Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Through the Looking Glass: The Cult of Power

 

"Legitimate power always includes attentiveness to justice.   When power is not attentive to justice it cannot endure.   

The market ideology is now the new form of imperial power and many of us, without any critical reflection, have signed onto that and organized our lives in that way so we do not have any time, energy or capacity for the things that are rightly important to us."

Walter Brueggemann, Truth Speaks To Power, 2013

"What happens to a society fed a diet of rushed, re-purposed, thinly reported content? Or branded content that is really merchandising — propaganda — posing as journalism?   And what happens when PR turns a profit and the truth goes penniless?"

Bill Moyers, Journalism in the Pressure Cooker of Plutocracy, May 26, 2015

“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?  Power is not a means; it is an end.”

George Orwell, 1984

"Thus the elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair.   That scheme is abetted by a sycophantic and increasingly concentrated media; by the integration of universities with their corporate benefactors; by a propaganda machine institutionalized in well-funded think tanks and conservative foundations; by the increasingly closer cooperation between local police and national law enforcement agencies aimed at identifying terrorists, suspicious aliens and domestic dissidents."

Sheldon Wolin, Inverted Totalitarianism, 2003 essay

"What is good? All that enhances the feeling of power, the will to power, and the power itself in man. What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is increasing— that resistance has been overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but competence. The first principle of our humanism is that the weak and the failures shall perish. And they ought to be helped to perish."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 1895

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites.  You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.  You snakes.  You brood of vipers.  How will you escape being condemned to hell?“

Matthew 23:27-28,33

The cult of power desires to control what you can say and what you can hear, and finally, what you can do.

There has rarely been a more naked display of the power of silencing in this century as there is now.  

It is the domain of oligarchy, of empire, of the so-called power elite.

It is not something that resides in one man, in one Administration.  It has its roots in a system that has steadily become distorted by the lust for power above all going back at least 30 years. 

It seems that the system is no longer capable of producing reform on its own, using its own internal mechanism.  Take a look at the candidates that the system is producing.

If you say things that they do not approve, that they do not wish to be heard, that obstruct their tales of an empire of illusion, the power of the markets will reach out and destroy your ability to be heard, to freely express yourself, to earn a living, and in some cases, even take your freedom.

This is the story of our government, of our campuses, and of the persecution of journalists.  Freedom of speech is crushed under a witch hunt of lies and power politics.  You will see only what they wish you to see, and hear what they wish you to hear.  They tell you that you have no other choice.

All in the name of peace and freedom.

Stocks came in slumping again this morning.

But voila, Alphabet to the rescue.

Stocks ended the day well into the green.

Gold and silver held a little bounce higher.

VIX fell.  

The Dollar dropped.

Non-Farm Payrolls and FOMC next week.

Have a pleasant evening.

David Simon: Our Rigged Political System

David Simon, journalist and creator of the TV series The Wire and Treme, returns to talk with Bill Moyers about the triumph of capital over democracy.

“If I could concentrate and focus on one thing … and start to walk the nightmare back, it would be campaign finance reform” Simon says.

Simon warns that if we don’t fix our broken election system — by getting big money out of elections and ending gerrymandering — we will have reached “the end game for democracy.”

Bill Moyers: Moral Mondays, North Carolina State of Conflict

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Our Oligarchs and Their Enablers - Gold and Silver Rising

 

"Immediately upon departing her post as Chair of the Federal Reserve, but prior to getting the nod from the Biden administration to become U.S. Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen engaged in what the courageous reporter at ProPublica, Jesse Eisinger, called a 'two-fisted money grab from banks.'   Yellen raked in more than $7 million in speaking fees with the bulk of that coming from Wall Street banks and trading houses, including JPMorgan Chase.”

Pam and Russ Martens, Yellen’s Treasury Hires 5-Count Felon JPM to Look for Fraud, October 11, 2023

"As a country becomes industrialized, its governance and corruption challenges do not disappear.  They simply morph and become more sophisticated: Transfer of a briefcase stashed with cash is less frequent.    Instead, subtler forms of capture and 'legal corruption' exist: an expectation of a future job for a regulator in a lobbying firm, or a campaign contribution with strings attached."

