Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Desperate Loneliness of Hell

 

"Your adversary, the devil, prowls the earth like a roaring lion, seeking those whom he may devour. Resist, and stand firmly in the faith, and know that your fellow believers throughout the world are also standing against the same temptations."

1 Peter 5:8-9

"Satan has been in the Heaven of Heavens and in the abyss of Hell, and surveyed all that lies between them, and in that whole immensity has found only one thing that interests Satan. Satan’s monomaniac concern with himself and his supposed rights and wrongs is a necessity of the Satanic predicament.

Certainly, he has no choice. He has chosen to have no choice. He has wished to ‘be himself’, and to be in himself and for himself, and his wish has been granted. The Hell he carries with him is, in one sense, a Hell of infinite boredom. To admire Satan, then, is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography."

C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942

“If we go as far as we can into the darkness, regardless of the consequences, I believe a midnight truth will free us from our bondage to violence and bring us to the light of peace.”

James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, 2008

“What we would like to do is change the world— make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute— the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words— we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world."

Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, 1952

"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 as well 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


Why does 'power' so often turn to self-destruction and cynical brutality?

I think it is because the soul incapable of loving and being loved becomes addicted to feeling - something.  

It is like there is a great hole in their being that torments them.  And so they try to fill it with things, and powerful emotions like hate and hanger, and the misery of other people.   Anything.

The 'shutdown' was resolved in the Senate last night, according to the media. 

Now this amended bill must be returned to the House, which must come back into session to deliberate it.

And if this happens, then Speaker Johnson would hopefully be under quite a bit of pressure to swear in the new member of the House, who has vowed to support the release of the 'Epstein files.'

We all now that, for whatever mysterious reason, the Trump administration had a remarkable change of mind in the release of the files, which they had whinged about for years when they were out of power.

And having pledged to release them, AG Bondi and her cohorts suddenly decided they were irrelevant, we didn't have to see them, and Trump himself dismissed them as a hoax, fake news, and unimportant.

Do you need to buy a vowel?   

So stocks rallied, bubbling back up.

Gold and silver just rocketed higher, having been pressed down into the phantom Non-Farm Payrolls report last week.   

You see, it's not really the report that drives prices.  Its the unregulated power of the moneyed interests of Wall Street and their Banks. 

There is going to be a significant amount of fraud and ugliness that may some day may tumble out into view.   Both of the corporate parties will not wish this to happen.  For every Trump there is a Clinton, so to speak.

But the current system is failing, and the more it abuses the public, the more the resistance to this dirty, rotten system will build. 

In his recollections, Bill Moyers said that one night in a Tennessee hotel Lyndon Johnson described the dynamics of Southern politics like this:

“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket.  Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”

And so the band plays on.

Have a pleasant evening. 

What Was the Financial Crisis of 2008 Like?

 

I just posted a number of items on X, a selection of charts and commentary from my blog during the Financial Crisis of 2008. 

Its all original and unedited. 

I wanted to recapture the feel for the crisis, what we were thinking and hearing, and how it unfolded in all its fraudulent ugliness and uncertainty. 

There was panic selling in the world markets.   Banks and financial institutions were falling like a house of cards.   

It was mostly a time of fear and uncertainty, as an avalanche of financial fraud and the mispricing of risk came crashing down around us.

It's worth a reminder for those who have forgotten what a serious market decline is like.

You may see the postings on X here.

 Below is a small sampling of the charts. 

 Here is a summation of the Five Major Causes of the financial crisis according to Joe Stiglitz in 2008:

1. Reagan's nomination of Alan Greenspan to replace Paul Volcker as Fed Chairman
2. The Repeal of Glass-Steagall and the Cult of Self-Regulation
3. Bush Tax Cuts for Upper Income Individuals, Corporations, and Speculators
4. Failure to Address Rampant Accounting Fraud Driven by Excessive and Flawed Compensation Models
5. Providing Enormous Bailouts to the Banks without Engaging Systemic Reform for the Underlying Causes of the Failure

I would like to say we have reformed the system of most of these failings.  But alas, we have not.

In retrospect the major bull market in gold found its start here as nations and individuals rushed to buy physical gold, dislocating the relationship between the physical and paper markets.  

Obama's failure to reform, which was the mandate that underwrote his election, was a critical failure.  And he never followed through on it over his eight years as president.  

 

 

Bank Bailouts Were Larger Than US Cost for WWII

All the Gains from the End of the Tech Bubble Bust Were Wiped Out

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A Conspiracy of Silence

 

"In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot."

Czesław Miłosz, Nobel Prize lecture, 8 December 1980

"To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny. In this world of ours in other lands, there are some people, who, in times past, have lived and fought for freedom, and seem to have grown too weary to carry on the fight. They have sold their heritage of freedom for the illusion of a living. They have yielded their democracy.

I believe in my heart that only our success can stir their ancient hope. They begin to know that here in America we are waging a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world."

Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democratic National Convention, 1936 

"The threat to our democracy is real and growing. But it didn’t start with the MAGA crowd. It started with the dark money crowd — which won’t be satisfied until it owns every member of Congress, every lifetime-appointed federal judge, and every key politician in every swing state. Until there is a groundswell in America demanding serious campaign finance reform, this is the best democracy that money can buy."

Pam and Russ Martens, American Democracy Is Under Grave Threat, 7 September 2022

"The greatest need is for intellectual reappraisal, and a good place to begin is with a statement from a paper co-authored by Minsky that “apt intervention and institutional structures are necessary for market economies to be successful.” Rather than waging old debates about tax cuts versus spending increases, policymakers ought to be discussing how to reform the financial system so that it serves the rest of the economy, instead of feeding off it and destabilizing it. 

Among the problems at hand: how to restructure Wall Street remuneration packages that encourage excessive risk-taking; restrict irresponsible lending without shutting out creditworthy borrowers; help victims of predatory practices without bailing out irresponsible lenders; and hold ratings agencies accountable for their assessments. These are complex issues, with few easy solutions, but that’s what makes them interesting. As Minsky believed, “Economies evolve, and so, too, must economic policy.”

John Cassidy, The Minsky Moment, The New Yorker, February 4, 2008

They are more openly normalizing fraud, cruelty, and injustice.  

Most leaders and their elite servants stand by in complicit silence.

Have a pleasant weekend. 

Just Gold and Silver

 

"Gold is the money of kings; silver is the money of gentlemen; barter is the money of peasants; but debt is the money of slaves."

Norm Franz, Money and Wealth in the New Millenium