Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - The Improbable in Service to the Insatiable

"With only twenty millions of coin, and three or four hundred millions of circulating paper, public and private, nothing is necessary but a general panic, produced either by failures, invasions, or any other cause, and the whole visionary fabric vanishes into air, and shows that paper is poverty, that it is only the ghost of money, and not money itself."

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington, 1788

"People criticize owning bullion because there’s no yield. But there’s a reason everything else needs a yield, to compensate you for things like obsolescence risk, business-cycle risk and management risk, all of the things that gold does not have.

We’re not gold bugs, but there’s a reason humanity has tended to use gold as an alternative to man-made currency – it’s the only virtually infinite-duration asset in the world."

Matthew McLennan, First Eagle Funds


"But when you recall that one of the first moves by Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler was to outlaw individual ownership of gold, you begin to sense that there may be some connection between money, redeemable in gold, and the rare prize known as human liberty."

Congressman Howard Buffett (Warren's father)

The whole spectacle of the health of the global economy pirouetting on the decision of an American Banker, or perhaps more properly, the Viceroy of Wall Street, on whether to symbolically raise a benchmark interest rate, tied to an avalanche of internationally distributed paper claim checks for conceptual ephemera and political promises, must be one of the oddest things that we have come to take for granted in our modern society today.   Even moreso than the atavistic significance of the merely human, in an age when soulless, corporate behemoths freely roam across the land and the seas. 

 

At the height of the British Empire, it is not clear that even the dowager Queen Victoria held that sort of whimsical power.   This sort of individual discretion is more reminiscent of the barbarity of former ages, of pharaonic Egypt, of the Mongol hordes, or of the cults of the dark gods that fed on beating hearts torn from human sacrifices.

Such is the power of the modern religion of the markets, and with those who would displace any power greater than themselves to make way for the overheated imaginings of their restless wills and fancies.

 

Future generation must surely think that we are mad.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Transparency Games

"Hiding behind opacity, bankers rig the global financial markets for their personal gain. Today, seven large banks paid over $5 billion in fines for rigging the foreign exchange markets. These were the latest fines for bad behavior.

However, just to show that these fines will not change their bad behavior, yesterday a survey was released in which 1 in 4 bankers agreed that, hiding behind a veil of opacity, they would engage in illegal activity if they could make at least $10 million dollars.

In my book I show a solution for restoring transparency and ending rigged global financial markets."

Richard Field, Transparency Games: How Bankers Rig the World of Finance

 

Stocks were floundering most of the day, but tried to rally up through overhead resistance again off the Fed minutes which were released a bit early.

 

Alas, a rally was not meant to be.

 

Stocks feel a bit heavy here, and vulnerable to exogenous risk shocks of even a relatively mild kind.

 

Valuations of the big talk momentum nifty stocks are almost incredible. 

 

A few more of the career criminals, aka the Banks, were spanked lightly today for rigging yet another important global financial market. 

 

Let's see what tomorrow brings.

 

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Pullback

Gold and silver have been steadily rising, but today gave a piece of that up and fell back to near support.   The 1200 and 16-17 ranges have their allure.

What a surprise.

 

The dollar rallied off the 'better than expected' home starts and permits number.  Recovery!

 

There was intraday commentary about The Recovery™  here.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

 

 

 

 

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Teen Spirit

The markets were thrilled this morning with Housing Starts and Building Permits numbers that were far above estimates, stoking hopes that the economy is recovering.

I would like to know the target market for these homes, and how many are spoken for. You'll forgive me for wondering if these are going into the speculative overhang along with the home flippers and their existing homes inventories.

Walmart missed on earnings and revenues, and in that there is a message, and a very strong one.

ETSY missed after the bell, and the stock was getting monkey hammered. So go the 'hot IPOs' of bubbledom, that come out at prices like 30, and less than a month later are under 20.

Have a pleasant evening.