Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Seductive Illusions of Empire

 

"Their tongues are devious weapons, bent like a drawn bow. With falsehoods rather than truth they have gained power in the land.  They commit one crime after another.  They do not know me."

Jeremiah 9:3

"For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work.  But the one who restrains it will continue to do so until he steps away.   And then the lawless one will be revealed, the one whom the Lord will slay by the breath of his mouth and bring to an end with the splendor of his coming.

The coming of the lawless one will be the work of Satan made manifest in power, signs and wonders of falsehood, and in every wicked deception designed for those who are perishing because they did not accept the love of truth, and be saved.

For this reason, God permits them [the exceptional] a powerful delusion to believe their lies, that all may be condemned who deny the truth and instead take pleasure in lawlessness."

2 Thessalonians 2:7-12

"If at the start this cancerous growth in the nation was not particularly noticeable, it was only because there were still enough forces at work that operated for the good, so that it was kept under control. As it grew larger, however, and finally in an ultimate spurt of growth attained ruling power, the tumor broke open, as it were, and infected the whole body."

The White Rose, Second Leaflet, Munich 1942

"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."

Fritz Lang, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933


An explanation of today's market decline is unnecessary, unless one is a spokesmodel for one of the financial or ideologically inclined organizations which are always trying to find clever ways to distract and mislead the narrative.

The mispricing of risks has corrected a bit, but I fear it has some way to go. 

Perhaps a substantial way to go, all things considered, including the real economy.

Gold popped but was held in check.

Silver ended the week mostly unchanged, but this was on top of a prior stellar performance the week before. 

Despite what people say, silver is just not as 'monetary' as gold.

And Bitcoin is a risk asset in drag.  

VIX ticked up.  But it did not yet spike.

I would imagine they will be exchanging 'presents' with messages attached back and forth this weekend over there.

The targets and the heft (throw weight) of the packages will be pivotal.

Even moreso if anyone else selects to cast off pretense and most openly engage. 

And then there is the Ukraine, the neglected. 

It's always something new and shinier with the Empire. 

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." 

Have a pleasant, and hopefully uneventful, weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The First Drop In the Onrushing Abyss

 

“I know your works; I know that you are neither cold nor hot.  But because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, ‘I am rich and affluent and have no need of anything,’ and yet do not realize that you are wretched, poor, pitiable, naked, and blind."

Revelation 3:15-17

"Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it’s a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.  Hope is not prognostication.  It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. 

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed."

Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 1990

“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan, April 2007

"Now might be a good time to find something that you can firmly believe in, something that is greater and better than yourself, and then hang on to it and faithfully serve it, with all your strength and hope."

Jesse, La Vie en Rose, 18 August 2015

"And Peter understood that neither Nero, nor all his legions, could overcome the living truth— that they could not overwhelm it with tears or blood, and that now its victory was beginning.

He understood with equal force why the Lord had turned him back on the road.  That city of pride, of crime, of wickedness, and of a lust for power, was beginning to be His."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis, 1896 

Stocks managed to hold a modest rally today.

There was a hidden weakness on the tape amidst all the bravado.

The Dollar gave up the 98 handle.

Watch the Bond and the Dollar.   They will speak the truths that risk assets like equities hide.

VIX is still mispricing risks of all manner.  

Hubris knows no fear, until it feels the first breath-taking plunge into the abyss.

Those imperious few.  

They will be scattered remnants on the streets of hell, voicelessly blown here and there by dull, directionless winds. 

In the end, the only thing that matters is to be among the saints.

Have a pleasant evening 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Liberty Cabbage

 

“Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage‘ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles?’ And the wartime censorship of honest papers?  As bad as Russia!  Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for dictatorship as ours!”

Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here, 1930

“Authoritarianism begins when we can no longer tell the difference between the true and the appealing.  At the same time, the cynic who decides that there is no truth at all is the citizen who welcomes the tyrant.  Freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear.  Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires."

Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, 2018

“If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of foolishness in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the foolishness of others.  It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted of destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 1951

“It is better described as simple-mindedness: people are often attracted to authoritarian ideas because they are bothered by complexity.  They dislike divisiveness.  They prefer unity.  A sudden onslaught of diversity—diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences—therefore makes them angry.  They seek solutions in new political language that makes them feel safer and more secure.

Democracy itself has always been loud and raucous, but when its rules are followed, it eventually creates consensus.  The modern debate does not. Instead, it inspires in some people the desire to forcibly silence the rest.  People have always had different opinions.  Now they have different facts."

Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, 2020


Charts are early tonight, because we have to take Daisy to the vet.  

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Burden of Self-Deception

 

"Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.  You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.  You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’  Why not?  It is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows.  Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy.  One hears no protest, and certainly sees none.  You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this.  In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say?  They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

And you are an alarmist.  You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it.  These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end?  On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you.  On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.  You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now.  Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work.  You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings.  Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither.  Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things.  This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what?  It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker.  So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you.  The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.  The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all.   

Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed.  Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.  The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things that your father, even in Germany, could not have imagined.  Suddenly it all comes down, all at once.  You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing).  You remember everything now, and your heart breaks.  Too late.  You are compromised beyond repair."

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

 

Stocks managed to stage a little rally into the close and hold it.

Gold and silver marched in place.

The Dollar was nominally unchanged.

VIX continues to wallow in self-deception.

Our complacency in the face of growing lawlessness is astonishing.

Who could have seen it coming.

Have a pleasant evening.