Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Lies Owe a Debt to the Truth - Non-Farm Payrolls Tomorrow

"There was time when average Americans could be counted upon to know correctly whether the country was going up or down, because in those days when America prospered, the American people prospered as well. These days things are different.

Let's look at it in a statistical sense. If you look at it from the middle of the 1930's (the Depression) up until the year 1980, the lower 90 percent of the population of this country, what you might call the American people, that group took home 70 percent of the growth in the country's income. If you look at the same numbers from 1997 up until now, from the height of the great Dot Com bubble up to the present, you will find that this same group, the American people, pocketed none of this country's income growth at all.

Our share of these great good times was zero, folks. The upper ten percent of the population, by which we mean our country's financiers and managers and professionals, consumed the entire thing. To be a young person in America these days is to understand instinctively the downward slope that so many of us are on."

Thomas Frank, Kansas City Missouri, 6 April 2017


"When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise — to deny the political character of the modern corporation — is not merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error."

John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the older male anchors on financial TV today noted, in a very condescending tone, that for some reason Elizabeth Warren 'has an attitude' when it comes to corporations.

I hope she and some of her like minded fellows get their opportunity to extend the hand of equal justice to these smug serial felons, pampered polecats, and corporatist clowns.   It has been a long time coming.

Stocks pushed higher today into the afternoon and the close.

Gold and silver backed off some of their earlier gains, again.

The other day 'someone' dumped 15,000 contracts on the paper gold market to keep the price from breaking out above 1350, and pushed it back down below 1340. And they seem determined to keep it there.

Tomorrow we will get the Non-Farm Payrolls Report for May. The number has implications, not so much for the real economy, but rather for the policy of the Fed in raising or lowering rates, and continuing to feed hot money into the financial assets bubbles, or not.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Saving Private Equity

"In particular, over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance."

Hyman Minsky, The Financial Instability Hypothesis


"It is always the soul that dies first, even if it's departure goes unnoticed. And it always carries the body along with it. Man is nourished by the invisible, man is nourished by that which is beyond the personal. He dies from preferring the opposite."

Jacques Lusseyran, Poetry at Buchenwald


"Thus we see how the neoliberal utopia tends to embody itself in the reality of a kind of infernal machine, whose necessity imposes itself even upon the rulers. Like the Marxism of an earlier time, with which, in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia evokes powerful belief - the free trade faith - not only among those who live off it, such as financiers, the owners and managers of large corporations, etc., but also among those, such as high-level government officials and politicians, who derive their justification for existing from it.

For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks.

And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses."

Pierre Bourdieu, L’essence du néolibéralisme

I am out of pocket this afternoon.

Here are the charts and other information for today.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Risk On! - Powell Pumps Equities With Rate Cuts Talk

"The mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control."

Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address


"Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world."

Alexander Pope


"And if you go chasing rabbits, and you know you're going to fall
Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call
And call Alice, when she was just small.

When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go
And you've just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice, I think she'll know
When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead
And the white knight is talking backwards
And the red queen's off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head, feed your head."

Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit

It's all just a game when you make it up, isn't it?

Stocks were on a tear higher today on the double barreled talk about a quick and favorable resolution to the Mexican tariffs question and suggestions of Fed rate cuts this year.

If the economy is so vibrant, so expansive, and the recovery is so strong, why would it be necessary for the Fed to cut rates?

Ah but that is just earthbound logic, and we have decided to create and live by our own logick and magick, and a panopoly of other profane mysteries now.  

The dollar was lower, but despite the risk on frenzy both gold and silver managed to finish higher.

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

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Risk Off - Gold Breaks Out to the Upside from the Wedge

"The received wisdom is mistaken on how recessions are made. They are not simply caused by shocks.  They are caused by a window of vulnerability in the economic cycle where the cyclical drivers of the economy have weakened to the point where it’s susceptible to a negative shock.  Within that window of vulnerability, virtually any reasonable shock becomes a recessionary shock. That’s how you get a recession."

Lakshman Achuthan, Economic Cycle Research Institute

In a similar manner one also gets a stock market crash.  Or the collapse of a long running gold pool.  What he calls a negative shock I call a 'trigger event.'

