Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Stand and Bear Witness to the End - Tinderbox

 

“As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer (I Will Bear Witness To the Bitter End 1933-1945) noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.

The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. 

The second mode is shamanistic incantation. The fascist style depends upon 'endless repetition,' designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. 

The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction.  Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason.  Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. 

The final mode is misplaced faith.  It involves the sort of self-deifying claims.  When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience.  What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent.  Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.  At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that 'understanding is useless, you have to have faith.' 

If people feel lost and alone and broken and hopeless today, what will it be like if the world begins to come apart at the hinges?  Jesus was a man for simple people.  He didn't make his messages incredibly complex.  If you were a person that had the eyes to see and the ears to hear, then his message was easily understood. 

Many who claim today with their mouths that they follow Jesus will abandon him then with their lives.” 

Brandon Andress, And Then the End Will Come

 

'What is truth?'  Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing.  Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference.  It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. 

Remember professional ethics.  When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important.  It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges.  Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor. 

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.  If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.  If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.  The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.  You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.” 

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, 2017

Stocks made another attempt to rally today.

And again the rally failed, and stocks went out near the lows.

This market is a tinderbox, waiting for a trigger event, and that of a diminishing magnitude, which at the end might even seem inconsequential. 

I am still sitting in cash, taking it easy. 

Gold and silver were lower.

They are having a very difficult time breaking out from here.

With the Golden Week holiday over in China I expect the movement of physical may pick up again there in the East.

The Dollar was higher.

The VIX gained back some of last week's decline.

There will be a stock option expiration on Friday.

Have a pleasant evening.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Dared by a Few, Willed by More, and Tolerated by All

 

"Capitalism is at risk of failing today not because we are running out of innovations, or because markets are failing to inspire private actions, but because we’ve lost sight of the operational failings of unfettered gluttony."

Jeffrey Sachs 

 

"It is no exaggeration to say that since the 1980s, much of the global financial sector has become criminalized, creating an industry culture that tolerates or even encourages systematic fraud." 

Charles H. Ferguson

 

"At first, the love of money, and then that of power began to prevail, and these became, as it were, the sources of every evil.   For avarice subverted honesty, integrity and other honorable principles and, in their stead, inculcated pride, inhumanity, contempt of religion and general venality.  Ambition prompted many to become deceitful; to keep one thing concealed in the breast and another ready on the tongue; to estimate friendships and enmities, not by their worth, but according to interest; and to carry rather a specious countenance than an honest heart.  These vices first advanced but slowly, and were sometimes restrained by correction; but afterward, when their infection had spread like a pestilence, the state was entirely changed, and the government, from being the most equitable and praiseworthy, became the most rapacious and insupportable." 

Sallust, Conspiracy of Cataline

 

“The worst crimes were dared by a few, willed by more, and tolerated by all.” 

 Tacitus 

 

As you have probably heard the Jobs Number came in strikingly below estimates this morning.

It was a shock because many very important people said that once unemployment compensation was cut, then people would go take any job that was available.

And so stocks did a pop n' flop.

The 'pop' was because the low number made traders think that the Fed would tend to remain dovish longer, since there is a lack of genuine economic recovery in the number.

But alas, the selling came in and stocks ended up in the red on the day.

This is one very dangerous and volatile market.

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who murder your prophets, and persecute those whom God has sent as messengers to you.  As you have willed, your house is now yours— but is made desolate."

We have learned nothing, and are emboldened by our willful ignorance.  

We make beasts of ourselves, to avoid the pain of our lack of humanity. 

We make a private cult out of our own childlike selfishness, sinning shamelessly against the word and the spirit.

We lay down with swine, and call it greatness.

Gold and silver also rallied strongly for the same reason.  

And then were steadily sold through the day to finish unchanged or even a little lower.

There are some powerful interests in London and New York defending their bearish positions in gold and silver.   

The dollar drifted a little lower as one might expect from a dovish economic indicator.

Need little, want less, love more. 

For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.

Have a pleasant weekend.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Now Serving: The Hair of the Dog That Bit You

 

“When everyone thinks central bankers, money managers, corporate managers, politicians or any other group are the smartest guys in the room, you are in a bubble.” 

Doug Kass, Ten Laws of Stock Market Bubbles 

 

"Mischief springs from the power which the monied interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, and from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges-- which are employed for their benefit." 

Andrew Jackson

 

“Human nature being what it is, small loopholes are likely to be exploited until they become big ones, and big ones until they turn into financial disasters.” 

Seth Klarman

 

“The business model of Wall Street is fraud. Wall Street won’t change until we make it clear that no bank is too big to fail and no CEO is too big to jail. Billionaires and Wall Street should not be buying elections.   The reason that Congress isn’t doing what the overwhelming majority of Americans wants has everything to do with the power of the monied interests.  Let us bring our people together to take on and defeat a ruling class whose greed is destroying our nation.  Our government belongs to each and every one of us, not just the few.” 

Bernie Sanders

Stocks were in party mode today, rising on a continuing tide of self-assurance. 

Gold and silver were off a bit in this risk on mode. 

And so too was the Dollar lower, and the VIX.

Everything is coming up roses.

Non-Farm Payrolls tomorrow.

Wall Street is looking for a solid number.

Have a pleasant evening.

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Reversals - Non-Farm Payrolls Friday

 

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.  They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs.  We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob." 

Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Second New Deal, 31 October 1936 

 

"From this rather innocuous mention, the little notion of collateral consequences would blossom into the great strangling vine that came to be known after the financial crisis of 2008 by its shorthand: 'too big to jail.'  Prosecutors and regulators were crippled by the idea that the government could not criminally sanction some companies—particularly giant banks—for fear that they would collapse, causing serious problems for financial markets or the economy.   Today’s Department of Justice has lost the will and indeed the ability to go after the highest-ranking corporate wrongdoers.”

Jesse Eisinger

 

"This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men." 

John Perkins 

 

Stocks were down hard this morning, but reversed and rallied into the green for the close.

The Dollar was higher, taking back the 94 handle and then some.

Gold and silver edged higher.

A better than expected ADP payroll number, and optimism about the debt ceiling caused the green shoots of exuberance to break out, anew.

Yay we win again.

Non-Farm Payrolls on Friday.

Have a pleasant evening.