Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Quiet Expiration Today, Advance GDP Number for 2Q Tomorrow

"And afterwards he went there daily, and gained an increasing number of followers.  It seemed that from every tear of a martyr new confessors were born, and every groan in the arena found an echo in thousands of hearts. 

Caesar was swimming in blood; Rome and the whole pagan world were mad. But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins.

When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one— happiness and love."

Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz


"And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be, a sort of policeman of the whole world.  God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, 'You're too arrogant!  And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name.  Be still and know that I'm God.'"

Martin Luther King

Stocks moved sideways today in the aftermath of the Facebook miss.

The Street is chomping at the bit, expecting a strong GDP Advance print for 2Q tomorrow morning.

Silver and gold were quiet for expiration with a small loss easily attributable to a rally in the US Dollar.

Thank you Lord, for your presence and faithful providence towards us all.

Spare us, Lord, from your chastisement.  Forgive our blindness, our foolish pride and stubborn selfishness, in failing to see your many consolations, gentle corrections, and tender mercies.

Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant evening.

Facebook - Ghosts of Bubbles Past

"This is how Ron Chernow correctly described what was happening for New York Times’ readers on March 15, 2001:

'Let us be clear about the magnitude of the Nasdaq collapse. The tumble has been so steep and so bloody — close to $4 trillion in market value erased in one year — that it amounts to nearly four times the carnage recorded in the October 1987 crash.'

Chernow characterized the Nasdaq stock market as a 'lunatic control tower that directed most incoming planes to a bustling, congested airport known as the New Economy while another, depressed airport, the Old Economy, stagnated with empty runways.  The market functioned as a vast, erratic mechanism for misallocating capital across America,' Chernow observed.

Let that sink in for a moment.  It wasn’t just that investment bankers on Wall Street were bringing to the public markets companies with the equivalent of a business plan written on the back of a napkin.  It was that all of the major investment banks on Wall Street, out of a motive of pure greed, were engaged in a mass conspiracy to misallocate capital across America – which strikes at the very heart of America’s economy and national interests...

Yesterday we got a little taste of what’s in store this time around courtesy of the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, the majority of whom have 'buy' ratings on Facebook."

Pam and Russ Martens, Wall Street On Parade

The venerable 'wash and rinse,' a Wall Street favorite, especially in 'new era stocks' and highly leveraged commodity markets.

It's not just for penny stocks in deregulated, devil-take-the-hindmost markets such as these.

And proudly I did not own any Facebook, and considered myself wise, and better than the others who did.

But there was no one left to protect or care about me, when they finally came for the rest, and bailed us in.

Go back to sleep, everything will be all right.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - A New US-EU Trade Deal Founded on Gas and Beans

"The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one.

The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see other people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one's desires and fears."

Erich Fromm


"Self-love for ever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens to stumble upon it."

George Gordon Lord Byron


"Narcissists gravitate towards professions where they can control people and elicit adulation. They are more likely to work in politics, finance or medicine than in shoemaking... They are aware of what they are doing to others— but they do not care.”

Sam Vaknin

People, ordinary people, cannot understand, or fully comprehend, the minds of those that flourish on Wall Street.  Enough is never enough for those whose appetites for more are not driven by ordinary needs.

And this is why people must combine to regulate the activities and markets that serve society.  People are not necessarily good or rational.   They are sometimes pathological. 

While the variety in human character is what often creates art and music, philosophy and the more enjoyable and diverting aspects of life, it can also take a dark turn towards some of the most destructive excesses, if it continues unrestrained.

Stocks took off higher in the afternoon on a news report from Dow Jones that the EU's Jean Claude Juncker had struck a trade deal with Trump by making some 'concessions.' On the announcement of a press conference, with thirty minutes to go, stocks went vertical in a major short squeeze and relief rally.

And so we await that big news.

After the bell Facebook missed on the topline, and the stock was down on that news.

Gold and silver were higher on a lower Dollar. It is not necessary for them to trade in inverse correlation with the Dollar, but they sometimes do for periods of time, and they are doing so now.

Postscript:  Trumpolini was pleased to announce that the EU is apparently agreeing to buy more soybeans and liquefied natural gas from the States.   The two entities will continue working towards eliminating tariffs on non-automotive products.  As for autos, well, we shall see.

Need little, want less, love more. For those that abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Elevated Economic Hazards - Comex Option Expiry Thursday

"No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."

David Hume


“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes.  This is apparent from a social pathology:  psychopaths rally followers.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan


"Definite signs that business and industry have turned the corner from the temporary period of emergency that followed deflation of the speculative market were seen today by President Hoover. The President said the reports to the Cabinet showed the tide of employment had changed in the right direction." -

News dispatch from Washington, January 21, 1930


“The narcissist devours people, consumes their output, and casts the empty, writhing shells aside.”

Sam Vaknin

Stocks were soaring higher as Alphabet, the stock formerly known as Google, put in some good results, sending the FANGs soaring.

