SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Memorare, Momento Mori

“The fancies that take their monstrous birth from the spinelessness and boredom of usurped wealth bring in their wake every defect ... and though rich men's crimes escape the law, protected as they are by the cowardice of governments and people, Nature, more real than society, sets her anarchic example by abandoning the wretched time servers of Capital to the shame and madness of the worst aberrations.”

Jean Lorrain, Le Crime Des Riches: Suivi de Paris Forain, 1905

“In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

The US will have a three day weekend for Memorial Day on Monday, in which we remember those who died in service to the people of this country.

Stocks were frisky after the core CPI printed a little hotter than expected at .3% for the month. No one apparently noticed that wages had zero growth.

The notion that inflation, not driven by wages or presumably demand, is a good thing smacks of cargo cult economics. Oh look, we have inflation, so we must have growth.

Or, this could be what happens when the Fed vigorously expands its balance sheet in a top down stimulus policy error that inflates assets while driving the velocity of that money to record lows because of the lack of organic growth from the bottom up in wages and broad demand.

I have a small index short working since yesterday. There could be a few more attempts at breaking overhead resistance, but the risks look mispriced a bit here. Let's see if it works or not because as the wiseguys like to point out, in the short term these markets don't listen to anything except their own self-serving baloney. Kind of like our politicians.

Have a pleasant weekend. See you on Monday evening.

 

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Pressure and Resistance - Love Is Moving

 

“We are slow to master the great truth that even now Christ is, as it were, walking among us, and by His hand, or eye, or voice, bidding us to follow Him. We do not understand that His call is a thing that takes place now. We think it took place in the Apostles' days, but we do not believe in it; we do not look for it in our own case."

John Henry Newman

Nothing of interest was happening in the backrooms of The Bucket Shop yesterday, with no precious metal 'deliveries' and little warehouse activity.

 

There was intraday commentary here.

 

Look, and see.  For the justice of God is not mocked.  A man, a people, reap what they sow.

 

In looking we have hope, always.  Even in our darkest hours, love is moving quietly among us.

 

But why doesn't He do something? 

 

He does.  He has called you and calls you now:  to do, to witness, to care for others, and to love.   He calls you to be better than you think that you can be.  He calls you to lift yourself up, and to go and sin no more.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Risks? We Don't Price No Stinkin' Risk!

VIX fell back down to the lows for the year.

How could there be risks for the Masters of the Universe?

What could go wrong?

Wall Street is very proud that they were able to get the SP 500 cash to close at a new all time high.

Huzzah!

I see four attempts by the SP 500 futures constant contract to break out.

Have a pleasant evening.

The Children of the Abyss

"He shows you how to become as gods. Then he laughs and jokes with you, and gets intimate with you; he takes your hand, and gets his fingers between yours, and grasps them, and then you are his."

J.H.Newman, The Times of Antichrist

People do not wake up one day and suddenly decide to become monsters, giving birth to unspeakable horrors. 

 

And yet throughout history, different peoples have done truly monstrous things.   The Americans were pioneers in forced sterilization and state propaganda.  The British invented concentration camps, and were masters of predatory colonization.  They even turned a large portion of the capital of their Empire into a festering ghetto through the Darwinian economics of neglect. 

 

None have clean hands.  No one is exceptional.

What do they have in common?  They all take a walk down a long and twisted path, one cold-hearted  and 'expedient' decision at a time, shifting responsibility by deflecting the choice for their actions on their leaders.

 

There is always some crackpot theory. some law of nature, from scientists or economists to support it.  What else could they do?  It is always difficult, but necessary.

They cope with their actions by making their victims the other, objectified, different, marginalized.  And what they marginalize they cannot see. What they cannot see, by choice, is easily ignored.

 

And so they destroy and they kill, first by neglect and then by more efficient and decisive actions.

They walk slowly, but almost determinedly, into an abyss of their own creation.

 

But they all seem to have one thing in common.  First they come for the old, the weak, the disabled, and the different, in a widening circle of scapegoats for their plunder.

"There is one beautiful sight in the East End, and only one, and it is the children dancing in the street when the organ-grinder goes his round. It is fascinating to watch them, the new-born, the next generation, swaying and stepping, with pretty little mimicries and graceful inventions all their own, with muscles that move swiftly and easily, and bodies that leap airily, weaving rhythms never taught in dancing school.

I have talked with these children, here, there, and everywhere, and they struck me as being bright as other children, and in many ways even brighter. They have most active little imaginations. Their capacity for projecting themselves into the realm of romance and fantasy is remarkable. A joyous life is romping in their blood. They delight in music, and motion, and colour, and very often they betray a startling beauty of face and form under their filth and rags.

