Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Why Don't You Do Right

"And finally, in our progress towards a resumption of work, we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order.

There must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments. There must be an end to speculation with other people's money."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1933


"All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome."

George Orwell, 'December Letter,' Partisan Review, Winter 1945

Today was another boring day in the Homeland.

There were no deliveries at The Bucket Shop yesterday.

The usual dribbles of bullion went in and out of the warehouses.

Gold and silver prices generally oscillated around their current price levels.

Both precious metals are utterly oversold.

Below the charts is a classic song from Peggy Lee.  It became a hit in 1942 with Benny Goodman and was included in the movie Stage Door Canteen.  It sold a million copies and brought her to national recognition. It is shown as the second video below.

She cut the more mellow version, the first video below, with her husband and guitarist Dave Barbour in 1947.  The video is from 1950.  Her vocalization is much more personal and confident, and helps to support Barbour's ice-cold licks on the guitar.

It is not her most famous recording of course, as she is always associated with Fever.

I'll bet you did not know that this song was originally recorded as 'The Weed Smoker's Dream' by the Harlem Hamfats in 1936. I did not.  I found it fascinating that the Harlem Hamfats are really a Chicago jazz group, and the recording featured below was purchased from a British musical instruments, sheet music and apparently record dealer, Saville Pianos on Holloway Road N7 London. The Vocalian Origins of Jazz collection is a 78 RPM series of records issued in 1951 by an American company.

The song was rewritten and released as 'Why Don't You Do Right' by Lil Green in 1941 with Big Bill Broonzy.  As you can hear, it has a distinctive rhythm and blues lilt that sounds more like the 1947 cut by Peggy Lee than the big swing band version by Benny Goodman.

Many others have also recorded this song, including one of my favorite singers Julie London. You may have seen a version of it in 'Who Killed Roger Rabbit.'  But Peggy Lee's rendition still sounds the best of them all to me.

The lyrics sound like something the Banks will say when the next crisis brings them around asking for your money in another bail-out or bail-in.

You had plenty money, 1922
You let other women make a fool of you
Why don't you do right, like some other men do
Get out of here and get me some money too

You're sittin' down and wonderin' what it's all about
You ain't got no money, they will put you out
Why don't you do right, like some other men do?
Get out of here and get me some money too

If you had prepared twenty years ago
You wouldn't be a-wanderin' now from door to door
Why don't you do right, like some other men do?
Get out of here and get me some money too

I fell for your jivin' and I took you in
Now all you got to offer me's a drink of gin
Why don't you do right, like some other men do
Get out of here and get me some money too

No, you don't think so?  You do not think that they would dare propose a 'bail-in' to save Wall Street again?

The Banks own more politicians and judges than Don Vito Corleone.

Have a pleasant evening.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Policy Errors, Other Peoples' Money, and Fear

What we have freed ourselves of, however, is any genuine consciousness of how we might look to others on this globe. Most Americans are probably unaware of how Washington exercises its global hegemony, since so much of this activity takes place either in relative secrecy or under comforting rubrics.

Many may, as a start, find it hard to believe that our place in the world even adds up to an empire. But only when we come to see our country as both profiting from and trapped within the structures of an empire of its own making will it be possible for us to explain many elements of the world that otherwise perplex us.

Chalmers Johnson


In England, a century of strong government has developed what O. Henry called the stern and rugged fear of the police to a point where any public protest seems an indecency.

George Orwell

Let's see if they can keep this bubble rolling.

As long as the volumes stay light and the Fed and the regulators stay loose, I suspect that they can.

Have a pleasant evening.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Economic Blowback

"There are two kinds of realists: Those who manipulate facts and those who create them.

The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality."

Henry Kissinger, 1963


"But in these cases
We still have judgment here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips..."

Shakespeare, Macbeth

Gold and silver are massively oversold here.

The dollar is rallying and I suspect the precious metals are being carried lower here by the kind of overreach of trends that are obtained from the momentum traders.

There were no deliveries at The Bucket Shop yesterday.

There is still the slow leakage out of the warehouses and ETFs as gold flows West to East. A good chunk of gold bullion left the JPM warehouse yesterday. Let's see if it goes anywhere special, or just sails into the sunset.

James Turk has an interesting new interview titled This Has Never Happened Before In History.

The dollar at these valuations is choking the real economy.  So we know this cannot last all that long since the economy is not robust, but is in fact than most economists would allow.

The Fed knows this, but they may not let that interfere with their desire to raise rates to give themselves some policy room to maneuver next year or the year after when this latest bubble collapses into crisis.

Propaganda and mistruths are flowing hot and heavy on American television on many fronts.

