Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Pervasive Nonsense

Gold and silver we hit again today, but silver managed to hang on to its 15 handle, and gold bounced back to 1050. 

 

I suspect that this was the usual sort of antics we see whenever some Fed head appears before the Congress for some 'confidence building.'

 

Gold and silver are now both short term oversold, and at some key support areas.

 

I may put something out on this later, but the open interest in gold is really very high, and the next active month for the metal is August.  I suspect some of the action we are seeing with price here is designed to try and shake off more of the short term longs.

 

It would be fairly easy for a short squeeze to occur in gold, because all the longs would have to do is to take delivery and park it as eligible storage, and force higher prices in order to shake more of that eligible gold into the delivery category.  This would not be a default since there is plenty of gold overall, given the Comex anyway.  But it would be a price squeeze.  So let's see what happens.

 

Greece is far from settled.  With some twists it is still progressing pretty much as I had expected it would.  The crux of the matter is that the German government and Eurocrats are trying to force an unworkable, painful situation on Greece out of some reflexive emotional commitment to the cargo cult economics of neoliberals.  To that extent they are like the Fed and the Bank of England among others.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Fed Follies and Assorted Shenanigans

Stocks managed to hold their own today in honor of Janet Yellen's testimony before the House.   And it was painful to watch.

 

The Greek situation continues to remain highly unstable, but the rinse cycle is not quite due yet.  but the markets are ignoring these things because of 'technical conditions.' 

 

Maybe later this week or next week we will see it dump again, perhaps after a push higher.  Where this little rally ends will be technically significant.

Netflix looks like it might be the big tickle tomorrow that could take us up to the next tipping point.  What a puffball.

 

There is no recovery.  The Western governments have been hijacked by the oligarchs for the most part, and their financial and economic minions are acting for their own short term interests, which are contrary for the most part to the greater good.  It is really too bad to see this.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Reaping the Whirlwind - The Good Shepherd

 

"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty."

Abraham Lincoln

The US Federal Reserve and Congress remind me very much of the Troika. 

All of them are caught in a credibility trap of self-serving constraints and things-which-we-cannot-discuss-openly. And all of them are sowing the wind, to reap the whirlwind sometime later this year, maybe earlier next year.  The timing of such sea change is difficult.

But no matter when it does come, they will not see it coming.

It is important to remember that there is a difference, especially in these days of upper classes and ruling elites, between the people of a nation and their governments.

So when I am hitting the criticism button hard on Germany or the US or the UK for example, I am referring to those who are 'running the show' so to speak. Oh I know very well that they will deny that they are running things, are just humble servants to the people, and so forth when any consequences or blame shows up. But moreso now than ever the ruling classes are running the show with much less reference to their own people than one might expect in normal times, which might be small enough at that.

And a people are diverse, and broadly so, except in crude stereotypes that crush out individuality. There are some cultural markers, some customs that tend to adhere perhaps, but even these can vary widely within a people. Southern Germans are not the same as northern Germans, anymore more than someone from New Mexico is like someone from Brooklyn, or someone from Manchester is like someone from the West End of London.

 

If anything, I think we are vastly underestimating the rise of the class system once again, with the historic gulf in economic equality.  People still tend to remark 'tribal' lines more than they do socio-economic differences, but the class lines are clearly there now.  The upper class knows and notes them, and will go to great lengths to get their children in the 'right schools' and with the 'right crowd.'

 

The US economic numbers this morning sucked out loud. The Fed will still raise rates, because they have stopped caring about the real economy sometime ago. It enters into their calculation primarily as a potential food source for the Banks.  There is no recovery, and most economists know it but will pretend otherwise until 'something happens.'

 

Gold and silver are being capped, by the folks I have noted and for the reasons that are obvious.   It is a competing currency that some jokers have decided is 'bad' for them.  Oh yes they will make up rationales and stories, but at the end of the day they are being self-serving and corrupt.

Gold is now viewed as 'undervalued' by fund managers.

There are some people who think that the system belongs to them and should serve their interests.  And you are not one of them.  You may like to think that you are, and a lot of people who are not do.  They can point to someone 'lower' on the ladder and exult in their position.  Let me assure you, to the real ruling class you are just working a different section of the fields.

 

It is almost funny sometimes, what people will do and say when they think they can get in with the in-crowd.  Oh to be invited up into the big house!   But if you show up on the doorstep of real power, it had better be with a serving towel over your arm, and a proper sense of your place.  When it comes to sitting down to dinner  you and yours are there, on the menu.

 

And they will continue to distort economic and public policy to serve their own narrow interests until someone finally stops them.   They will not stop it by themselves.   After all, they are winning...

 

Have a pleasant evening. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Wash Cycle Is Almost Finished

I figure we have about 15 or so more points of upside potential in the SP 500, barring exogenous events, and then it turns into a slower slog higher with the usual wash and rinse cycles to keep the HFT and predator trading desks happy.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - 'Peace In Our Time'

"Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

Frederick Douglass

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras seems to have folded precipitously, after apparently having taken all other options off the table including a Grexit, a movement toward the burgeoning China Development Bank, an impasse.

