Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - The Unsustainable Power of Cheap Money and Omnivorous Greed

"Cæsar was swimming in blood.  Rome and the whole pagan world was mad. But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins.

When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one,—happiness and love. And Peter understood that neither Cæsar nor all his legions could overcome the living truth, —that they could not overwhelm it with tears or blood, and that now its victory was beginning.

He understood with equal force why the Lord had turned him back on the road. That city of pride, crime, wickedness, and power was beginning to be His city."

Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero

Blues riff in B, watch me for the changes, and try to keep up.

And so we begin the delivery month of December.

The Bucket Shop is leaking, slowly but steadily.

Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday.

What is unsustainable will not be sustained: cheap money, and even cheaper grace.

Have a pleasant evening.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - The Great Emptiness

"Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness."

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace


"I see dead people. Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead."

Cole Sear, The Sixth Sense


"The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love...

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov


"Every century is like every other, and to those who live in it seems worse than all times before it... thus much of comfort do we gain from what has been hitherto, not to despond, not to be dismayed, not to be anxious, at the troubles which encompass us. They have ever been; they ever shall be; they are our portion."

John H. Newman

Economic news came in weakly this morning with a shocking miss in the Chicago PMI.

The major US stock indices were waffling about today at the end of November, with an undercurrent of weakness, but with prices somewhat sustained by a lack of conviction and therefore without the substance of genuine volume to take them much higher or lower.

The US electoral and political process is becoming almost compelling to watch, not out of any enjoyment or intellectual enrichment, but with a macabre fascination of a natural disaster or a train wreck.

What follows the emptying of oneself, the impulse to give over to the void so as to escape the burden of thought and compassion, the pain of being human?   History suggests that it is an occasion of grace, or a slow descent into madness.

More bread, circuses, and cowbell.

Have a pleasant evening.

Shanghai Gold Exchange Has 54 Tonnes of Gold Withdrawn in the Latest Week

There were 54 tonnes of gold bullion taken off the Shanghai Gold Exchange into mainland China in the latest week.

The second chart shows that the SGE is well on its way to a record year.

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Quiet Markets, Cheap Shots - Jobs Report

Hold the presses, there was an actual 'delivery' of gold on the Comex the other day. A customer of JPM let some of their holdings go, and the house account at Nova Scotia swept it up.

Non-Farm Payrolls next week. I have included an economic calendar.

There was intraday commentary here.

Have a pleasant weekend.

SP 500 and NDX Futures Daily Charts - Policy Error De Luxe

Years ago when I was a boy programmer we used to have a joke about the big computer systems.

We would say that the systems programmers would get the operating system working just right.  The only problem was when users came on the system on then everything went to hell in a handbasket.

So too it is with many insular specialists like the Fed.  They are virtually owned by the Banks, and have their roots in a very incestuous profession in which the group think is powerfully motivated towards the care and cultivation of the financiers and their money flows and the system that supports them.

Well, I think we can all see what giving more and more power to the Fed as regulators, and unleashing the ability of Big Money to buy politicians by the gross lot has done for us.

And this is why we have so many hard-to-understand things going on with Big Finance, and Big Pharma, and all the other things that are sending the US into a Third World recovery.

Have a pleasant weekend.

NAV Premiums of Certain Precious Metal Trusts and Funds