But there is a Pied Piper of London Town who steals them all away. They disappear. One never sees them again, or anything that suggests them. You may look for them in vain amongst the generation of grown-ups. Here you will find stunted forms, ugly faces, and blunt and stolid minds. Grace, beauty, imagination, all the resiliency of mind and muscle, are gone. Sometimes, however, you may see a woman, not necessarily old, but twisted and deformed out of all womanhood, bloated and drunken, lift her draggled skirts and execute a few grotesque and lumbering steps upon the pavement. It is a hint that she was once one of those children who danced to the organ-grinder. Those grotesque and lumbering steps are all that is left of the promise of childhood. In the befogged recesses of her brain has arisen a fleeting memory that she was once a girl. The crowd closes in. Little girls are dancing beside her, about her, with all the pretty graces she dimly recollects, but can no more than parody with her body. Then she pants for breath, exhausted, and stumbles out through the circle. But the little girls dance on.

The children of the Ghetto possess all the qualities which make for noble manhood and womanhood; but the Ghetto itself, like an infuriated tigress turning on its young, turns upon and destroys all these qualities, blots out the light and laughter, and moulds those it does not kill into sodden and forlorn creatures, uncouth, degraded, and wretched below the beasts of the field.

As to the manner in which this is done, I have in previous chapters described it at length; here let Professor Huxley describe it in brief:-

"Any one who is acquainted with the state of the population of all great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns supreme . . . that condition which the French call la misere, a word for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures within reach are reduced to brutality and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation; in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave."

In such conditions, the outlook for children is hopeless. They die like flies, and those that survive, survive because they possess excessive vitality and a capacity of adaptation to the degradation with which they are surrounded. They have no home life. In the dens and lairs in which they live they are exposed to all that is obscene and indecent. And as their minds are made rotten, so are their bodies made rotten by bad sanitation, overcrowding, and underfeeding. When a father and mother live with three or four children in a room where the children take turn about in sitting up to drive the rats away from the sleepers, when those children never have enough to eat and are preyed upon and made miserable and weak by swarming vermin, the sort of men and women the survivors will make can readily be imagined."

Jack London, The People of the Abyss

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - The Improbable in Service to the Insatiable

"With only twenty millions of coin, and three or four hundred millions of circulating paper, public and private, nothing is necessary but a general panic, produced either by failures, invasions, or any other cause, and the whole visionary fabric vanishes into air, and shows that paper is poverty, that it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself."

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington, 1788

"People criticize owning bullion because there’s no yield. But there’s a reason everything else needs a yield, to compensate you for things like obsolescence risk, business-cycle risk and management risk, all of the things that gold does not have.

We’re not gold bugs, but there’s a reason humanity has tended to use gold as an alternative to man-made currency – it’s the only virtually infinite-duration asset in the world."

Matthew McLennan, First Eagle Funds


"But when you recall that one of the first moves by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler was to outlaw individual ownership of gold, you begin to sense that there may be some connection between money, redeemable in gold, and the rare prize known as human liberty."

Congressman Howard Buffett (Warren's father)

The whole spectacle of the health of the global economy pirouetting on the decision of an American Banker, or perhaps more properly, the Viceroy of Wall Street, on whether to symbolically raise a benchmark interest rate, tied to an avalanche of internationally distributed paper claim checks for conceptual ephemera and political promises, must be one of the oddest things that we have come to take for granted in our modern society today.   Even moreso than the atavistic significance of the merely human, in an age when soulless, corporate behemoths freely roam across the land and the seas. 

 

At the height of the British Empire, it is not clear that even the dowager Queen Victoria held that sort of whimsical power.   This sort of individual discretion is more reminiscent of the barbarity of former ages, of pharaonic Egypt, of the Mongol hordes, or of the cults of the dark gods that fed on beating hearts torn from human sacrifices.

Such is the power of the modern religion of the markets, and with those who would displace any power greater than themselves to make way for the overheated imaginings of their restless wills and fancies.

 

Future generation must surely think that we are mad.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Transparency Games

"Hiding behind opacity, bankers rig the global financial markets for their personal gain. Today, seven large banks paid over $5 billion in fines for rigging the foreign exchange markets. These were the latest fines for bad behavior.

However, just to show that these fines will not change their bad behavior, yesterday a survey was released in which 1 in 4 bankers agreed that, hiding behind a veil of opacity, they would engage in illegal activity if they could make at least $10 million dollars.

In my book I show a solution for restoring transparency and ending rigged global financial markets."

Richard Field, Transparency Games: How Bankers Rig the World of Finance

 

Stocks were floundering most of the day, but tried to rally up through overhead resistance again off the Fed minutes which were released a bit early.

 

Alas, a rally was not meant to be.

 

Stocks feel a bit heavy here, and vulnerable to exogenous risk shocks of even a relatively mild kind.

 

Valuations of the big talk momentum nifty stocks are almost incredible. 

 

A few more of the career criminals, aka the Banks, were spanked lightly today for rigging yet another important global financial market. 

 

Let's see what tomorrow brings.

 

Have a pleasant evening.