Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Oligarchs, Flush With Victory

 

"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."

Thomas Clement Douglas, Canadian MP

"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

"Whoever today still doubts the reality, the existence of demonic powers, has failed by a wide margin to understand the metaphysical background of this war.  Behind the concrete, the visible events, behind all the objective, logical considerations, we find that which goes beyond the merely rational: the struggle against evil, against the servants of the antichrist."

Die Weiße Rose, Fourth Leaflet, Munich, 1942

"Around the world, authoritarian leaders are on the rise.  They're working from a common playbook.   They use violent rhetoric.  They attack the media.  They see their political rivals as existential enemies to the nation.  Demagogues are willing to do or say anything to gain office or to consolidate their power. Unconstrained by ideology, they have no concern for the consequences of their actions.  Anything that serves to make them more powerful is good enough for them — even if the political system that facilitated their rise should be destroyed in the process."

Daniel Ziblatt, Saving Democracy from Demagogues, 2022

"The oligarchs are flush with victory, and feel that they are firmly in control, able to subvert and direct any popular movement to the support of their own fascist ends and unslakable will to power. This is the contempt in which they hold the majority of American people and the political process: the common people are easily led fools, and everyone else who is smart enough to know better has their price.

And they would beggar every middle class voter in the US before they will voluntarily give up one dime of their ill gotten gains. But my model says that the oligarchs will continue to press their advantages, being flushed with victory, until they provoke a strong reaction that frightens everyone, like a wake up call, and the tide then turns to genuine reform."

Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup, May 2009

"The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects.  Power will achieve its murderous potential.  It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."

R. J. Rummel, Mass Murder and Genocide, 1994


The Fed did not change interest rates today.

Stocks popped and flopped back to unchanged.

VIX is wallowing, oblivious to the growing economic and geopolitical risks.

Gold and silver went ballistic in an impressive rally to new highs.  

What are the precious metals telling us?   

If you don't yet know, you have not been listening.  

And you certainly are not prepared for what is coming next.

The hand of God is moving, slowly and silently among us.

I know, you don't believe it.

Did you believe that gold would be near $5400 and silver at $118 even six months ago?  

If someone could tell you what would happen over the next 24 months you would not believe that either.  But you could figure it out for yourself, if you were not so taken over by foolish pride and fantasy.

"God will allow a powerful delusion to take those who rejected the truth, so that they may believe the lie and be condemned, because they have delighted in their lawlessness."   2 Thessalonians 11-12

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Love of Power Is Hell

 

"A new commandment I give you — that you love one another, as I have loved you.  By this all will know that you are mine — if you love one another.'”

John 13:34-35

"Holiness consists simply in doing God's will, and being just what God wants us to be.  Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, or even at their difficulty, but at the love with which we do them.  Without love deeds, even the greatest, count as nothing.  Our Lord's love shines forth as much in the simplest of souls as it does in the most highly gifted, as long as there is no refusal of His grace."

Thérèse Martin de Lisieux, L'Histoire d'une Âme

"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 to a certain extent, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, of the poor, of the destitute – the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor.  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."

Dorothy Day, Love Is the Measure, June 1946

“The opposite of love is not hate, he said.  It’s power.  Relationships fueled by a drive for power, where one person seeks dominance over the other, are incapable of producing love.”

David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard: the Rise of America's Secret Government, 2015

"And the rich man replied, ‘No, Father Abraham! But if someone is sent to my brothers from the dead, then they will surely 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 16:30-31 

The absence of love is power.  The love of power is hell. 

The emptiness of the absence of divine comfort, that selfless presence which comforts and flows around a soul in the vastness of eternity, is what will burn those who refuse the call to love.  The absence of God from 'interference with their lives' that they had desired is a terrible judgement.  They suffer in a torment of regret, alone and unloved.

The casual ease with which people consign themselves to the abyss makes the devils in hell rejoice, and the angels in heaven weep. 

Who could have seen it coming?

 Stocks continued to rally today.   

Today was a minor option expiration for gold and silver futures on the Comex. 

Gold and silver came in struggling, but rocketed higher in the late day trade as the Dollar continued its cascading decline.  

Uncle Buck plunged in the closing hour to fall into the 95 handle. 

What are the markets saying to us?

VIX wallows.

Bitcoin managed to stage a little rally in the last hour.  It is back in its trading range after a failed breakout attempt.

