Stocks and Precious Metal Charts - Reckless Disregard

 

"Complex systems that have artificially suppressed volatility tend to become extremely fragile, while at the same time exhibiting no visible risks.  In fact, they tend to be too calm and exhibit minimal variability as silent risks accumulate beneath the surface. 

These artificially constrained systems become prone to 'Black Swans' — that is, they become extremely vulnerable to large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set of observers.

Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems."

Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan of Cairo, Foreign Affairs

"Having fallen from the eternal, the evil one's desires are endless, insatiable.  Having fallen from pure Being, he is driven by the desire to possess, to fill his emptiness.  But the problem is insoluble, always. He is compelled to have and to hold, to possess and consume, and nothing else.  All he takes, he destroys."

Denis de Rougemont

“It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one.  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

'Life is a school of probabilities.'

Walter Bagehot

...and the tuition is paid by their willful miscalculation and mispricing of risk.  Good designs have linear consequences.   Unfortunately bad designs have exponential consequences. 

Stocks did the customary 'pop and flop' today, with a rally in the morning that faded out to nothing in the afternoon. 

Gold bounced back, while silver endured its own wash and rinse to finish nearly unchanged.

VIX has come up a bit off its multi-year lows.

The market has weak underpinnings and is susceptible to any kind of exogenous surprise.

Have a pleasant evening. 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Feeding Moloch - Waschen und Spülen

 

"We were standing at a window of my room in the Foreign Office.  It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking.  My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words:  'The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.'"

Edward Grey, Twenty-Five Years 1892–1916, 1925

“Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.”

Henri Barbusse, Le Feu: journal d'une escouade, 1916

"I believed that our public intelligentsia had succumbed to an amazing series of cognitive failures; that time after time they had gotten the facts wrong, ignored the clanging bullshit detector, made the sort of mistakes that would disqualify them.

What I didn't understand was that these weren't cognitive failures at all; they were moral failures, mistakes that were hard-wired into the belief systems of the organizations and professions and social classes in question. As such they were mistakes that, from the point of view of those organizations or professions or classes, shed no discredit on the individual chowderheads who made them.

Holding them accountable was out of the question, and it remains off the table today. These people ignored every flashing red signal, refused to listen to the whistleblowers, blew off the obvious screaming indicators that something was going wrong in the boardrooms of the nation, even talked us into an unnecessary war, and the bailout apparatus still stands ready."

Thomas Frank, Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly, March 26, 2012

"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell

“Let us learn our lessons.  Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that any one who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter.  The Statesman who yields to war fever must realise that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.  Antiquated War Offices, incompetent or arrogant Commanders, untrustworthy allies, hostile neutrals, malignant Fortune, ugly surprises, awful miscalculations— all take their seat at the Council Board on the morrow of a declaration of war."

Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission, Thornton Butterworth Ltd, London 1930


As it is with conventional war, so too with economic wars, wars fought with banking systems, trade sanctions, and currency.

The Jobs number came in smoking hot this morning, and the Labor Participation Rate ticked higher.

But unemployment rate rose, so of course stocks focused on that and went into a risk on stampede higher.   

Gold and silver were crushed.

What a surprise.  Not.

 And of course the VIX fell to a low we have not seen since 2021.

Market bubbles, false flags, cartel pricing, manufactured wars?   It's all good for profits.

Maybe we'll see the flip side to this next week.  

Rinse follows wash in the endless harvesting of a nation's wealth.

Have a pleasant weekend.

 

Stocks and Precious Metals Charts - Sic Semper Inanitas - Slouching Into the Payrolls Report

 

"Gold has worked down from Alexander's time.  When something holds good for two thousand years I do not believe it can be so because of prejudice or mistaken theory."

Bernard Baruch

"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."

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 262

"Gold is unique among assets, in that it is not issued by any government or central bank, which means that its value is not influenced by political decisions or the solvency of one institution or another."

Salvatore Rossi, Chief of the Central Bank of Italy, 30 Sept 2013

"There can be no other criterion, no other standard than gold. Yes, gold which never changes, which can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality and which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par excellence."

Charles De Gaulle, February 4, 1965

"Specie [gold and silver] is the most perfect medium because it will preserve its own level, because, having intrinsic and universal value it can never die in our hands, and it is the surest resource of reliance in time of war."

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Wayles Eppes, 6 November 1813

“Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history.  But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood.  For these few gold has been the asset of last resort.”

Antony C. Sutton


Stocks were in risk on rally mode today.  

And the spokesmodels with fluttering pom-poms were cheering them on.

AI, AI, hear our cry,  V - I -C - T - O - R - Y

VIX fell to its multiyear low.

Gold and silver rallied, going out near the highs.

The Dollar fell sharply.

What's wrong with this picture?

Let's see how the Non-Farm Payrolls report prints tomorrow.

And how the markets choose to take it.

Its really not about the economy anymore, it's all about the Fed.

That's because as the sum of their policy errors and abuses, the Fed has become the market.

Have a pleasant evening.