Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - No Fear, No Consequences, No Accountability

"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes."

Andrew Jackson, On the Second Bank of the United States


"Jim, lad, there be consequences an' then there be consequences.  Devil take 'em all, says I, and pass aft the rum."

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

The Nasdaq managed to close at a new all time high today, with techs leading the way.

The broader measures such as the SP 500 and the Russell 2000 were weaker.

Gold and silver finished off slightly along with Treasuries as it was another risk on day, although the bravado seemed to be getting a bit thin at these levels.

VIX closed at a 24 year low yesterday. The spreads between Junk and the Ten Year have also been narrowing.

Traders seem very confident that the Trump administration is going to be very good for the corporatocracy.

Disney beat on earnings, but missed on revenues and other metrics.

In my estimation, which is by no means a general consensus, the Fed has fomented yet another speculative bubble through a combination of monetary policy errors, not so much in low rates, but in the application of the stimulus which was by no means accidental or unconscious, and more importantly, through a sustained regulatory failure of the most disreputable sort.

And they certainly have had a lot of company in this from both political parties and the government.

If some incident should trigger another financial crisis, it is widely expected amongst the financiers that, once again, the consequences will be visited primarily upon the innocent and their victims.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Hardened Hearts

"Greed, I say, is a great flood; it is a whirlpool that sucks a person down, a constant yearning, always seeking a hold, continually in movement."

Siddhārtha Gautama


"For this people's heart has grown callous, their ears are dull of hearing, they have closed their eyes; or else perhaps they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and understand with their heart— and then they would turn back again; and I would heal them.'

Matthew 13:15


“Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be with the coming of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given away in marriage, up until the very day that Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came, and swept them all away."

Luke 17:26-27

Volatility continued lower on lightish volumes.  VIX fell to 9.77 which is a new low.

Gold and silver were largely unchanged from Friday.

Stocks were weak all day, with big cap tech staging a late day rally to finish nearly unchanged.

Have a pleasant evening.

It Can't Happen Here: Pride, Power, Exceptionalism, and the Smoking Chimney

"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness...

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism



"It seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances.

The fact that the foolish person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him.

He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the foolish person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison



"One of the primary characteristics of narcissists is their exaggerated sense of entitlement. It's hardly surprising then that so many politicians somehow think they 'deserve' to game the system. After all, from their self-interested perspective, isn't that what the system is for?

In their heavily self-biased opinion, if they want something, by rights it should be their's. So, nothing if not opportunistic, they take from public and private coffers alike whatever they think they can get away with. And given their grandiose sense of self, they're inclined to believe they can get away with most anything.

Exploiting their privileged position in such a manner hardly leaves them plagued with guilt. In general, guilt isn't an emotion they're prone to. How could they be if they feel entitled to the objects of their desire? In their minds their very ability to attain something must certainly mean it was merited."

Leon F. Seltzer


"On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that ... Masters of the Universe."

Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities


"Power will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster, to justify the beginning of murder en masse."

R. J. Rummel


“Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory, or one of unthinkable horror.”

C. S. Lewis


"The essential characteristic of a good and healthy ruling elite, however, is that it views itself not as a function of the monarchy or the commonwealth, but as its very meaning and highest justification, and that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments.

Their fundamental belief simply has to be that society must not exist for society's sake, but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which the best type of being is able to raise itself to its higher task and to a higher state of being..."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"People do not wake up one morning and decide to become monsters that will be reviled by all civilized people throughout history.  They go down that path one small step at a time, one seemingly harmless and practical decision after another.  They are just being reasonable, practical, realistic— merely following the advice of thought leaders and repeating the stories and slogans that 'everyone knows.'  

For most people it quickly becomes depersonalized, a kind of game.  What clever slogans and high sounding arguments can one memorize, what authorities and books will one reference and quote, and finally, what resolve can a person muster to stubbornly go back and defend the position which they have taken, which most likely has little or nothing to do with logical arguments or reason?

Having freed ourselves from the constraints of truth and morality, we live in a truly cynical age.  My purpose is this— to show us what we are becoming, to expose that which we serve, without any self-righteous illusions.

"And then he prompts you what to say, and 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."

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Unspeakable

"A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”

Chris Hedges


"In this way people are thrown aside as if they were trash."

Francis I


"Those who are at present so eager to be reconciled with the world at any price must take care not to be reconciled with it under this particular aspect: as the nest of The Unspeakable.  This is what too few are willing to see."

Thomas Merton, The Unspeakable

The French elections will be this weekend, with market pricing in a win by the Europhile businessman Macron over the nationalist right with Le Pen.

The SP and Nasdaq closed at all time highs today.

Gold and silver continued to move sideways.  The dollar also moved lower.

Must have been a 'risk on' day for the one percent and their financiers.

The Health-scare Bill (sic) passed by the House is widely being disregarded by the more astute observers as a cynical exercise in political flimflammery.  It is so outrageously bad that the Senate is unlikely to pass it at anything like its current form.  It is yet another of their symbolic repeals of a healthcare system formulated by the conservative Heritage Foundation and embraced by the Wall Street wing of the Democrats under Obama and Clinton.

The Donald did not care what bill was passed, as long as he ended up with something that would allow him to say he kept his promise and could claim as an accomplishment.  He is all appearance over substance.

No matter if this legislation would devastate members of the woeful working class who carried him into office.   He and the Congressmen cared so little for the consequences of this law to the public that they did not even wait for the impact analysis that is customary for major legislation.

The House GOP took advantage of Donald's egomania by passing a bill which would deny affordable healthcare insurance to millions of Americans, the weak, the poor, and the elderly, in order to finance a $600 billion tax cut over the next ten years for the richest of the one percent. And afterwards they all celebrated with a beer party in the Rose Garden.

It would have been better for them if they had never been born.

Have a pleasant weekend.