Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Emptiness: The Agony of Mammon

 

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Stephen Miller, CNN Interview, 6 January 2026

"The dazzling and consuming act of pride that transformed the angel of light into an angel and prince of darkness condemned him to an insatiable, and therefore desperate, need to acquire.  The loss of the wellspring of life gives rise to an essentially inextinguishable thirst.  The entire world can not fill the emptiness which the awareness of having left their rightful place in the world forms in the heart of a creature.

Having fallen from the eternal, Satan's desires are endless and insatiable.  Having fallen from pure Being, he seeks to possess.  But the problem is forever insoluble.  For in order to have and possess, it would be necessary to have life, to Be, and he is connected to life no longer.  All he takes into himself he destroys.

And to be sure, he can have it, since he is called Prince of this World in Scripture— but he will never have anything but the things of this world. He will never regain Heaven, which is properly the soul of this world, and the essence of existence... 

He knows this full well.  This is why his desire and his rabid jealousy fasten on our individual souls. He prowls around like a roaring lion in quest of his prey, says the Bible.  He prowls around us, like a criminal, obsessed by kidnapping.  But his victories will always be sterile.

One does not become a father by stealing a child.  One can steal the child, but not the paternity.  One can steal power, but not authority.  Satan can steal this world, but not its divine essence. And yet we humans can lose all of these things, which are our heritage as children of God.  It is the Devil's only chance.  He does not intend to miss it."

Denis de Rougemont, La Part du Diable, Switzerland, 1944

"The Unspeakable.  It is the void, the emptiness of the end.  Not the end of the world, but a climax of absolute finality in refusal, in equivocation, in disorder, in absurdity, which can be open again to truth only by miracle, by the coming of God."

Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable, New Directions, 1966

"Never in the history of the world have so many people been so rich; never in the history off the world have so many of those same people felt themselves so poor. The state of perpetual emptiness is, of course, very good for business. The feasts of consumption sustain the economy, keep up the volume in the stock markets, employ the unemployable, excite the fevers of speculation, and stimulate the passion for political and sexual novelty."

Lewis H. Lapham, The Agony of Mammon, 1999

"Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness."

Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce, 1947

 

Stocks rallied up to new highs, and then fell, badly.

This foolish and baseless ascent followed by a horrific decline will be the theme for 2026.

 VIX stopped again at its exponential 20 day moving average

Gold and silver were pushed lower in this attempt to reassert the defiance of risk. 

 It will not work.

"A true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”  Czeslaw Milosz

The wages of sin are death.  And they will be paid. 

Have a pleasant evening.  

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Empires, Behaving Badly

 

"Structural deep events are events which violate the American social structure, have a major impact on American society, repeatedly involve lawbreaking or violence, and in many cases proceed from an unknown dark force.”

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics, 1993

"Each time banks fail, by bailing the system out again, we teach our finance sector a lesson: you can safely take too much risk because, when you lose, the taxpayer will pick up the bill.  Such a system is destined to fail, but the party can run for a long time."

Simon Johnson and Peter Boone, Economic Donkeys, 19 September 2009

"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mobilization for Human Needs, October 13, 1940

"Empires in decline tend to behave badly.  The twilight years of imperialism often brought brutal repression of subjects abroad, the suppression of civil liberties at home and general varieties of brutality toward foreigners, be they refugees or migrants.

Aggressive wars abroad pollute the domestic political discourse and breed hypernationalism, racism and xenophobia.  Aggressive wars of choice have ushered in rampant torture, atrocities in prisons, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations, warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the citizenry.  It’s all connected. The empire — all empires — eventually come home."

Major Danny Sjursen, An American Tragedy: Empire at Home and Abroad, July 23, 2019

"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


Stocks rallied up to highs, with the tech giants lagging a bit.

The Dollar bounced.

Gold and silver continued to rally back from their end of year beatdown.

VIX remains below its moving averages.  

When the reckoning comes, it will appear like a thief in the night.

But there is nothing one can say that will restrain a people who desire to be rich.

At the end of the year, when we take account of the dead and the fallen, we may obtain a better idea of how God's judgement has fallen.

All we can be sure of now is that it will.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Charts - The Beast Stirs

 

"There are children of God and the children of the devil.  Those who do not do what is right and who do not love their brothers and sisters are not the children of God."

1 John 3:10

"The never ending alarms, the never ending phrases, it all produces apathy.  There is so much lethargy in the German people, and so much immorality, and above all so much stupidity."

Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness 1933-41

“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.  Power is not a means; it is an end.”

George Orwell, 1984

"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.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

"What is happiness?  The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.  'The weak and the flawed shall perish' is the first principle of our charity.  And one should help them to perish.  What is more harmful than any vice?  Christian love."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

"Why take a government by force when you can delude the public, energize a vocal minority, eliminate a few key leaders of any effective opposition thereby setting an example for any others, and through coercion and soft bribery simply buy it?"

Jesse, A Corporatist Coup d'Etat, 2 August 2012


Stocks were rallying in celebration of the liberation of Venezuela's oil reserves for the friends of crony capitalism.

Gold and silver rose sharply, buoyed by the increasing risks of lawlessness, rising like a phoenix from the decaying corpse of vanity. 

VIX is mesmerized by the wizards of finance.

The dollar took a nose dive, but retains its seat of power.

Bitcoin is bouncing around the upper bound of its recent trading range.

We will be seeing more serious economic news on Wednesday.

The rich man replied, ‘No, Father Abraham!  But if someone is sent to them from the dead, then they will repent of their sins and turn to God.’  But Abraham said, ‘If they won’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded, even if someone rises from the dead.’”    Luke 16:19-31

What a man sows, so shall he reap. 

And they never see it coming.

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Eaters of the Dead

 

"The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.  It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century."

Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy, 1995

"Surveys show that the usual investors in major rallies – pension funds, hedge funds and retail investors – have not been net buyers of equities.  And he says the most likely explanation for this anomaly in the biggest stock market rally since the 1930s is that major investment banks are the anxious buyers. 

'Their buying would appear to be for one of two reasons.  Firstly because they think the authorities will prevail in their (so far unsuccessful) efforts to inflate their way out of debt liquidation; or secondly because they are too big to fail and so can afford to take a huge gamble that enough buying will convince others to rush in and buy their inventory of risk assets at even higher prices.'" 

Leigh Skene, Equity Rally Not Driven by the Usual Investors, Financial Times, April 28, 2010

"Right now the US is on the path to a devaluation and a selective default on its debt and currency.  No one can say 'how and when' with certainty.  Some suggest that devaluation of a sovereign currency no longer has any significance and meaning.  Why?  Because what would one devalue such a currency against, as it is tied to no external standard?  And so they say that the Dollar is its own standard as the reserve currency of the world.

It is always a mistake to assume that there are no external standards, no dissenting views, that things are merely what we say they are and should be, for everyone.  The dollar standard is in fact the 'full faith and credit of the United States.'  And if that confidence is broken, the reversion to fundamental 'external' values may be impressive."

Jesse, Thinking the Unthinkable, 11 November 2008

“Woe to you, learned scribes and the elite— hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which appear beautiful, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all corruption. You outwardly look righteous, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness."

Matthew 23:27-28

"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, Chief of the Central Bank of Italy, 30 Sept 2013


And that is why gold is the king of assets, par excellence.

Today's market action was, in a word, nonsensical.

Let's see what happens when the adults come back next week.

The young man is on his way back.

I thoroughly enjoyed the company I had for Christmas dinner.  But with five little petri dishes running around, I have understandably contracted a fairly nasty head and chest cold.

Oh the price we grandparents pay.  lol 

Have a pleasant weekend.