in general are operating on two important axioms.

First, that Volcker has proved that you can beat even a serious, pernicious inflation with high short term interest rates.

I remember that period of time very well.  There were some who made quite a good amount of future income by investing in interest rate sensitive assets such as dividend paying stocks and bonds and annuities, on the bet that 20% marked the peak of Volcker's gambit.

I can even recall a young engineer who took an ARM mortgage who interest rate fell in each subsequent year, so that merely by maintaining the same payment a 30 year mortgage was fully paid in 15.

The second axiom is that no matter how bad the crash, if the Fed floods the markets with liquidity is the right way then assets will return to their prior levels.   This is the Greenspan gambit from 1987.

There is a third axiom.  A supply shock of a key economic input, such as oil, can lead to a slump in activity as well as an increasing price spiral.   This is the oil embargo of the 1970s.   Economists don't think about this one very much, because they still don't know what to do about it from a policy standpoint, without plunging the economy into a depression.

There is a fourth  axiom.  It has not been fully formed as of yet.  In our hubris, we do not yet even recognize it's possibility.   It rests in existential matters of money.

We are well on our way to finding it.   And therein lies our uncertainty.

Have a pleasant evening.