Daniel Kaufmann, Corruption And The Global Financial Crisis, Forbes, 27 January 2009

"A credibility trap is when the regulatory, political and/or informational functions of a society have been compromised by a corrupting influence and a fraud, so that they cannot address the situation without implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure including themselves.   The status quo has at least tolerated the corruption and the fraud, if not profited directly from it, and most likely continues to do so."

Jesse, Financial Coup d'Etat and a Credibility Trap, 28 September 2012

"And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not. And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of -- and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent -- to the detriment of everyone else.

Neil Barofsky, Interview with Bill Moyers, 27 October 2012

 

Here are the updated charts.

Gold and silver put in another solid performance.

The Dollar slid a little lower.

VIX declined further showing the almost complacent optimism in the equity markets.

Earlier today the doctor gave me a green light on the recovery of my eye.    The improvement in the last week has been heartening.  

Have a pleasant evening.

NAV Premiums of Certain Precious Metal Trusts and Funds - Stockman On Crony Capitalism

As I suggested might happen yesterday, the precious metal longs were given a gutcheck today as the price was hit on the NY open.

The housing number this morning was a well-seasonalized canard, from the looks of it.

Below the chart, there is a reprise of Bill Moyers and David Stockman discussing the crony capitalism that is pervasive on the US economic scene, have encompassed both political parties, despite their marketing campaigns and brand differentiation.

Bill Moyers & Company: Reckoning With Torture

"Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary."

David H. Petraeus, Commander, U.S. Central Command

“The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."

Admiral Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence

"If it were up to me I would close Guantánamo not tomorrow but this afternoon...Essentially, we have shaken the belief that the world had in America's justice system...and it's causing us far more damage than any good we get from it."

Colin Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State

"I have been hard pressed to find a situation where anybody can tell me that they've ever encountered the ticking-bomb scenario... a show like 24...makes all of us believe that this is real--it's not. Throw that stuff out, it doesn't happen."

Jack Cloonan, FBI special agent from 1977 - 2002

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current [G.W. Bush] administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Major General Antonio M. Taguba, US Army Retired

"I consider the insistence on pressing ahead with cases that would be marginal even if properly prepared to be a severe threat to the reputation of the military justice system and even a fraud on the American people...I lie awake worrying about this every night."

Major Robert Preston, former prosecutor, US military commissions

Source

Bill Moyers: It Pays To Be Rich - And a Tribute to Bernard Rapoport

It's all part of Obama's Raw Deal.

If he is Hoover, what is Mitt? More of the same, or something a little more edgy perhaps.

And as a counterpoint to mindless greed and the cult of self, a touching and moving tribute to Bernard Rapoport, who was fully human, greatly loved, and a great man, a pillar in the stream of a generation that has lost its way and its honor, and has forgotten the duty of talent and the obligation of fortune.

"Any beast can cry over the misfortunes of its own child. It takes a mensch to weep for others' children."

Sam Levenson

Links For Saturday, 30 March

"Are we often weary, disheartened and sad? Do we feel weighed down by our sins? Do we think that we won’t be able to cope? Let us not close our hearts, let us not lose confidence, let us never give up: there are no situations which God cannot change, there is no sin which he cannot forgive, if only we open ourselves to him."

Francis I, Easter Vigil, 2013

Links For Today

Bill Moyers: The Hypocrisy of 'Justice for All'

David Stockman: We've Been Lied To, Robbed, and Misled (podcast)

Afghan and Iraq Wars To Cost US From $4 to 6 Trillion

Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Shame of the Three Strikes Law - Rolling Stone

Inside the Three Strikes Project: An Inmate's Letter - Taibbi

Cyprus Depositors May Have Up to 60 Percent Seized

SAC's Steinberg Gets a Perp Walk - NYT

A Tale of Two Londons - Vanity Fair

Wall St Burden's the Public Debt - Michael Hudson

$600 Million Ponzi Scheme Collapse in North Carolina

Lesser Known Aspect of Currency War and the US Dollar - Rubino

Nation's Only State-Owned Bank the Envy of Wall Street

How G. W. Bush Won the Iraq War - Palast

Median Household Income Down 7% Since Start of Recession

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Cults of Moloch and Mammon - Option Expiration Tomorrow

 

"It was incredible. It was distressing to me how simple and outrageous it was. It wasn't so complicated that you said, 'Wow, at least they're smart in the way they're doing it.'  It was simple.  It was brazen.  The evidence of it was overwhelming. It's just that it hadn't been revealed to the public, and that's why could get away with it... 

