Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Pop and Flop

"Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future."

Marcus Aurelius


"A narcissist will deliberately damage other people in pursuit of their own selfish desires, but may regret and will in some circumstances show remorse for doing so, while a malignant narcissist will harm others and enjoy doing so, showing little empathy or regret for the damage they have caused.”

John D. Garner

Stocks were trying to extend their rally today, but fizzled badly into the close.

Are they ready to roll over? It might take some sort of exogenous event to get that ball rolling.

But the market valuations are thinly supported and vulnerable to a serious sell off, unless the ESF and powers that be once again choose to expend public funds to support it.

Gold and silver rose a bit with the Dollar lower.

Donny was roiling markets today as he and his merry pranksters attempt to divert attention from their pervasive corruption and inept handling of the nation's business with emotional bread and circuses.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Devil Take the Hindmost - Here We Go Again

"Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started."

Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By


"Over the past 30 years the plutocrats have used their vastly increased wealth to capture the flag and assure the government does their bidding. This marriage of money and politics has produced an America of gross inequality at the top and low social mobility at the bottom, with little but anxiety and dread in between, as middle class Americans feel the ground falling out from under their feet.

Like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy. Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs."

Bill Moyers, last episode of Bill Moyers Journal, 30 April 2010


“A mighty bubble of wealth is blown before our eyes, as empty, as transient, as contradictory to the laws of solid material, as confuted by every circumstance of actual condition, as any other bubble which man or child ever blew before.”

Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost


"This is funny."

Doc Holliday, last words, November 8, 1887, Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

Stocks are reaching for a high note, on a bubble of easy money and slack oversight, as well as a lack of adult supervision.

Gold was hit hard today but bounced back.  Pure shenanigans.

Trump is losing it.  Nothing could be more obvious, even by his standards which are pretty weird.

Not much good can be said for the character of the rest of the political establishment and the elites in general.

That does not bode well for a country skimming the edge of the abyss.

Things could get quite intense and exciting over the next few months.

Learn to pray.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Another Comex Options Expiration - Bluster and Bravado

"Another toast to Citizens United, gentlemen?"

"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

It was a risk on day today, with the prospects for risky assets rising higher on a wave of hot air.

The NDX was a huge non-confirmation of this latest rally, as the futures actually finished unchanged. The SP futures did better but still gave up much of their gains.

Gold was hit hard as expected for a key futures month in option expiration. Silver gave up its gains and finished in the red as well.

The Dollar was lower.

Today was an excellent example of the deep and cynical corruption of the financial system, overfunded and underregulated.

Let's see how the rest of the week goes.

The young man is back from England, working from home now at his new job. He is in two weeks quarantine here. I bought the supplies today for a small garden, so he can fulfill his new interests in that regard in addition to his technical work.

We always had a modest garden, but over the past years had taken it down and returned it to the lawn.

As Cicero noted, 'if you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.'

Have a pleasant evening.

Memorial Day 2020

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863


"The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries.  It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, 'the greatest', but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is."

Sydney J. Harris


“Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations."

Wendell Berry