His strategy seemed a bit out of joint. I have heard that Victoria Nuland made him an offer he could not refuse, and he did not wish or did not have the option to offer a 'principled resignation' as did Varoufakis.

(Note: I am now mulling this and a few other things over in light of this new interview by Varoufakis.)

It could be that he was then taken aback and surprised by the sheer ferocity of the European (German) proposal, which was to essentially make Greek into a protectorate, and to visit a looting of national assets, given that the loans being granted are completely unpayable and the collateral will be forfeit.

 

He certainly is not the first Western leader to have capitulated when a 'gun' has been held to their head.  There is a certain rhyme, and a sense of déjà vu in all this.  We must do these things, because of the imperative of (pick one:  destiny, our blood, they have given us no choice, it is in their nature to be ruled, to safeguard our freedom, and/or the logic of the market)

 

There was intraday commentary along these lines here.

 

There is certainly room for criticizing Syriza in this. I admit I was supportive of their efforts, and still am.  I will try not to judge their efforts too harshly until all the facts are revealed. Since I am not eager to be a martyr, I rarely find it appropriate to insist on that path for anyone else. But I did think this characterization from John Pilger bears some merit.

The leaders of Syriza are revolutionaries of a kind – but their revolution is the perverse, familiar appropriation of social democratic and parliamentary movements by liberals groomed to comply with neo-liberal drivel and a social engineering whose authentic face is that of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s finance minister, an imperial thug.

Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as 'liberal' or even 'left',  Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, “schooled in postmodernism”, as Alex Lantier wrote.

For them, class is the unmentionable, let alone an enduring struggle, regardless of the reality of the lives of most human beings. Syriza’s luminaries are well-groomed; they lead not the resistance that ordinary people crave, as the Greek electorate has so bravely demonstrated, but “better terms” of a venal status quo that corrals and punishes the poor. When merged with “identity politics” and its insidious distractions, the consequence is not resistance, but subservience. “Mainstream” political life in Britain exemplifies this.

John Pilger, The Problem of Greece is not Only a Tragedy: It is a Lie

I wonder how much of Anglo-American political realities that Pilger is projecting on the Greeks.  It is hard to me to judge.

 

But this is mere speculation and second guessing, and we have to focus on what is next. Certainly the Greek people will be foolish to accept the terms to which their Prime Minister has agreed. But what they will do about it, if anything, is another matter.  One hopes that they will make a stand, if only to break the momentum of what James Galbraith has called 'the neoliberal project' in which the US in involved despite all its dissembling about it.

Those who complain about the abuse of power and financial repression in their own cases, as those in the precious metals are sometimes known to do, are foolish if they think that what is happening in Greece means nothing for them.   The cause of freedom makes all free people brothers and sisters, and those who see themselves as standing proudly alone will fall, miserably and alone. 

The global financial class is pleased that any pain to be visited from the bad behavior of, wait for it, the global financial class including some of the usual and almost omnipresent suspects, will be presumably visited upon the Greek public alone.

And there will be a feast of sorts for the vulture class.

This is the continuation of a financial strategy being pursued by the Western developed economies for some years now.   It is not 'ordoliberal', which is a nice historical diversion, so much as neo-liberal, a fashion of political management that has swept the West thanks in great part to the economic and political influence of the US and the UK.

What makes it different in this case of Greece is that it is being done, not to a Third World country, but to a long established Western nation and a member of the European community.   If there is any good to come out of this, at least the neo-liberal financial class has been revealed for who and what they truly are.  And so we can no longer claim any illusions, no plausible excuse in our believing them once again.

‘In the [1967] coup d’état the choice of weapon used in order to bring down democracy then was the tanks.  Well, this time it was the banks.  The banks were used by foreign powers to take over the government.  The difference is that this time they’re taking over all public property.’

Yanis Varoufakis

And so we see Hillary the populist railing about wages and Wall Street today, while riding on a tidal wave of big money, insider dealings, and soft payoffs from the moneyed interests.  But it is all in the patter, the words, the quality of the performance, the identity politics, don't ya know.  This is a spectacle, a play on the national stage, and an act of political fiction. And so facts don't matter, just the entertainment factor.  How else could one account for at least half of the Republican candidates?

 

We are seeing the same thing being done on a much more local scale in the UK and the US surely, with certain locales being turned into virtual protectorates after being caught up in a web of corruption, financial fraud, and unpayable debts by officially sanctioned Banks.

Consider this not an anomaly, but an experiment in progress, with more to follow.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Celebrating The Recovery™ Again

 

Stocks were in rally mode today as the threat of 'Grexit' was resolved, for now.

 

I dare to suggest that this is just another phantom from that continuing fable called The Recovery™.

 

Have a pleasant evening.