One of the things that is eminently clear from our investigation is that all the compliance departments, all the self-regulation is nothing.  They watched it, but they did nothing. So we've got to think this through, and it's not only the financial community. There are a lot of sectors where we have said self-regulation is the answer. We've got to think about it." 

Eliot Spitzer, The Wall Street Fix, March 16, 2003

 

"And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not. And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of -- and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent -- to the detriment of everyone else. "

 Neil Barofsky, 2012 interview with Bill Moyers

"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.  Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason.  But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right." 

John Kenneth Galbraith 

 

"Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked. And they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy have the opportunity to become successful."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation

 

Stocks dove again today in the morning, but were saved back into the green in the afternoon.

There will be the monthly stock option expiration tomorrow.

Gold and silver were off a bit.

The Dollar rallied into the middle of the 93 handle.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Anti-Knowledge of the Elites - Credibility Trap

After dinner, Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. 'Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them.

Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say.

But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.'

I had been warned.

Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance


And he said to me, he said, "Neil, you're a smart guy. You're a young guy. You're a talented guy. You got your whole future in front of you. You've got a young family that's starting out. But you're doing yourself real harm.” And the reason why you're doing yourself real harm is the harsh tone that I had towards the government as well as to Wall Street, based on what I was seeing down in Washington. And he told me that if I wanted to get a job out on the Street afterwards, it was going to really be hard for me.

And I explained to him that I wasn't really interested in that. And he said, "Well, maybe a judgeship. Maybe an appointment from the Obama administration for a federal judgeship." And I said, "Well, again, that would be great. But I don't really think that's going to happen with my criticisms." And he said it didn't have to be that way. "If all you do is soften your tone, be a little bit more upbeat, all this stuff can happen for you."

And I felt a real obligation and sense of duty to fulfill the oath that I took in Secretary Paulson's office on December 15th, 2008 to do the job that I was sent down there to do. But I wasn't really tempted with a big job on Wall Street. And frankly, if it meant getting a judgeship, compromising the job that I needed to do and was supposed to do, it just wasn't interesting to me.

When I had my incident with the assistant secretary that my deputy, who had come down from-- who's another former federal prosecutor, who did narcotics work, said to me, Kevin Puvalowski. And he said to me, "Neil, you were just offered the bullet or the bribe, the gold or the lead."

That's kind of what happens in a society where the rewards and incentives are, again, nobody's getting shot in the head thank goodness. But it's a breakdown of the system.

And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not. And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of -- and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent - to the detriment of everyone else."

Neil Barofsky, Interview with Bill Moyers


"He prompts you what to say, and then listens to you, and praises you, and encourages you. He bids you mount aloft. 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."

John Henry Newman

Here is a must read piece about the current flavor of kool-aid being quaffed by the acolytes of the credibility trap in Washington and New York.   The Anti-Knowledge of the Elites.

It has never been more important in the twin power areas of foreign policy and finance. You must believe to be an insider.

The precious metals markets are becoming dangerously over-leveraged and unstable.  The cause of this is a conscious mispricing of risk that is being overlooked by the regulators because of who is doing it, and why.

We cannot maintain a sustainable economic system on a financial system grounded in the actions of a few, very powerful financial crime families and serial felons.

What are we thinking?  Why does this not bear discussion?   Why do we feel the need to distort our own realities to the point of our own destruction?

Gold and silver were hammered lower right on the release of the Non-Farm Payrolls report.  So needless to say we have still not seen any short term buy signals.

The number looked like an outlier to me based on a overly generous seasonal adjustment. If they had applied the same seasonality factor which they used last October the headline number would have been around 144,000.

There was one more business day in October last year, but jobs are not jars, and production of new jobs is not a linear daily function.

This is not to say that the NFP number was 'wrong' or even purposely fat in order to provide confidence to the markets and useful cover for the Fed.

Rather, these headline numbers for a single month are very noisy as we have discussed before. They get revised several times in the short term, and then often radically so in whole revisions that go back years.

This is why I like to look at the six and nine month moving averages for jobs to get a feeling for the trend. And the trend is still fairly sluggish.

But at the end of the day, the Fed wants to raise rates for all the reasons we have discussed, mostly having to do with their own policy mechanics.

And the financiers want to do what they wish to do, and they have their way for now. Winning.

