Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Between Good and Evil

 

"Life is a continual story of shattered dreams.

There is a tension at the heart of the universe between good and evil.  It’s there: a tension at the heart of the universe between good and evil. Hinduism refers to this as a struggle between illusion and reality. Platonic philosophy used to refer to it as a tension between body and soul. Zoroastrianism, a religion of old, used to refer to it as a tension between the god of light and the god of darkness. Traditional Judaism and Christianity refer to it as a tension between God and Satan. Whatever you call it, there is a struggle in the universe between good and evil.

Now not only is that struggle structured out somewhere in the external forces of the universe, it’s structured in our own lives. 

And in every one of us this morning, there’s a war going on.  It’s a civil war. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care where you live, there is a civil war going on in your life.  And every time you set out to be good, there’s something pulling on you, telling you to be evil.  It’s going on in your life.  

Every time you set out to love, something keeps pulling on you, trying to get you to hate.  Every time you set out to be kind and say nice things about people, something is pulling on you to be jealous and envious and to spread evil gossip about them.  There’s a civil war going on.  There’s a tension at the heart of human nature." 

Martin Luther King, Unfulfilled Dreams,  3 March 1968

The market is looking to gain some direction from the inflation data tomorrow morning.

Let's see what happens.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Blood of the Poor - For What Does It Profit a Man

 

"Capitalism is at risk of failing today not because we are running out of innovations, or because markets are failing to inspire private actions, but because we’ve lost sight of the operational failings of unfettered gluttony.  We are neglecting a torrent of market failures in infrastructure, finance, and the environment.  We are turning our backs on a grotesque worsening of income inequality and willfully continuing to slash social benefits.  We are destroying the Earth as if we are the last generation."

Jeffrey Sachs

"The gold of the rich is the blood of the poor, flowing through the institutions and estates of the propertied few. "

Leon Bloy, as quoted in Pilgrim of the Absolute

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.  Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.  Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty.  Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but was wrong in thinking that we can get them for ourselves, without grace.

The beautiful is the experiential proof that the incarnation is possible.  We must have faith that the universe is beautiful, and that it has a fullness of beauty in relation to each of the thinking beings that actually exist and of all those that are possible.  It is this very agreement of an infinity of perfect beauties that gives a transcendent character to the beauty of the world. 

He is really present in this universal beauty. The love of this beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the universe.  The beauty of this world is Christ's tender smile coming to us through the material."

Simone Weil

“They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway.  It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”

Franz Kafka, The Trial

 

Stocks took a run at a rally today, but alas, the attraction of reality was too great for them to achieve escape velocity, and down they fell again to finish off a little lower.

Gold and silver took off higher, with silver putting in some impressive gains after the recent bear raids that took their prices lower, because of course they can, and the bullion banks are not ashamed to do so.

Nvidia jarred tech with some awful earnings, and a few other have also sounded their wake up calls, creative accounting and fanciful metrics notwithstanding.

More inflation data coming out later this week.

The consensus on bubblevision is that we are already in a recession but it really isn't all that bad.

Franz Kafka's The Trial says it all about this attractive but deceitful financial demimonde.

They wish to blot out the glory of God in His creation, because the light of His love shines through the darkness, and exposes the naked emptiness of their souls.

“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell."  C. S. Lewis

Daisy and I abide.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Payrolls Pops Powell Pivot - Tremors in the Financial Metaverse

 

"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, June 3, 2019


"We suspect strongly that another trigger event will shake the global financial system to its foundations, and that the Central Bankers are losing a great deal of sleep as they wonder where the Anglo-American financial hegemony has brought them.  This will end badly.  But it will end."

Jesse, 15 June 2008


"So you are lean and mean and resourceful, and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipice, because over the years you have become fascinated by how close you can walk without losing your balance."

