Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Long Day's Journey Into Fright

Stocks were weak this morning and under pressure most of the day.

It is interesting to note that the falure, if it continues, originated around the 38.2# fibonacci retracement level.

Tech was the leader to the downside, as collateral damage to the trade war and the reactions by the US against Huawei.

Gold and silver are in a lazy cross trade with the dollar when there is no flight to safety activity.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Light Shines On In the Darkness - Love Is Moving All Around Us

“One of those freedoms most treasured by the Koch brothers is their ability to see a research study done by one of their funded economics departments, then have its dubious data quoted from the mouth of a funded ‘news’ celebrity.

From 2002 through 2006, the Koch funded Mercatus Center paid Lawrence Kudlow, a CNBC co-host and later host of his own show, ‘The Kudlow Report,’ a total of $332,500 through his consulting arm, Kudlow and Co. LLC.  I obtained the information from public filings Mercatus made with the IRS. ”

The Martens, Wall Street On Parade


"Why should we not form a secret society with but one object— the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire.  What a dream, but yet it is probable, it is possible."

Cecil Rhodes, founder of the Rhodes Scholarships, 1877


"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole...

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

Carroll Quigley

The Dollar was stronger again today.  I have included a five year chart as well as the intraday chart for context.

Gold and silver were lower.  Gold needs to hold these levels to validate the potential 'W' bottom.

Stocks attempted to rally, but failed later in the day and settled back down to the 38.2% Fibonacci retracement level.   This was not bullish action.

Next week is a lighter one for economic news.  There will be the Fed minutes.  The bobbleheads are hoping for a rate cut. 

I suspect the economic conversation, and most likely the market trading, will be dominated by international trade relations, attempts at regime change in various places around the world, company earnings, and the usual distracting nonsense.   The White House has been aggressively spinning headlines with an eye to the markets.  And they have no shame in it.

And excepting for the schemes of a day, most of it is of little lasting consequence in the greater accumulations of daily life.

The key for the faithful is to remain steadfast, and not be drawn into the deception of madness by fear, hate or anger.  The temptation is there, no doubt, and it can be strong, especially in our vain imaginings.

One must take steps to maintain an environment around themselves for themselves and their communities of interest, to do small things with great love, and to be prayerful in all of it, all the rest, secure in the armor of faithfulness and love.  Loving is moving all around us.  Take care not to lose sight of it, and with that, lose your way.

When the time comes to consider all things, we will wonder at so many things that greatly concerned us, that in the end really did not matter after all.

Have a pleasant weekend.

The light shines on in the darkness, and the darkness comprehends it not at all.

"Do you desire to be great? make yourselves little.  There is a mysterious connexion between real advancement and self-abasement. If you minister to the humble and despised, if you feed the hungry, tend the sick, succour the distressed; if you bear with the froward, submit to insult, endure ingratitude, render good for evil, you are, as by a divine charm, getting power over the world and rising among the creatures. God has established this law. Thus He does His wonderful works.

His instruments are poor and despised; the world hardly knows their names, or not at all. They are busied about what the world thinks petty actions, and no one minds them. They are apparently set on no great works; nothing is seen to come of what they do: they seem to fail...

Our warfare is not with carnal weapons, but with heavenly. The world does not understand what our real power is, and where it lies. And until we put ourselves into its hands of our own act, it can do nothing against us. Till we leave off patience, meekness, purity, resignation, and peace, it can do nothing against that Truth which is our birthright, that Cause which is ours, as it has been the cause of all saints before us.

But let all who would labour for God in a dark time beware of any thing which ruffles, excites, and in any way withdraws them from the love of God and Christ, and simple obedience to Him...

Such is the rule of our warfare We advance by yielding; we rise by falling; we conquer by suffering; we persuade by silence; we become rich by bountifulness ; we inherit the earth through meekness; we gain comfort through mourning; we earn glory by penitence and prayer. Heaven and earth shall sooner fall than this rule be reversed; it is the law of Christ's kingdom, and nothing can reverse it but sin."

John Henry Newman

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Götterdämmerung - Option Expiration Tomorrow

“England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire.”