There was intraday commentary on Hillary's Heavy Obligations to Wall St and The Banks' Favorite Candidates.

Have a pleasant evening.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - What We Need Is More Power

As Tim Allen used to say, 'what this needs is more power.'

Stocks has difficulty achieving liftoff today as the economic news continues to reek, and real buying from organic sources fails to appear to carry forward the thin liquidity of the algos and momentum players.

Let's see if stocks can find any footing to provide the usual Santa Claus rally before the next crisis shows up on our doorsteps.

Have a pleasant evening.

Hillary's Heavy Obligations to Wall Street Money and The Banks' Favorite Candidates

"The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well. Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them.

Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Robbery, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus, Agricola

People are discouraged and disillusioned after almost thirty years of distorted governance, specially in the aftermath of the 'Hope and Change' which quickly became 'Vain Hope for Change.'   Most cannot admit that their guys were in the pockets of Big Defense, Big Pharma, Big Energy, and Wall Street.

The real question about Hillary comes down to this.   Can you trust her to do what she says she will do, the right things for her putative constituents and not her big money donors and paymasters, once she takes office?

Or will that poor family who left the White House 'broke' and then mysteriously obtained a fortune of over $100 million in the following years, thanks to enormous payments for 'speeches' from large financial firms and huge donations to their Trust once again take care of the hand that pays them the most?

This is not to say that there is a better alternative amongst the leading Republican candidates, who have been and are still under the same types of payment arrangements, only with different people signing the checks.

Or we could skip the middlemen entirely and just directly elect one of New York's most prominent of their narcissist class directly, instead of another witless stooge of big money, and hope for something different? And how will that likely work out for us?

It is an exceptionally hard time to be a human being in this great nation of ours.

And so what ought we to do? Wallow in cynicism and the sweet sickness of misanthropy and despair?  Vote strictly on the hope of our own narrow self-interest no matter the broader and longer term consequences, and then face the inevitable blowback from injustice and repression?

Give up on our grandchildren and children because we are too tired and interested in our own short term comfort?  Too filled with selfishness, anger and hate to see straight, and do anything but turn ourselves into mindless animals to escape the pain of being truly human?  Do no thinking, and just follow orders? This latter impulse has taken whole nations of desperate people into the abyss.

Or do we stop wallowing in our specialness and self-pity, and  'stand on the shoulders of giants' and confront what virtually every generation and every individual has had to wrestle with since the beginning of recorded time?

Do we fall, finally stricken with grief in our blindness, on the road to Damascus and say at long last, 'Lord, what then wilt thou have me to do?'

This is the question that circumstance is posing to us.  And hopefully we will we heed the answer that has been already given, to be 'steadfast, unshaken, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in Him our labor is not in vain.'

And the touchstone of the alloy of our actions is love.

And so we have before us what Franklin Roosevelt so aptly characterized as our own 'rendezvous with destiny.'


Related:
Wall Street Is Running the World's Central Banks
Wall Street's Favorite Presidential Candidates

Hillary's Wall Street Money Taint Goes Viral
By Pam and Russ Martens

Everyone has been waiting for the next shoe to drop in the Clinton cash scandals but no one expected Hillary to be the one to drop the shoe. But after making the stunning assertions in last Saturday night’s Democratic debate that most of her donors are “small” and her Wall Street spigot of funding was turned on as a result of her helping New York to rebuild after 9/11 – Hillary, the perpetual Teflon candidate, has been pummeled from Twitter to cable to mainstream media.

Elizabeth Bruenig, writing for the New Republic, pointed out that “large donations make up 81 percent” of Hillary’s current campaign donations, refuting the candidate’s misstatement that “most” of her funding is from small donations. (The chart below from the Center for Responsive Politics provides the actual breakdown.) Bruenig writes further that confidence in Hillary’s assistance in the post 9/11 era “wouldn’t explain the $125 million she and her husband Bill have accepted in personal payment from major firms since 2001, mostly in return for speaking engagements. Nor would it explain why, more than a decade down the line, Hillary Clinton is still making $200,000 per speech at banks like Goldman Sachs”...

As Wall Street On Parade has pointed out time and again, no Wall Street firm has had a cozier relationship with the Clintons than the serially charged Citigroup, which just this past May admitted to a criminal felony charge for rigging foreign exchange markets (along with four other mega banks). Citigroup was the largest beneficiary when Bill Clinton signed the legislation in 1999 that repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, allowing Citigroup to house its merged commercial bank, insurance companies, investment bank, and stock brokerage firm under one roof: A dangerous and combustible concoction that would lead to its implosion in 2008 and the largest taxpayer bailout in U.S. history.

Read the entire article at Wall Street On Parade.