Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Deceit Hates the Light - Non-Farm Payrolls Tomorrow

"Above all, do not lie to yourself.  A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others.  Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov


“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

Soren Kierkegaard


"You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path.  You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty.  You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.”

Anton Chekhov, The Bet


“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

Simone Weil

The Dollar slumped and gold and silver had some nice moves higher today.

They did not yet break out.

Stocks slumped badly on poor news on the China trade deal, and from a much worse than expected Chicago PMI this morning.

They did not break down, and managed to bounce off their lows into the close.

Many rush to put their noses into news sites that will tell them the lies that they wish to hear.

As for the truth, they do not want any part of it.

It is hard to do anything for those who have chosen to love the lie, and embrace the darkness of the world, except to continue to remember them in our prayers.  They must regain their senses on their own, and choose to walk back into the light.  They cannot do this while they believe that good and evil do not matter, and that the battle for their souls is not real.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - The Fed Pauses - Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday

“When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate...

Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes.  This is apparent from a social pathology— psychopaths rally followers.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable


"And the people who belong to this world worshiped the beast.  They are the ones whose names are not written in the Book of Life that belongs to the Lamb."

Revelation 13:8

The FOMC came out with their decision today.

They reduced their benchmark short term interest rate by 25 bps.

And they also signalled by a change in wording that they would be more data dependent on any future changes.

Initially this was interpreted as a hawkish stance, and the markets swerved accordingly, with Dollar up and gold/silver down and stocks a bit off.

But in a little while people realied that the Fed was merely shifting into 'neutral' and so those trades reversed.

And so gold, siver, and stocks finished higher with the Dollar lower.

This data dependency might put a little more push behind macroeconomic indicators, such as the Non-Farm Payrolls report on Friday.

After the bell some of the wunderkind stocks such as Facebook, Lyft, Etsy put forward decent results.

For the first time in a little while we saw a large offtake of gold from the Comex Hong Kong warehouses.

And there were no tweets from Trumpolini about the Fed after their announcement this afternoon.  That was probably the most unexpected thing in some time.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - An Oligopoly of Privilege - FOMC Tomorrow, Payrolls on Friday

"Moral hazard is the probability that a party insulated from risk will behave differently from the way they would behave if fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act with increasing recklessness, literally 'without reckoning." It also encourages the rise to power of the sociopath in the affected organizations.

It is difficult to explain moral hazard to tenured professors or the pampered princes of bureaucracy, who beat the drum with their silver spoons in support of shifting the risk of loss to the public every time that Wall Street falls into one of its own schemes and blows itself up.

It is a lesson that the average person learns by the age of twelve and relearns, sometimes spectacularly, at least once in young adulthood. If you do something wrong there can be bad outcomes, and you will pay the price and penalty.  Unfortunately there is a small but powerful oligopoly of privilege that is trying to project themselves onto the global stage while believing that they are immune to ordinary consequence, and have become addicted to the notion that 'others must pay' for their failures.

Moral hazard comes from rewarding bad behaviour in markets with wristslaps and bailouts. It is a danger to the economy and to the public."

Jesse, Moral Hazard, 22 March 2008


"When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin!

Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out."

Andrew Jackson, The original minutes of the Philadelphia bankers sent to meet with President Jackson February 1834, from Andrew Jackson and the Bank of the United States (1928) by Stan V. Henkels

Alphabet, the tech giant formerly known as Google, weighed on the tech stocks today.

Most other market were lightly traded ahead of the FOMC announcement tomorrow.

The financiers sparkled as Jamie Dimon has apparently persuaded Mr. Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, to further lighten up their regulations on capital.

They might also considered forbidding stock buybacks. That would loosen up some funds for loans.

There will be a general election in the UK on December 12 apparently.

The market is expecting a 25 bp cut from the FOMC tomorrow. And then we will see what they say about the future.

Have a pleasant evening.