The more vulnerable and unstable a market structure may become, the less of a trigger event is required to initiate a sharp shift in valuations.

Today was definitely a 'risk off' day in the US markets.

Gold broke out and up out of the descending wedge, and with a relatively large about of energy.

As you know I had expected this to happen, but not until after the Non-Farm Payrolls report.

In contrast to May, June is an 'active' month for the gold trade, and there has been a remarkable withdrawal of gold marked as available for delivery at the NY Comex recently.

There are rumors that a bank was caught short with its pants down in gold, and it is now buying its way out, as sufficient bullion is not available in sufficient quantity, so that money must be thrown at the problem. Whoever they are, they must not be a member of the bullion bank club.

Well, in any event, it is difficult to contain a commodity market when it has been coiling with so much energy.   And so much of it has been flowing to the Asian markets, not to return at anything near to these prices.

Silver followed gold up towards its fifteen handle, settling just below that.

This breakout may not be a clear runner, but may have to back and fill a bit. Let's watch its progress, and see if the big cup and handle bottom can be activated.

Stocks slumped, and badly at times during the day, led by big cap tech.

The Trump administration is leaning on Silicon Valley. There is no love lost between Trump and the tech giants, and this makes for strange bedfellows with the progressive Democrats who also consider the antitrust aspects of companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple et al.

Let's see how the rest of this week goes. The stock decline was 'orderly' and there was a bit of a cynical bounce into the close.

Yet is this is truly a risk awareness situation, one wonders if it can be stabilized and pushed to the upside for long.

Or if the quote at the top of this posting described it, stocks will remain vulnerable, and it will take only some trigger event, some tweet, to set them rolling downhill again.

Have a pleasant evening.

Financial Crisis III: Stores of Precious Metals in Trusts and Funds - Junk Bond and Credit Market Concerns

Here is the state of the gold and silver holdings in trusts and funds.

In other matters, there were two articles about risks in the credit markets that caught my eye this weekend.

These *could be* stories spread by market operators who are hoping for turmoil in the junk bond markets.

Or on the other hand this could be signs of something which some have feared would be approaching, as we seem to keep repeating the behaviours that prompted the last two financial crises this century.

The truth is hard to discern these days— it has few friends, and even fewer willing to stand for it.

Nevertheless, I thought it would be appropriate to bring them to your attention, for what it is worth.

Greenwich Time, A New Credit Bubble Gets Ready to Burst, May 31, 2019

The Street, U.S. Officials Meet in Secret Over Junk-Loan Frenzy as Recession Alarms Flash, June 1, 2019

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - And It Is - Non-Farm Payrolls Next Week

"Shanghai Gold will change the current gold market with its 'consumed in the East but priced in the West' arrangement.  When China has the right to speak in the international gold market, the true price of gold will be revealed."

Xu Luode, Chairman, Shanghai Gold Exchange, 15 May 2014


“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.”

Simone Weil


"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

Stocks dropped significantly after Trump initiated a 'shock tariff' on all Mexican goods effective June 10.

The Dollar declined.

Gold rallied significantly in a flight to safety. Silver tagged along, weighed down a bit by its industrial component.

On the chart gold has broken up and out from a large descending triangle.  Let's see if it can stick this breakout and expand it through the Non-Farm Payrolls report next week.

If so, this may activate the much larger cup and handle pattern that has been lingering on the chart for some time.

The US Treasury yield curve is now more inverted than at any time since 2007 and the inception of the last financial crisis.

Treasuries are apparently pricing in two rate cuts for this year.

At the same time junk bonds are signficantly diverged from this outlook on risk.

Something is going to break, and badly.

There will be a Non-Farm Payrolls report next Friday.

There is an economy of the lord of this world, that rewards the attentions of its adherents, temporarily if not fleetingly.   And there is the economy of God, that embraces all of us in the next, forever.

For some, that the economy of this passing world deems foolish, it is simply a matter of investment assumptions and horizons.   Their hearts are invested in what is to come— and what will endure.

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

Have a pleasant weekend.