Brief Thoughts on the Fed, The Recovery™, and the Markets

"We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put up a façade to prevent ourselves from seeing it.”

Blaise Pascal


“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death— the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, and even murders that we are not going to be held to account.”

Czesław Miłosz


"The cruelest lies are often told in silence."

Robert Louis Stevenson

I am taking care of the queen, mostly just keeping an eye on her and helping as needed.

She requires someone to be with her most of the time for now.  I have a resident goddaughter taken over in the evening after work.  I try to use the time to do charts when I can, but often I have to do the little chores around the house and outside.

I will provide chart updates when I do them in the evening.

Not one thing has changed in my outlook for the markets.

The Recovery™ is an artificial, almost farcical construct by and for the one percent, and no one else.  Nothing could be more obvious based on the economic results of the last twenty years starting with the Asian currency crisis and the first tech bubble of 2000.

Chris Whalen of the Institutional Risk Analyst thinks that the Fed is going to do a 'one and done' in June and then won't be raising rates again anytime soon, perhaps 'for years.'   I could not agree more.

The interest rate increase in June is going to be another gratuitous nod to the Fed's desire to get some space between the current interest rate and zero so they can cut when their latest narrow bubble bursts.

Why are we caught in this cycle of bubble and busts without sustainable recovery? Because our distorted monetary and fiscal policy continues to create paper wealth and deliver it to the top of the income pyramid by inflating financial assets, putting a hammerlock on wages, and allowing predatory monopolies to continue to expand and financialize their positions of power.

Top down stimulus is a canard like deregulating to create 'efficient markets.'   There is no 'wealth effect' that lifts all boats.

So why is the establishment in such aggressive denial after all these years of failure?   The very important people being paid not to see what they to see and manage that it is almost mind-boggling.

And the rest of our experts and politicos just follow cravenly along, too timid to take on the consensus of insiders and be exiled from access to the halls of privilege and power.

We are going to keep lurching from bubble to bust until the gears of this dirty, rotten system grind to a halt.  I do not see any realistic movement for reform to come from within the established parties.  The money and the momentum of hypocrisy and greed are just too good.

I did a 'cartoon' for Tony Sanders' latest column at Confounded Interest while I was cooling my heels in the Emergency Room on Saturday.  Tony is a smart guy and a very kind human being.  I get a lot of joy and fellowship from many people I have never met.

I finished a second cartoon later that evening when the queen was cleaned up and put to bed.  One must always make time for work and prayer, and a laugh when you can manage it.  Especially in times of elephantine vanity and greed.

'I am frightened, by the strength of evil, and the weakness of men.

Do you love the Lord, as He loves You? Then you must fear no more.'

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Eventide

"Peace I leave you; my peace I give to you, not as the world gives do I give it to you; so do not let your heart be troubled, do not let it be afraid."

John 14:27

Since today was interesting I wanted to at least provide charts updated with the last two days action.

The US dollar caught some strength today off of British pound weakness as a consequence of the election results and a 'hung Parliament.'

The crookedness is glaringly apparent now for any that would look at it with eyes and ears open.

When greed is a culture's moral benchmark, and its leaders are like childish louts, what else would one expect.

I hope to be back on Monday. Things seem to have stabilized here, which is welcome. I sat with the queen all day yesterday and today.   She is wobbly and has fallen.  One of the goddaughters arrived after work to give me a break and take over the watch.  Doctors visits next week to find what has gone amiss.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Against the Dying of the Light

"The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting.    It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you.  Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to.

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-1945


"Representative institutions no longer represent voters.  Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans.  The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security..."

Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism


"It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.

The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.

He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison


"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Samuel Johnson

Stocks and precious metals largely kept jogging in place, with a little excitement thrown in here and there to keep the tourists interested.

Gold and silver are poised below the breakout level, when even the financial media might have to recognize that, slowly but surely, something is happening.

But isn't that the antithesis of what we have been led to believe, that really nothing unexpected could happen because the very best among us, our elite are 'in control?'  And if the unexpected does occur it must always and everywhere because of some unavoidable act of God, or even worse an outside interference from someone who is our enemy and hates us?   Markets crash and towers fall, and no one knows why, in a culture devoted to deception and distractions.

Our national attention is run along the rails of panem et circenses—  bread and circuses.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Summer Wind

"It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside."

Maud Hart Lovelace


"Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you.
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by."

Christina Rossetti

Today was just a bit of a 'risk off' day, with gold and silver showing gains, and the big gap NDX showing its first negative number on the futures in twelve trading days.

The weather here is glorious one day, and cooler and rainy the next. Nature is fairly bursting forth as Spring gives way to early Summer.

Gold is bumping its head against a new high for the year, and some serious overhead resistance.

The tension on the tape is palpable.

As they say in the song, 'something's gotta give.'

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Emperor Wears Nada

“Every organization should tolerate rebels who tell the emperor he has no clothes.”

Colin Powell

But there are not always those who are willing to place principle above power and self-interest to speak such truth to power, right Colin?

Great events abroad, but here at home just another blissfully uneventful day in the markets under the Pax Americana.

However, I cannot help but feel that there is a 'tension' on the tape, and that the largely unchanged nature of the box scores for the day are masking what may turn out to the an imminent move.

Stocks seem overpriced, and the metals, especially gold, seem to be undervalued and ill-supplied.

But who can argue with such success?

And if one did, who would listen?

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Fifty Days Awakening - Whitsunday

“The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.”

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets


"Nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur


“It is better to be a child of God than king of the whole world.”

Aloysius Gonzaga

As you most likely have heard by now, the Non-Farm Payrolls Report For May came in quite shockingly low.

Despite a great deal of popular nonsense The Recovery™ is reserved for the one percent.

I had to crack up at one remark this morning that the jobs number is so low because we are at full employment, and therefore there are not any more jobs to be had or people to take them.

Never mind the Labor Participation Rate which is still falling and awful, and average wages which are sluggish.

But nevertheless stocks rallied as expectations of the Fed's raising rates this year more than once or twice have fallen dramatically on the lack of inflation and jobs.

And because of that, the dollar tumbled and gold and silver caught a bid on expectations of more Fed looseness, along with their buddies at the ECB and BoJ.

So what next?

Make no mistake. Stocks are in a bubble now. And the underpinnings in the real economy, despite the rhetoric from the ivory towers and beltway bandits, is just not there. And therefore this inflated paper asset tower is doomed to fail because there is no organic growth to sustain it.

They may bubble on even more, but one look at big cap tech should tell you everything you need to know. They are mispriced for risk, or on the other hand, now priced for stupidity.  And the Wall Street denizens wait patiently for the greater fools.

How will the Fed and the government respond to the next financial crisis? What new lies and scapegoats will be forthcoming from the maw of the establishment? What jealous entities are undermining our exceptionalism now?

This is not going to be pretty, especially since there are so many propagandized zealots running around with great expectations fed by their respective demagogic saviours on the polarized right and left. The only genuine reformers and friends of the people are largely friendless in the circles of power and the rat alleyways that surround them.

And the powerful and the wealthy are ascendant, and feeling good about themselves almost to the point of fearlessness.  This is the effect of disordered minds, whose judgement has been corrupted by pride, and a lack of self-knowledge grounded in place their true place in the universe.

They do not know themselves, or even what they do not know, being willfully blind.

Exceptional.  Our hypocrisy knows no bounds.

Have a pleasant weekend.