But tech faded and turned around, just managing to finish unchanged.

There will be a Comex gold option expiration on Thursday the 26^th.

We are in the thick of earnings season now, and individual result are sending some stocks soaring or plunging.

The IMF estimates that the US Dollar is overvalued from 8 to 16 percent.

I think gold expressed in dollars is undervalued by from 60 to 100 percent.

Let's how all the reversions to the mean go.

There was intraday commentary regarding the dangers of the derivatives markets to the Too-Big-To-Fail boys here.

It's probably early days, but now might be the time to start taking precautions against a 2008 class event in the financial markets. I would suggest it might arrive anytime between now and July 2020.

These sorts of things depend on the magnitude of any 'trigger event,' which is why it is so difficult to forecast with regard to specific dates.

As time goes on the required force for a market moving event decreases until it takes very little to set that ball in motion.

Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant evening.

The Warning Part II: Financial Armageddon, Again - Blood Moon - Trump Trade Policy the Patsy?

"Ultimately, the same financial architecture that surrounded the housing mortgage crisis (almost certainly including 'naked' credit default swaps) has been replicated in the three key areas where debt is growing at a troubling rate: defaults in student loans, auto loans, and credit card debt...

Thus, as the tenth anniversary of the Lehman failure approaches, there is an understanding among many market regulators and swaps trading experts that large portions of the swaps market have moved from U.S. bank holding company swaps dealers to their newly deguaranteed foreign affiliates.  ['off balance sheet' part deux]

But, what has not moved abroad is the very real obligation of the lender of last resort to rescue these U.S. swaps dealer bank holding companies if they fail because of poorly regulated swaps in their deguaranteed foreign subsidiaries, i.e., the U.S. taxpayer.

While relief is unlikely to be forthcoming from either the Trump Administration or a Republican-controlled Congress, some other means will have to be found to avert another multitrillion dollar bank bailout and/or financial calamity caused by poorly regulated swaps on the books of big U.S. banks...

By their own design, large U.S. bank holding company swaps [derivatives] dealers and their representatives have crafted their own massive loopholes from Dodd-Frank swaps regulations, which they can exercise at their own will.

By arranging, negotiating and executing swaps in the U.S. with U.S. personnel and then ‘assigning’ them to their ‘foreign’ newly ‘deguaranteed’ subsidiaries, these swaps dealers have the best of both worlds: swaps execution in the U.S. under the parent bank holding companies’ direct control, but the ability to move the swaps abroad out from under Dodd-Frank.

As history has demonstrated all too well, unregulated swaps dealing almost always ultimately leads to extreme economic suffering and then too often to systemic breaks in the world economy, thereby putting U.S. taxpayers, who suffer all the economic distress that recessions bring, in the position of once again being the lender of last resort to these huge U.S. institutions.

The Obama CFTC tried to put an end to these loopholes through a proposed rule and interpretations in October 2016.  However, those efforts were never finalized
before Donald Trump assumed the Presidency.  There will almost certainly be no relief from these dysfunctions from the Trump Administration or Congress.

However, state attorneys general and various state financial regulators have the statutory legal tools to enjoin these loopholes and save the world’s economy and U.S. taxpayers from once again suffering a massive bailout burden and an economic Armageddon."

Michael Greenberger, Too Big to Fail U.S. Banks’ Regulatory Alchemy


"'We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,' says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- 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?'...

'It'll happen again if we don't take the appropriate steps,' Born warns. 'There will be significant financial downturns and disasters attributed to this regulatory gap over and over until we learn from experience.'"

PBS Frontline, The Warning

While the mainstream media says 'Russia, Russia, Russia' and the Administration says 'Immigrants, Trade, and Deregulate' the Banks may be setting up the US taxpayer for another taste of Financial Armageddon and a multi-trillion dollar bailout under duress.

As Trumpolini says, the US Taxpayer is 'the piggy bank' that is going to be robbed.  But it may not be at the hands of foreign mercantilists, but by domestic predators, wrapping themselves in the Constitution and the flag.

Or perhaps Michael Greenberger and Brooksley Born are just alarmists that don't really understand modern finance.

But maybe, just maybe, the Fed and the regulators are conveniently asleep at the switch, again.  And we are going to be forced to go through that whole, horrible episode of hidden leverage and multi-tiered frauds for the great benefit of a very few and their enablers in the professions and the government again.

Do they really know?  Are the people charged with protecting the public sure?  Will we even care until its too late?  Is all this fear-mongering hoopla about external threats just another misdirection, a distraction from the real crisis unfolding?  Is Trump, and his trade policy, being set up as a patsy for the next crash?

I would say that the probabilities are unacceptably high that another black swan may be coming home to roost.  And that the beneficiaries of this rotten system will do nothing to stop it, again.


Related and h/t for link to this paper:  Wall Street’s Derivatives Nightmare: New York Times Does a Shallow [CYA] Dive