FOMC rate decision tomorrow. 

Trump is heading into a turning point.  That much is obvious to anyone who is watching.

His attempts to thwart the midterm elections will escalate.  

The hand of God is moving now among us.   

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - And Where Are the Snows of Yesteryear?

 

"They shall eat the bitter fruit of their ways, and be gutted by their schemes.  The foolish turn away from me — to death.  For fools are destroyed by their pride and self-deception.”

Proverbs 1:31-33

"Where are the princes of this world, and those who lorded it over the creatures of the earth?  Those who hoarded up riches in which they placed their hope.  Those who have no limit to their greed, who scheme to get more wealth, and are always anxious about their possessions.

Now there is nothing left of them.  They have vanished into the bowels of the earth, and others like them have risen to take their place."

Baruch 3:16-19

"And Joan, the holy maiden from Lorraine
Whom the English burned at Rouen;
Where are they now, O Virgin Queen?
And where are the snows of yesteryear."

François Villon, Ballade des dames du temps jadis

"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilised and innocent people.  The silence under the terror was only its consequence.  The coldness of the societal mindset, the isolated competitor, was the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others, for the fact that only very few people reacted. The torturers know this, and they put it to test ever anew.

One must come to know the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds, must reveal these mechanisms to them, and strive, by awakening a general awareness of those mechanisms, to prevent people from becoming so again.

It is not the victims who are guilty, not even in the sophistic and caricatured sense in which still today many like to construe it.  Only those who unreflectingly vented their hate and aggression upon them are guilty.  One must labor against this lack of reflection, must dissuade people from striking outward without reflecting upon themselves.  The only education that has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection."

Theodor Adorno, Education After Auschwitz, 18 April 1966


Silver rocketed to a new all time high today of 117.70, but backed off to around 108 into the close.  Still a solid gain piled on the recent breakout over 100.

Gold rallied.

Bitcoin slumped a bit.

The Dollar continued its cascading decline, now to the bottom of the 97 handle.

Stocks rallied sharply.

Then tend to do that on Mondays lately.

We will be having the FOMC rate decision on Wednesday.

It's hard to tell, but things seem to be approaching a tipping point in the States, as we head into the midterm elections. 

It seems that the bold lawlessness of the day will keep testing the strength of justice and the commitment of this generation to the freedoms which it has been given.

That boldness will continue until stopped.  And as men learn that they can break the law with impunity, they will develop a taste for it, and the impetus for even greater excess.

"Where are the leaders?  Has our political process become so compromised by powerful interest groups and the threat of character assassination that even the best among us will not dare to speak honestly about the solutions that might bring us back to common sense and fundamental fairness?"    Senator Jim Webb, A Time to Fight, 2008

Where are our leaders indeed?

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Lawless and Self-Enslaved

 

“There are only two kinds of people in the end — those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'  All that are in Hell choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell.”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 1945

"As you have willed it, so your house is now yours to command — but it is made desolate.’”

Matthew 23:38

"But, outside the realm of business, these men are stupid. They know only business. They do not know mankind nor society, and yet they set themselves up as arbiters of the fates of the hungry millions and all the other millions thrown in. 

We well we know by bitter experience that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you.  I know nothing that I may say can influence you.  You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things.  You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats.  You are lick-spittles and panderers, the creatures of the plutocracy.” ”

Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1907 

"We labor and labor and labor for stuff that never satisfies us. The market ideology is now the new form of imperial power and many of us, without any critical reflection, have signed onto that, and organized our lives in that way so we do not have any time, energy or capacity for the things that are rightly important to us, our humanness."

Walter Brueggemann, Truth To Power, 2013

"I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.  I do not mean that they may not wish to come out of hell, but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good.  They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved."

C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 1940


Fed rate decision next Wednesday afternoon. 

The Dollar slumped down to the 97 handle as the rest of the world is selling hubris.

Gold and silver rocketed higher, with silver punching through $100 and closing above $102.

Gold is knocking on $5,000. 

Stocks tried to extend their rally and then fell back to hold a modest gain.

It did not take much to get VIX wallowing near complacency again.

Donnie's done.  He just doesn't know it yet.  Slowly, and then all at once.

The dogfight that will take place afterwards could be interesting.

We are expecting a major snowstorm here in the northeast this weekend.

Daisy and I are ready.  I washed all the blankets today.

Have a pleasant weekend.