As I suggested they might, JPM has transferred their recently acquired 'house account' gold from Nova Scotia's warehouse to their own as shown in the report below.

The Bucket Shop was otherwise quiet, with the usual slow bleed out of the silver warehouses.

The precious metals are still a relatively 'small tent.'  When they go mainstream, as I think that they will, I suspect that the metals will be as agnostic with regard to value, politics, and philosophy as any other form of wealth.

But perhaps not now, in these politically divisive times with the financial engineers and their courtiers in the ascendancy.  All the very serious player learn soon enough to serve the world, and the will to power.  They want to have access, connections, recognition, approval.

They sell themselves more cheaply than you might imagine.   Not for the world, but for position, the faint praises and approval of others and, above all, for the appearances of power.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Bill Moyers: The Crony Capitalist Blowout

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Going Off the Rails on a Crazy Train

"And what happens when PR turns a profit, and truth goes penniless?"

Bill Moyers

"Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different results."

Albert Einstein

"Has he lost his mind?

Can he see or is he blind?

Now the time is here

for Iron Man to spread fear."

 

Ozzy Osbourne, Iron Man

 

Most Americans are completely unaware of FIFA or what it does, and only a bit more aware of the World Cup and non-US football.  Unless they are school age children perhaps, the parents of same, or recent immigrants from Europe and South America.

 

The official reason for the US to proceed with prosecutions of FIFA this week, after a 24 year investigation, is that the payoff schemes involved some of the Wall Street Banks.  Since it is unlikely that there will be any action against these same Banks, one wonders as to the reason and the timing for this.

 

This week FIFA was expected to sanction Israel on Wednesday for their truly terrible treatment of Palestinian football clubs.   And the US was perturbed that Qatar was chosen as the 2022 World Cup host, despite their awful human rights record, and record donations to the Clinton Fund, and loyalty to the US ambitions in the Mideast.   And finally, FIFA dared to award the 2018 World Cup to Moscow.   

 

Have you noticed that this FIFA prosecution, which so few understand and care about in the States, is getting so much more media coverage than the latest massive thefts by the Banks in wholesale rigging in the forex markets, for which no one is being prosecuted and no serious reforms are being undertaken?  There are risks in standing in any way against the will of an empire.

And besides, FIFA is THEIR scandal, and it serves to distract from OUR scandals.

 

Speaking of gold, it appears that Austria has decided that the risks of storing its sovereign gold in London are too great, and are repatriating it home.   As well they may, because in the times that are just ahead, we might suspect that possession will be nine-tenths of the law, MF Global-style.

 

Gold and silver are quite obviously in some sort of locked down trading range.    Gold will become much more interesting next week as June is an active month, and the leverage on the deliverable portion of the Comex gold warehouses is historically rather high, indicating higher prices ahead.

 

Of course, that is not the way things work necessarily in The Bucket Shop on the Hudson.   The gold game in the US benefits The Central Bank storytelling, and the Banks, who 'make markets,' or make-up markets to suit themselves and their trading profits.  It is quite lucrative as we have seen in so many other cases like is such as LIBOR, forex, derivatives, and so forth.

 

On a final note, it must seem like madness to the non-US observers, what the Fed is doing with QE and top down stimulus.  Well not to the Brits, because they have taken such madness to heart, or the Continent, which is visiting senseless misery now on Greece, and a number of the usual suspects yet to come, until they finally make they way around to the volks at home.

 

And so here we are, running off the rails on the neo-con and neo-liberal crazy train.   

 

Have a pleasant evening.

Related:  Down With FIFA!  Next World Cup Should Be in the US

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bear Raid In Gold Results in an Historic One Day Liquidation: Höllenmädchen Merkel und die Straßenschreier

According to John Brimelow:

"Open interest plunged 21,256 lots, 66.11 tonnes or 3.53%, one of the largest changes in history..."

And this was before the latest round today after this early report.

Open Interest is the total number of contracts for a given future category. When the Open Interest declines on a marked price decrease this is generally considered the net liquidation of long positions. And conversely, on a rising price it is considered short covering. The weekly reports give more insight into who was doing the buying and selling. The report should be daily, and should include specific position changes for traders with aggregate positions higher than 5 percent of any total market for a specific product.

Next Tuesday is the option expiration for Calls and Puts on the Comex gold futures. There was a particularly large concentration of contracts at the 1200 level which we were watching from Monday when we promised you many market shenanigans in the coming option expiration, for both the mining stocks and precious metals.

