Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Wax On, Wax Off

 

"The privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right."

John Kenneth Galbraith 

 

"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

 

"From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find a comfortable foothold.  Nothing can calm it, since its goal is far beyond all it can attain.  Reality seems valueless by comparison with the dreams of fevered imaginations; reality is therefore abandoned."

Emile Durkheim

 

"He has shown you what is good.  The Lord requires you to act justly, and to love kindness and mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." 

Micah 6:8 

 

The wash and rinse continues.

Just charts tonight.    I was out of pocket all day.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

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.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Devil Take the Hindmost - Here We Go Again

"Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started."

Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By


"Over the past 30 years the plutocrats have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet.

Like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy. Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs."

Bill Moyers, last episode of Bill Moyers Journal, 30 April 2010


“A mighty bubble of wealth is blown before our eyes, as empty, as transient, as contradictory to the laws of solid material, as confuted by every circumstance of actual condition, as any other bubble which man or child ever blew before.”

Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost


"This is funny."

Doc Holliday, last words, November 8, 1887, Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

Stocks are reaching for a high note, on a bubble of easy money and slack oversight, as well as a lack of adult supervision.

Gold was hit hard today but bounced back.  Pure shenanigans.

Trump is losing it.  Nothing could be more obvious, even by his standards which are pretty weird.

Not much good can be said for the character of the rest of the political establishment and the elites in general.

That does not bode well for a country skimming the edge of the abyss.

Things could get quite intense and exciting over the next few months.

Learn to pray.

Have a pleasant evening.

Pictures at an Exhibition of an Oligarchy

“Right, and again, it’s not necessarily intentional. It’s that those are the people that you’re surrounded with, so there becomes a group-think. And look, you are aware of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether you want it to or not, that’s a reality.”

Krystal Ball (courtesy of Caitlin Johnstone)


"Media companies run by the country’s richest people can’t help but project the mindset of their owners, and they are naturally incompetent when it comes to viewing their own role in society.

Trump may have accelerated distaste for the press, but he didn’t create it. He sniffed out existing frustrations and used them to rally anger toward 'elites' to his side. The criticism works because national media are elites, ten-percenters working for one-percenters. The longer people in the business try to deny it, the more it will be fodder for politicians. Sanders wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last."

Matt Taibbi


"And that's what I meant by playing ball. I was essentially told, play ball, soften your tone, and all of these good things can happen to you. But if you stay harsh that was going to cause me real harm, in those words.

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."

Bill Moyers and Neil Barofsky, The Bullet or the Bribe


"Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population.  Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful (though sometimes badly mismanaged) industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy.

These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation


"Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity...few people have yet considered the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of cold war with its neighbors."

George Orwell


"A true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, that we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz, The Discreet Charm of Nihilism

The problem is not just with 'the media.'

The corruption in the developed world permeates the professions, from politics to healthcare to the media to telecommunications to the legal system to accounting and especially to the financial system.

It is a system based on deception, that abuses the power of money and other forms of career rewards and advancements and honors to promote the benefits of a relatively small group of people, to the detriment of everyone else.

What is sad is not the obviously and often justifiably angry unsophisticated who are taken in by some clumsy con man who was propped up by the powerful insiders as a strawman in the first place.

The real sadness is the well-intentioned, educated people, who historically have been the 'conscience'  of nation, that faithfully plug into their favorite, 'highly respected' media outlets, and allow their minds to be formed into the kind of unthinking, fearfully reactionary, and highly propagandized mindset that sits back and cheers on its own destruction, along with the overthrow of everything that it once believed to be good.

The corporate media bias against Sanders is just one example of many, especially if one thinks about the lead ups to war, and the blatant and persistent persecution of dissident voices, whistleblowers and reform and popular movements.

Power corrupts, and even worse, it attracts and rewards the highly corruptible.   This is why ordinary people combine to form laws, to protect themselves and their families from the abuses of power by the amoral, unscrupulous, and otherwise unrestrained.


It is a story as old as Babylon, and a betrayal evil as sin.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Oh the Bovinity! - Flight to Safety - Stock Option Expiration Friday

"While everyone enjoys an economic party the long-term costs of a bubble to the economy and society are potentially great. They include a reduction in the long-term saving rate, a seemingly random distribution of wealth, and the diversion of financial human capital into the acquisition of wealth.

