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. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Madness Withering in Bunkers of Despair

 

"Friday, April 20, was Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday. The radio announced that Hitler had come out of his safe bomb-proof bunker to talk with the fourteen to sixteen year old boys who had 'volunteered' for the 'honor' to be accepted into the SS and to die for their Fuhrer in the defense of Berlin.  What a cruel lie!  These boys did not volunteer, but had no choice, because boys who were found hiding were hanged as traitors by the SS as a warning that, 'he who was not brave enough to fight had to die.'

When trees were not available, people were strung up on lamp posts.  They were hanging everywhere, military and civilian, men and women, ordinary citizens who had been executed by a small group of fanatics.   It appeared that the Nazis did not want the people to survive because a lost war, by their rationale, was obviously the fault of all of us.  We had not sacrificed enough and therefore, we had forfeited our right to live, as only the government was without guilt."

Dorothea von Schwanenfluegel, A Personal Journey Through Germany's World Wars and Postwar Years, 1999

"This is an almost perfect illustration of the credibility trap.  One cannot allow the illusion to falter, even a little, to the bitter end.  And as the fraud fades, the force intensifies, becoming almost rabid in its deflection of guilt.  Because that illusion has become the center of a hollowed people's being, their raison d'être, a mythological justification for their existence. 

If the ideology had been a lie, then they are not heroes and gods on earth, but monsters and criminals, and their life has been self-serving and meaningless, without significance and honor.  And that is the credibility trap.  It is the impulse for the leaders to keep doubling down in the hope of a win, until exhaustion and collapse. The madness serves none but itself."

Jesse, Empires of Illusion: First They Come For the Weak, 31 December 2012,

"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

Stocks did a grand 'pop and flop' today.

Sometimes known as a 'wash and rinse.'

US tariffs are scheduled to go into effect tomorrow.

Although extensions, like the one granted to Mexico, are always at hand.

Gold and silver rallied back a bit.

Tomorrow will be another Non-Farm Payrolls report.

Traudl Junge's memoir, Until the Final Hour, is often interpreted as a metaphor for how people can become disconnected from reality and rationalize their actions, even when those actions lead to catastrophic consequences.

I always found it strikingly odd that the backstabbing and jockeying for power amongst the Nazi elites continued, with increasing viciousness, even until the very end when they abandoned the Bunker and Berlin was burning.

And true believers went around like gangs of fanatical beasts, hanging their own people, with the enemy at their gates.

Greed and hate are bottomless pits, that feed on in furious misery, even as they die.

We are going to be seeing that same behaviour playing out, in more than one place, in the days to come.

First they come for the weak, the stranger, the other. 

Nations can truly fall into a kind of fatalistic madness, driven by a lust for possessions and power, pride and greed, myths and tainted dreams.

Whether you choose to believe it or not, you will bear witness to this with your own eyes, in one place or another. 

Even if you do not believe in plagues. 

What a man sows, so shall he reap. 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Are You Not Entertained?

 

"Modern tyranny is terror management.  When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power.  For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission.  For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions.”

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, 2017

“All make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”

Sophocles, Antigone

"Efforts to manage and manipulate asset prices are not new. But history provides little comfort that these practices work. Interfering with market prices occasionally buys time, but rarely do policy makers seize the window of opportunity to enact structural reform. Financial repression embeds the wrong incentives—obfuscation begets delay, and a robust recovery becomes unattainable."

Kevin Warsh, The Financial Repression Trap, 2011

"Brothers, you came from our own people. You are killing your own brothers. Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God, which says, 'Thou shalt not kill'. No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you obeyed your consciences rather than sinful orders. The church cannot remain silent before such an abomination."

Oscar Romero, Assassinated While Saying Mass, March 24, 1980

"Through a set of economic policies designed to bail out and subsidize failed and often tainted corporate enterprises, while actively promoting a false sense of confidence to support those policies, the public has become exposed, by those very people entrusted to protect them, to dangerously high levels of hidden counterparty risks.

The cautionary functions of the media, the political class, and the regulatory bodies have been routinely directed, distorted, and even silenced for the benefit of a highly compromised and increasingly self-serving elite. And this corruption has begun feeding on its own momentum, resulting in increasingly blatant examples of deception, distortion, and outright theft. This is crony capitalism, and its deadly credibility trap."

Jesse, Gold, Silver, and the May Jobs Report, June 2012

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty, 1977


The Fed did pretty much what everyone expected it to do, the Economic Sophisticate notwithstanding. 

The Dollar soared.

Gold and silver were hammered lower.

One interesting twist is that stock futures soared in the last 20 minutes of trading. 

I suspect it was just some dumb thing that Trump said, or some 'corporate surprise.'

These are the times we are in, and the type of governance that some have demanded, and the rest in their apathy tolerate.

This is plutocracy, the malady of the West. 

Have a pleasant evening.