We also picked up quite a bit more activity on the part of 'posting trolls,' who are traders both independent and with hedge funds who set the stage for major bear raids with sensationalistic statements and exaggerated 'headlines.'

The impunity with which this bear raid was conducted makes us wonder if the CFTC and SEC will ever do anything to clean up these markets. The best defense is not to rise to the bait, and trade in the short term in markets so obviously given to manipulation by large trading interests with fraudulent intents. These markets are tainted.

If the trend is broken it will be time to step aside. Until then we sell strength and buy weakness, slowly. For most it is better to take small incremental positions and then just let them ride the ups and downs.

As an aside, the hysteria, or Straßenschreier, with which the actions of Germany to curb naked short selling were greeted was very funny last night, and highly entertaining.

As you may not realize, naked short selling has been illegal in the US for some time, as least as far as equities are concerned. It was not enforced as the regulators turned a blind eye to many abuses that crept into the 'naturally efficient markets' on their watch. It is tantamount to counterfeiting, and in the hands of a party with pockets deep enough to permit it to dominate small markets, it is a blatant form of control fraud.

By the way, I hear that there has been almost no coverage of William K. Black's highly credible and shocking revelations on the public media in the States, outside of a piece on Bill Moyers' Journal. Can anything be so obvious as the control wielded by the corporatists?

But what is of concern to the Wall Street demimonde are their beloved CDS, which are as foul a form of white collar criminal abuse as ever has been seen since the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank. Any attempts to limit them will be resisted with threats, promises of dire outcomes and ruin, and buckets of money for politicians and regulators.

The rest of the world is beginning to act with revulsion at the destructive corruption of Washington and New York, and the American oligarchs.

Merkel made them squeal with her own version of shock and awe, and it was music to many ears. You go, Höllenmädchen.


Merkel und die Banken (Sarkozy ist Salieri)

Bill Moyers: Deep State Hiding In Plain Sight

"Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.

My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an 'establishment.'

All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched.

Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude."

Mike Lofgren, Anatomy of the Deep State

"Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo."

Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bubble

 

"As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool returns to his folly. "

Proverbs 26:11

"And in some ways, it creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not. And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of -- and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent -- to the detriment of everyone else."

Neil Barofsky, 2012 interview with Bill Moyers

"Now why don't you just take it easy, Group Captain, and please make me a drink of grain alcohol and rainwater, and help yourself to whatever you'd like."

General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), Dr. Strangelove

"Where are the leaders? Has our political process become so compromised by powerful interest groups and the threat of character assassination that even the best among us will not dare to speak honestly about the solutions that might bring us back to common sense and fundamental fairness?"

Senator Jim Webb, A Time to Fight, 2008

"General Turgidson, I find this very difficult to understand. I was under the impression that I was the only one in authority to order the use of nuclear weapons."

President Merkin Muffley, Dr. Strangelove

From Wall Street to the White House, it's all about serving the oligarchy, the 1 percent, while maintaing plausible deniability. 

The market came in broadly expecting a whipsaw, with the FOMC standing pat with dovish verbiage, and then Jay Powell coming in and raining on the parade with skeptical cautions.

No way Zimbabwe Jay.  

Although it must be said that the Street took it much further than he allowed.  It reminded me of a college friend who kept seeing 'signs' from a girl for which he pined, but would not actually approach.

I think it would have been interesting to see the FOMC commentary on bubblevision performed by the voice-over actor from The Curse of Oak Island.

Stocks rallied very hard, parabolically surpassing their bubble peaks.

The Dollar dropped off a cliff.

Gold and silver rallied like rockets.

And there is the second phase of the wash and rinse.

VIX did not drop but marked time in place.

Stock option expiration on Friday.

I can feel the hammer getting closer, and closer, to the retail bulls.  

But give it some time.

This is not sour grapes.   I snagged some serious coin in the  miners today, buying them into this recent pounding down the last two days.  It was just too contrived and cliché.  

Pretty much like all the official 'verbiage' we get these days. 

You know how they ran gold up to a new high, ran all the short stops, and then smashed it down into yesterday?

Patented move.   

And I think they may have the same play in store for stocks.  

But timing and leverage are everything.

Meanwhile, we've got two wars a leaping. 

Changed my mind about not using twitter. 

Have a pleasant evening.