Richard Nixon


"In the absence of an event, I would expect us to continue on with the status quo, the regular back and forth, wash and rinse rigging of almost every market as the pretenses and facades wear ever more thin.  It is very difficult to forecast a market break.  But it is quite possible to analyze the structure of the market, and to judge it to be inherently unstable and fragile.  'Prone to accidents' if you will.

The political and financial class are way out over their skis, with moral hazard and the colossal winds of hubris at their backs.   It is a question of what exogenous event may trigger the next great crisis, and who will the moneyed interests try to blame."

Jesse, 3 September 2014


"Every market decline has its own specific course of events, but they do tend to have some things in common.   There is generally a build up of conditions that make it the right kind of market, and then some trigger event occurs to set things in motion.  It is much like what occurs in the build up to an avalanche, or a wildfire

And there are the many confrontational hotspots around the world, in the Mideast of course, in the South China Sea, and in the Ukraine among others.

I extend this watch to October, and will keep looking for changes.  I do not expect much to come of this.  This is just a caution, but given a trigger event of sufficient magnitude, this could become a problematic market even during the dog days of Summer.   Our leadership and financial management is just that bad, reckless and irresponsible.

One thing I learned, most painfully, is that the Fed can and will keep an obvious asset bubble going much longer than one might expect, given the lack of a major trigger event.  And they have absolutely demonstrated a disregard for the consequences from doing so several times in the past fifteen years."

Jesse, 1 May 2015


"Having fallen from the eternal, the evil one's desires are endless, insatiable.  Having fallen from pure Being, he is driven by the desire to possess, to fill his emptiness.  But the problem is insoluble, always.  He is compelled to have and to hold, to possess and consume, and nothing else.  All he takes, he destroys.  Certainly he rules the material, as he is called the Prince of this World in the gospels."

Denis de Rougemont

As you have probably already heard the Non-Farm Payrolls report came in with a huge upside surprise this morning.

This basically popped the fantasy about the Fed's pivot to dovishness.

And so the Dollar spiked straight up and gold and silver were smacked down.

Stocks cratered and then wobbled back a bit into the close.

I published an update of the CrashTrak profile with some additional historical data this morning.  You can scroll down to see it.

And then I left and spent the rest of the day with Daisy and my son.  And I am very glad that I did.

It looked like the Banksters and their affiliated knuckleheads would be playing tag with the public in the American financial metaverse for the rest of the day.

And they did.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Crash of 2008 In One Picture

 

"There are recurring cycles, ups and downs, but the course of events is essentially the same, with small variations. It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes."

Theodor Reik, The Unreachables, 1965


History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends."

Mark Twain, The Gilded Age, 1874


“History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.”

Max Beerbohm, 1896


I have included the CrashTrak plot in the aftermath but originally I was posting it when the signal was given in June 2008.

I have stopped including 1987 in the historical reference because although it fits the pattern it was in fact a hellacious flash crash noted for it brief intensity, quickly addressed with a flood of liquidity by Alan Greenspan.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - God and Mammon

 

"You either belong wholly to the world or wholly to God.  If people would do for God what they do for the world, what a great number would go to Heaven.  Our greatest cross is the fear of crosses.

Envy follows pride; whoever is envious is proud.  Envy comes to us from Hell; the devils having sinned through pride, sinned also through envy, envying our glory, our happiness.  Why do we envy the happiness and the goods of others?  Because we are proud; we should like to be the sole possessors of talents, riches, of the esteem and love of all the world!

Everything is good and precious in God’s sight when we act from the motives of adoration and of love. Christ tells us that even offering someone a glass of water would not go unrewarded. You see, my children, that although we may be poor, we can still easily give alms.

How good is our God!  When we are no longer able to come to Him, He comes to us.  We are each of us like a small mirror, in which God searches for His reflection.

If you pray and love, that is where happiness lies.  It is always springtime in the heart that loves God."

John Vianney, Curé of Ars

"Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu' il a été proprement fait."    (The secret of great returns which are difficult to explain is a crime that has not yet been discovered because it has been carefully executed.)

