“Depart from me, you accursed. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not comfort me.' They answer, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not care for you?' He answered, 'Truly I tell you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it for me.’” Matthew 25:40-46
Gold and silver both had nice rallies today as they moved even deeper in the overhead resistance of the long bear market.
I have updated the gold chart with some new indicators of where we are.
The next big level for gold is at 1210, although 1200 is likely to be a significant 'psychological' barrier. And of course, gold needs to hold within the new uptrending channel it is establishing on any retracements and corrections.
The Bucket Shop is becoming very quiet, like a museum, but empty, devoid of humanity. More like a ghost town perhaps, an artifact from a place that time and custom are passing by.
As of today, gold and silver are outperforming stocks year to date.
Let's see if gold and silver can truly break out from here, or just form a different trading challenge. I have not noticed any genuine reform in the paper markets.
I wonder how the fellows who say that gold and silver 'have no fundamentals' would explain this? I am sure it would be misleadingly distracting.
That seems to be the currency and major export of America's elite ruling class and their servants these days.
As I indicated the other day, based on the extreme reading in skew, and intraday today on the warning from Walmart and the general lack of economic recovery which is seemingly invisible to the upper crust and their media minions, I think that sometime within the next year or two we are going to see quite a surprising correction in terms of real valuations of stocks.
Whether that is nominal or just real depends on the dollar.
Our kids are going to live so much better than we do now."
Warren Buffett
“Among 21 countries in the study the U.S. ranks second-to-last in the percentage of its GDP spent on benefits for families, despite one of the highest relative child poverty rates of the comparable high-income countries. [only Turkey was worse because it failed to provide any data]”
Walmart warned on its profit outlook for 2016 and the stock dropped about 8 percent.
As the pampered princes of financial television put it:
"To say that Wall Street was surprised by what Walmart had to say is an understatement.'
The spin is that Walmart is 'brick and mortar' and that it is losing ground to Amazon.
And amongst the worst analysis, Walmart ought not to have given its employees, who are among the lowest of the working poor, a raise in wages.
Walmart merely needs to 'reinvent' itself.
Maybe that is true.
Or maybe it is tied into the overall retail results which we saw this morning.
Walmart is at the sharp point of the failing US consumers, who are un- or under- employed with stagnant wages and shrinking benefits, pinned by rising rents and healthcare costs, possessing little discretionary income, almost no savings, and living virtually paycheck to paycheck.
In the new retail models, like Walmart and Amazon, the vast bulk of the income goes directly to the top, to a fortunate few like the Walmart family and Jeff Bezos, with a little to shareholders, and crumbs to the employees who are driven harder to be 'competitive.'
There will be many more surprises for Wall Street, and for the very comfortable ruling elite.
The banks must be restrained, the financial system reformed, and the economy brought back into balance, before there can be any sustained recovery.
“The mythological Narcissus rejected the advances of the nymph Echo and was punished by the goddess Nemesis. He was consigned to pine away as he fell in love with his own reflection - exactly as Echo had pined away for him. How apt. Narcissists are punished by echoes and reflections of their problematic personalities up to this very day.
Narcissists are said to be in love with themselves. But this is a fallacy. Narcissus is not in love with himself. He is in love with his 'reflection'...
In the narcissist's surrealistic world, even language is pathologized. It mutates into a weapon of self-defence, a verbal fortification, a medium without a message, replacing words with duplicitous and ambiguous vocables.
When narcissism fails as a defense mechanism, the narcissist develops paranoid narratives: self-directed confabulations which place him at the center of others' allegedly malign attention."
Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited
“There's a reason narcissists don't learn from mistakes and that's because they never get past the first step which is admitting that they made one. It's always an assistant's fault, an adviser's fault, a lawyer's fault. Ask them to account for a mistake any other way and they'll say, 'what mistake?”
Jeffrey Kluger, The Narcissist Next Door
Gold and silver managed to nudge up a little tighter into the overhead resistance at 1166 gold and 16+ for silver.
The Bucket Shop was dead quiet on precious metal deliveries yesterday. No surprise there. And no surprise that the bullion continues to slowly leak out of the warehouses as shown in the reports below.
There was intraday commentary on a remarkable spike in an indicator that in the past has presaged significant stock market corrections. You may find some value in reading it at Stock Share Risk Measure Rises To Highest Level Ever.
As the Austrian school likes to say about the velocity of money, the risk measure in question, the skew, doesn't do anything, in much the same sense that the speedometer on your car does not do anything. What it does is provide some information that may prove to be useful, especially when you are heading into a sharp turn at over 100 mph.
And that information suggests that there is an exceptionally high probability of a stock market decline of significance within the next two years or so, depending on how some exogenous events may unfold.
I learned the hard way after the tech bubble not to underestimate the Greenspan put, and the willingness of the Fed and their courtiers to throw the real economy under the bus to pump up an asset bubble for the benefit of the Banks, even when the financiers are acting at their very worst.
I like gold and silver more now than I have in some time. As I suggest in the intraday piece on the mispricing of risks, I do not see how the Street is going to avoid a very embarrassing break in the bullion market if things keep going on as they are.
But we may find some of the antics of Big Money's courtiers to be amusing as they continue to say and do the most ludicrous things in order to save the hides, bail out once more if you will, of their felonious cousins at the Banks.
After the bell JPM missed both top line revenues and their earnings estimates, even with a ten percent reduction in loss allowances.
"Make no mistake about it, just as Lehman Brothers was set up to take the fall for triggering the 2008 collapse, China is being groomed as the new scapegoat for the coming crisis. But China’s economic slump is only a symptom, not the disease."
"Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people.
The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe, if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living."
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Stocks were weak most of the day on overseas and earnings jitters.
They were rallying a bit after a lower open, but ended up going out on the lows of the day.
After the bell JPM missed both the top line revenues and the earnings per share, after reducing their provisions for losses by ten percent.
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
It is available for your use at no cost, but with attribution and a link to the original posting.
I make every attempt to respect the rights of others. If you feel that something here has infringed your work please let me know and I will correct it immediately. It is not always easy to determine the status of material posted to the Internet with regard to fair use and public domain.