William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands


“Economic relations with our East Asian satellites have, for example, hollowed out our domestic manufacturing industries and led us into a reliance on finance capitalism, whose appearance has in the past been a sign of a hitherto healthy economy entering decline...

In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the American empire have sown has been kept secret.”

Chalmers Johnson, Blowback


“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them."

Arundhati Roy, War Talk

Stocks hit the 50% retracement from the recent steep decline.

Stock market option expiration for May tomorrow.

The dollar strengthened while gold and silver declined.

A cartel of Banks led by Citi were fined $1.2 Billion for manipulating the foreign exchange market.

Over the past twenty years, a cartel of traders manipulating almost every market have been exposed, one by one.

These are serial felons, career criminals. That we tolerate their drain upon society is a remarkable testament to the corrupting power of big money on the government regulators and the professional class which crafts the narratives being presented to both move and pacify the public.

Have a pleasant evening.

Citi and a Cartel of Global Banks Fined $1.2 Billion By EU over FX Market Rigging

I wanted to call your attention to this story about brazen manipulation in the forex exchange markets by the Banks for three reasons:

1. The markets are too large to be manipulated. When accusations of market manipulation are made, spokesmodels and apologists will dismiss them by saying 'the market is too big to be manipulated' and then cite some gross total of the market trade. This is utter baloney and they know it. Prices are set at the margins, not on the whole, and there is no market that is too big to be manipulated in some manner by big enough players.

2. The government is the problem. If there was a free market you would not see any manipulation. Get rid of all government involvement. This is such a howler that I won't even waste many words on it, except to say that this sophistry implies that if we eliminated the law, then there would not be any crime.  This is utopian nonsense, repeated as slogans by those who have stopped thinking for themselves.

3. The Banks are too well regulated to manipulate markets.  It is the same big banks that are involved in these market manipulation schemes, again and again. They are serial felons who always blame each instance of the felony crime to some 'rogue element' or isolated trader, which is also nonsense. And in each case the fine, while nominally large by individual standards, is really just a cost of doing business.

These market manipulation schemes will end when people reject the narratives put forward by the Bankers and their enablers and think tanks, and choose to elect people who are serious about financial and political reform.

At some point the long term price/physical manipulation in the gold market is going to blow up, and no one in authority could have seen it coming. Because their eyes are firmly closed and gaze averted.

And Trump is no different from his predecessors, and in some ways may be worse.

"Citigroup Inc.[aka Dr. Evil], Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are among five banks that agreed to pay European Union fines totaling 1.07 billion euros ($1.2 billion) for colluding on foreign-exchange trading strategies.

Citigroup was hit hardest with a 310.8 million-euro penalty, followed by fines of 249.2 million euros and 228.8 million euros for RBS and JPMorgan, the European Commission said in a statement on Thursday. Barclays Plc was fined 210.3 million euros and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. must pay nearly 70 million euros as part of the settlement with the EU’s antitrust regulator.

Traders ran two cartels on online chatrooms, swapping sensitive information and trading plans that allowed them to make informed decisions to buy or sell currencies, the regulator said. Many of them knew each other, calling one chatroom on the Bloomberg terminal the "Essex Express n’ the Jimmy" because all of the traders but one met on a commuter train from Essex to London. Other names for rooms were the "Three Way Banana Split" and "Semi Grumpy Old Men."

"Foreign exchange spot trading activities are one of the largest markets in the world, worth billions of euros every day," EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said. "These cartel decisions send a clear message that the commission will not tolerate collusive behavior in any sector of the financial markets."


...The effects of the EU decision on banks will be “relatively mild, because the fines aren’t huge,” said Aitor Ortiz, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Referring to the third probe involving Credit Suisse, he said “we may still have to wait another year” to see the decision, because the bank has refused to join a settlement that would grant lower fines.

Traders exchanged information about outstanding customers’ orders, bid-ask spreads, their open-risk positions and details of current or planned trading activities. They would sometimes agree to "stand down" or stop a trading activity to avoid interfering with another trader in the group. They traded 11 currencies, including the euro, the U.S. dollar, the British pound and the Japanese yen...

Read the entire story here.