Honoré de Balzac, Pere Goriot

"The real collapse of our currency began when it became evident that certain industrial circles were more powerful than the government."

Adam Fergusson, When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Collapse

The VIX and Dollar dumped, and gold and silver shot higher.

Gold is now up to some serious resistance in the short term.

Stocks had another ranging day, finishing slightly higher to unchanged.

The markets are waffling ahead of tomorrow's Non-Farm Payrolls report.

And that is just another indication of what a Fed-driven mispriced market we have. 

I could not find enough conviction to take any serious position ahead of the report, so we'll just have to see what happen.

Daisy is responding remarkably well to treatments and is settling in to her new environment.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - La Belle Aurore - We'll Always Have Paris

 

"You might think that parking your money in a big bank like JP Morgan Chase would insulate you from fraud.  It’s just the opposite.  The big banks are the biggest perpetrators of financial fraud – fraud that affects millions of us, either directly or indirectly, on an ongoing basis.  While they are wrist slaps when properly scaled, you can see the list of 'settlements' made between the government and the big banks here.  These 'settlements,' the aftermath of Wall Street's near production of a second Great Depression, entailed not a single criminal indictment.  The top two repositories of banksters, based on the number of settlements, are Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase.

The banks engage in fraud for two reasons.  First, they profit from swindling the public.  Second, they can get away with it via a simple technique.  They buy off the regulators with promises of enormously lucrative jobs when they leave government service, and they buy off the politicians with huge direct and indirect campaign contributions."

Laurence Kotlikoff, When Banksters Buy Regulators and Prosecutors, Forbes, October 21, 2014


"It’s bad enough that two trial lawyers have written a book [cited above] comparing Dimon’s leadership of the bank to the Gambino crime family, and Bloomberg News spilling the secrets coming out of the Chicago precious metals trial, but now Dimon is likely to see new headlines linking his name to questionable payments to Tony Blair and unknown others."

Pam and Russ Martens, JPM Whistleblower Cites Payments to Tony Blair, Wall Street on Parade, August 3, 2022


“Berlin.  I used to love this old city.  But that was before it had caught sight of its own reflection and taken to wearing corsets laced so tight that it could hardly breathe.  I loved the easy, carefree philosophies, the cheap jazz, the vulgar cabarets and all of the other cultural excesses that characterized the Weimar years, and made Berlin seem like one of the most exciting cities in the world.”

Philip Kerr, Berlin Noir: March Violets


“We'll always have Paris.”

Howard Koch, screenwriter, Casablanca

 

Stocks were in risk on mode today, for whatever reason one wishes to imagine in order to rationalize its irrationality.

The Dollar was up marginally.

Gold and silver were hit lower again as is customary ahead of a non-farm payrolls report.

The amount of criminality and corruption in the US financial system should never be underestimated.

Why the American people allow themselves to be so easily distracted by divisive social controversies while being robbed blind by the kleptocracy is almost amazing.  

But there is historical precedent.  We know it, but we just cannot see it in ourselves, yet.

We are canning tomatoes tonight, and I did the blanching and peeling on eight quarts of San Marzanos.

Even with all the lack of rain, a proper drought in the past month, the garden is doing very well.

I have a huge pot of green beans that I am making 'West Virginia style.'  My wife's maternal grandmother was from there and she always called them that.    

Basically you fry bacon and saute an onion in a big pot and then steam the green beans down into them all, cooking out the liquid so that the beans are sauteed as well.   Its very good especially if you have more mature beans that are not suitable for steaming.  Try to pull off the strings before cooking.

My mind kept returning to Paris today.   The last time I was there was in 1992, when I was attending a graduate business seminar at ESSEC concerning the proposed European Union.  I think the slogan at the time was 'EU 92.'

The queen was tagging along on this trip and had a grand time, although she never went on a business trip again with me, as leaving the newly born young man with her parents was jarring for her.

Daisy gave the young man his first face licks today  He was beaming.

Have a pleasant evening.