As in the United States in the late 1920s and Japan in the late 1980s, the case for a central bank ultimately to burst that bubble becomes overwhelming. I think it is far better that we do so while the bubble still resembles surface froth and before the bubble carries the economy to stratospheric heights. Whenever we do it, it is going to be painful, however.”

Larry Lindsey, Federal Reserve Governor, September 24, 1996 FOMC Minutes


“I recognise that there is a stock market bubble problem at this point, and I agree with Governor Lindsey that this is a problem that we should keep an eye on....We do have the possibility of raising major concerns by increasing margin requirements.  I guarantee that if you want to get rid of the bubble, whatever it is, that will do it.”

Alan Greenspan, September 24, 1996 FOMC Minutes


"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

Stocks were in meltdown mode, relatively speaking, to the insouciance with which they have greeted most negative economic news this year.

That recovery on Friday reeked of bravado and phoniness.  But it went less noticed because there is so much of that going around lately.

There was special coverage and a wave of happy talk this morning on bubblevision, that seemed to fade into quiet desperation and calls for a rate cut to rescue the markets.

But there was really no panic, despite the fact that both of the gaps in the equity indices have now been filled, as we had suggested that they would be.  For this is no breakaway gap in a booming economy.  This was a gap in a highly cynical, very technical, asset bubble following the debacle in December.

Gold was a clear beneficiary of this, banging up to the $1300 level.   The dollar and silver were both fairly flat.

We may get a tweet fueled rebound of sorts.  But it is unlikely to last.

There will be a stock market option expiration on Friday.

Just a quick mention as the eight year saga of Game of Thrones staggers to a close. A friend of ours sent us the following diagram of the series from China, which is included below. It is remarkably insightful. I have seen other versions floating around the circles where these things are discussed.

I am given to understand that the writers for these last few seasons of GoT are moving on to become the writers of a new Star Wars trilogy.

Need little, want less, 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 On - You Never Can Tell

"While everyone enjoys an economic party the long-term costs of a bubble to the economy and society are potentially great. They include a reduction in the long-term saving rate, a seemingly random distribution of wealth, and the diversion of financial human capital into the acquisition of wealth. As in the United States in the late 1920s and Japan in the late 1980s, the case for a central bank ultimately to burst that bubble becomes overwhelming. I think it is far better that we do so while the bubble still resembles surface froth and before the bubble carries the economy to stratospheric heights. Whenever we do it, it is going to be painful, however.”

Larry Lindsey, Federal Reserve Governor, September 24, 1996 FOMC Minutes


“I recognise that there is a stock market bubble problem at this point, and I agree with Governor Lindsey that this is a problem that we should keep an eye on... We do have the possibility of raising major concerns by increasing margin requirements. I guarantee that if you want to get rid of the bubble, whatever it is, that will do it.”

Alan Greenspan, September 24, 1996 FOMC Minutes


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 in a 2012 interview with Bill Moyers


"Donald Trump wasn’t actually a successful businessman at all, not in the normal sense anyway.  He was an economic magician (or, in classic American terms, a con man) who regularly ground business after business — a set of casinos (at a time when other casinos were thriving), hotels, an airline, and a series of other endeavors ranging from Trump Steaks to Trump Vodka to Trump University — into the dust of bankruptcy or failure. What made him such a magician was that, in case after case, his greatest 'business' skill proved to be jumping ship, dollars in hand, leaving those who trusted him, had faith in him, believed in him holding the bag.

He had a history of screwing anyone who relied on him, whether we’re talking about the investors in his Atlantic City casinos or a bevy of small business types and others who worked for him — plumbers, waiters, painters, cabinet makers — and were later stiffed. In other words, Americans elected a bankruptcy king as their president and character will tell.

There really are no secrets here. In the end, Donald Trump clearly cares about nothing but himself (and perhaps his family as an extension of that self).   Whether in his first or second term (should he win again in 2020), if things start to head south economically, count on this: he’ll repeat his well-documented history and jump ship, leaving the American people, including that beloved base of his, holding the bag."

Tom Engelhardt, Donald Trump Will Bankrupt America


"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

It was risk on today, as stock gapped open higher and pushed upwards with a mind to making yet another blow off top, sooner rather than later.

The dollar and the metals declined in this devil-take-the-hindmost burst of good feelings and animal spirits.

Let's see how far they can take this, and how low it can go again this next time. You never can tell.

Have a pleasant evening.