Stocks and Precious Metal Charts - A Late Summer's Afternoon

Bertramka Villa, Prague

"Listen, and I will tell you a mystery:  we will not all fall sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the call of the last trumpet. For that trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we, we will be changed.  

For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.   And when the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then shall come to pass the words which have been written:  ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’"

1 Corinthians 15:51-54

There will be an options expiration on the Comex for precious metals next week on Tuesday the 26th. Given that it is for the October contracts it could be more important for gold than silver.

Late this afternoon Senator McCain indicated he cannot vote for the latest form of GOP healthcare repeal.

Pictured to the right is the Bertramka Villa in Prague. I visited it with Mary when I was attending business school classes in Prague in 1991.  It is associated with Mozart and I believe he wrote his 'Prague Symphony' there as well.  They had a small Mozart exhibition and I still have a small bust of the composer as a young boy in my study that I purchased there.

The day is absolutely beautiful outside, and so I will be leaving a bit early today.

Have a pleasant weekend.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Ubi Sunt? Not With a Bang, But a Whimper

“Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it.”

Léon Bloy

Stocks were a little wobbly today, although the VIX continued to be at quite low levels for this year at least.

The economic news is mixed, as usual.

The dollar gave a little of yesterday's sharp rally higher back today. The rally itself was more technical than anything else, given the long decline that it has already seen. Certainly any notions of a hawkish Fed raising rates with enough fortitude to make a difference in the dollar is sheer fantasy.

The Fed may have one more rate increase in them for this year, but they are already on thin ice given the weak recovery and lingering lack of organic growth. The reasons are so obvious one really hates to keep repeating them. The economists certainly know them, but they are reluctant to discuss the Emperor's nakedness.  Alas, they are too often a craven careerist lot as a whole.  But such are the times.

As my Greek attorney put it just today, "Hillary just wants to tweak the status quo because it works well for her and her donors Bernie wanted to change the status quo, so he was a threat to everyone but the public."

Indeed. The credibility trap is alive and well, and crippling the impulse and efforts to reform.

Have a pleasant evening.

And where is the magnificence now, the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome.  And where is the Emperor Nero now, immortal god and lord of the world, but a memory, returned to the earth as the dirt and dust.    Perhaps he is to be found as a piece of dirt beneath the fingernails of some little child, to be plucked out and discarded, with a 'tut tut'  from a doting mother.

The mighty rise and are fallen, but the word and the spirit endure.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - In the Garden of Beasts

"I wonder, Madam, that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Dr. Samuel Johnson

Today the FOMC made an announcement.

They do not understand what is happening, or at least cannot openly admit it.

But they hope that they can, with straight faces, raise interest rates a bit more, so that they can lower them again when their latest financial assets bubble bursts.

They are exceptional hypocrites.

Only the politicians, and them being lawyers for the most part, are more accomplished.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - FOMC Tomorrow - One Step Enough For Me

“That’s just the way: a person does a low down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace.”

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn


"Beware the fury of a patient man.”

John Dryden, Absalom and Achitopel

Janet and her Merry Pranksters at the Fed will be making their latest interest rates announcement from their two day September meeting tomorrow at 2 PM.

The SP 500 continues to dribble higher, while the tech heavy Nas 100 is now chopping sideways.

I don't have any short positions on at the moment.  There would be an event-driven drop no doubt, although the markets managed to shake off quite a bit of 'risky' news at the end of last week.

I watched part of Trump's speech to the UN.  It was cringeworthy.    I liked it better when I was in mourning, and not watching the news.  It beggars belief at times.

One wonders what has to happen so that Hillary Clinton will get the hint that the public as a whole has had enough of her crony capitalist political chicanery, and should cease her whining and blaming the progressive wing of her party, ie the real historical base.  She managed to lose to one of the worst candidates ever to run for President, and it was because of her aloof arrogance, despite many unfair advantages. Time to retire and do some real good for others in the world like Jimmy Carter.

Lets see how gold and silver do over the next few days.  They are at some key support levels and it would be nice to see them hold to them.

Dave Kranzler had an article out the other day discussing how BIS has swapped out a large amount of their gold bullion to the Banks.  I had the impression that this is how they are plugging the gap in the 'London float' which had been identified by those precious metals luminaries Ronan Manly and Koos Jansen at BullionStar.com, along with data wrangler Nick Laird from goldchartsrus.com.

Life goes on.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - On the Daedalian Wings of Paper Money and Corrupted Power

"The conventional wisdom seems to be that the problems of the euro zone are, as economist Martin Feldstein once put it, 'the inevitable consequence of imposing a single currency on a very heterogeneous group of countries.'

What this commentary gets wrong, however, is that single currencies are never the product of debates about optimal economic solutions. Instead, currencies like the U.S. dollar itself are the result of political battles, where motivated actors try to centralize power. 

This has most often occurred 'through iron and blood,' as Otto van Bismarck, the unifier of Germany put it, as a result of catastrophic wars. Smaller geographic units were brought together to build the modern nation state, with a unified fiscal system, a common national language that was often imposed by force, a unified legal system, and, a single currency. Put differently, war makes the state, and the state makes the currency....

European leaders weren’t stupid or self indulgent when they decided to move ahead with the euro, without fiscal union or strong Europe-level democracy. They just cared more about politics and international security than economics. They wanted to build a Europe that had transcended the divisions of the Cold War, and bind together Germany, which was reunited and much more powerful, with the rest of Europe."

Kathleen McNamara, This is what economists don’t understand about the euro crisis – or the U.S. dollar


"Another cause of today’s instability is that we now have a society in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking, and the corporation.

These are free of political controls and social responsibility and have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production.

The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital."

Professor Carroll Quigley, Oscar Iden Lecture Series 3, 1976


"The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public, but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”

Henry A. Wallace


"The judicious operations of banking, by providing, if I may be allowed so violent a metaphor, a sort of waggon-way through the air, enable the country to convert, as it were, a great part of its highways into good pastures, and corn fields, and thereby to increase, very considerably, the annual produce of its land and labour.

The commerce and industry of the country, however, it must be acknowledged,though they may be somewhat augmented, cannot be altogether so secure, when they are thus, as it were, suspended upon the Daedalian wings of paper money, as when they travel about upon the solid ground of gold and silver.

Over and above the accidents to which they are exposed from the unskilfulness of the conductors of this paper money, they are liable to several others, from which no prudence or skill of those conductors can guard them."

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 262


Major commercial and investment banks—and the hedge funds that ran alongside them—were the big beneficiaries of the twin housing and equity-market bubbles of this decade, their profits fed by an ever-increasing volume of transactions founded on a relatively small base of actual physical assets.

Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear.

Recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time."

Simon Johnson, The Quiet Coup, May 2009

Unsustainable social and economic arrangements promoted by an abusive minority are backed by force and fraud.   As the fraud loses its power to persuade and misdirect the public, over time, force must increase in the suppression of dissent and the increased control over all relevant news and public information.